Remember the trusty old netbook? Those snappy little machines that were supposed to be the “bridge” between smartphones and the traditional PC? Well, if you don’t that’s not really a surprise, given how these devices are likely to be all washed up within the next couple of years.

According to the research firm HIS iSuppli, the outlook for the poor old netbook is becoming increasingly bleak, with the machines set to slide into irrelevance by 2015 – just two years from now. That’s a far cry from the heady days of 2010, when the category reached a peak of some 32.14 million units being shipped worldwide. Of course, 2010 also happens to be the same year that Apple launched its industry-changing iPad, and we all know what kind of affect that had on the PC market…

IHS iSuppli’s report makes no bones about the fact that the netbook’s time is coming to a close. Shipments for this year (2013) are expected to be just 10% of 2010’s total, with just 3.97 million units shipped. Next year, things are expected to get even worse, with just 264,000 units set to be shipped throughout 2014. By 2015, IHS says that the netbook will have effectively expired, with zero units shipped.

IHS’s analyst Craig Stice laid the blame for the netbook’s demise squarely at the feet of Apple’s iPad:

“Netbooks shot to popularity immediately after launch because they were optimized for low cost, delivering what many consumers believed as acceptable computer performance. However, netbooks began their descent into oblivion with the introduction in 2010 of Apple’s iPad.”

Most analysts agree that the iPad is one of the chief reasons for the PC industry’s decline. Apple’s revolutionary device kicked led to a wave of similar, Android tablets hitting the stores over the next three years, driven by consumer’s insatiable thirst for mobility over the power afforded by laptops. The iPad though, has continued to play the part of poster-child in the Post-PC era, accounting for approximately one-sixth of all computers shipped, according to AppleInsider.

Before the launch of the iPad, a great deal of analysts were predicting that Apple would release their own device in the netbook category in order to compete in the low-end consumer market. Back in the day, the cheapest available MacBook was still almost twice as expensive as the average netbook. However, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs dismissed the netbook idea out of hand, saying that it wasn’t worth their time:

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that,” said Jobs back in 2008.

As we now know, Apple was indeed planning a response to the netbook category, but rather than introduce a lookalike machine it conceived the revolutionary iPad, in what Job’s correctly predicted would become the new “third-category” device after PCs and smartphones.