Tablet PCs killing netbook sales?
Netbooks were all the rage for three years when in 2007, ASUS popularized the small and less powerful laptop devices with its low cost Eee PC.
Other hardware manufacturers, such as Dell and Acer, took note after the first ASUS Eee PC sold over 300,000 units in four months, resulting in a multitude of netbooks hitting the shelves over the next few years.
The age of the netbook was delivered a devastating blow in April 2010 when Apple released the first iPad and sold 3 million units in 80 days.
History repeated itself, and over the last year tablet PC devices have emerged from most prominent hardware manufacturers.
The netbook hype has been replaced by a new tablet hype cycle, and according to Christopher Riley, MD of The Notebook Company, tablets have replaced netbook and laptop sales instead of complementing them.
“It appears the sales of iPad and iPad2 – while they have been great – have negatively affected sales of our other products in quite a major fashion,” said Riley. “So while the arrival of iPads can be welcomed, at the end of the day they haven’t acted to add that much to our overall revenue.”
“I really felt that they would find their own niche in the market – rather than replacing other sales. But, in our experience, this is not happening. I thought they would replace laptops as more mobile devices – and that notebooks would finally replace desktops, thereby not affecting overall sales volumes.”
There is some debate whether PC sales were also affected by the emergence of tablet PCs.
PC sales were down in the last quarter, leading some analysts to claim this was a direct result of the increasing popularity of tablet devices.
Other analysts argue that the Windows 7 launch prompted a sales spike that boosted PC sales figures last year – a tad unrealistically. This resulted, therefore, in the “sales correction” seen during this last quarter.
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