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10 Sep 2010 - 12:21 by soullezz Industry News |
While PC makers are running full-speed to chase the iPad's success, it's notable that just as quickly they've stopped talking about Netbooks.
Some people call them mini-notebooks. Even more people now call them that thing that's bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop that looks more than a little bit clunky next to a tablet device.
Between October and December last year, PC makers shipped 10.5 million mini-notebooks, according to Gartner. That may have been a market peak.
Fast-forward to the first quarter of this year: 9.7 million units shipped. Tick forward again to the second quarter of this year, and 8.4 million Netbooks left PC factories. The numbers are expected to drop even further in the coming months.
So what happened? It's not a stretch to connect the dots between the rise of the iPad and the sudden drop in last year's most-hyped product category.
Even before the iPad was officially introduced in January, the talk of the PC world just a few weeks prior at CES 2010 was about tablets. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Archos showed touch-screen tablets somewhat tentatively -- few details were named, and some shipping dates were vague -- but it was clear the attention had shifted away from targeting consumers looking for a new mobile device with Netbooks.
As Oracle's Larry Ellison once said, the tech industry's penchant for fads is a lot like the fashion world.
It wasn't all that long ago that Netbooks were lauded as the future of mobile computing in a form factor larger than a smartphone, and for an entirely more reasonable price than a full-size notebook.
In a Netbook you got a shrunk-down notebook (all the better for plopping down with at a coffee shop or when on the road), with a screen between 5 and 10 inches, running Windows XP or 7, or even Linux. That was paired with low-power processors that encourage longer battery life, all for between $300 and $600.
Asus kicked off the Netbook fad with the Eee PC in late 2007, and even before shipments dropped off earlier this year the buzz surrounding mini-notebooks was already fading.
A year after playing a starring role at CES 2009, Netbooks were hardly mentioned at the annual Las Vegas techfest last January.
Market researchers crunching the numbers picked up on this earlier this year, releasing data showing how Netbooks are falling out of favor behind traditional PCs and even the touch-screen tablet craze.
In its U.S. Consumer PC Market 2015 report released this summer, Forrester Research projected that in four years, the U.S. PC market will be led by notebooks, with a 42 percent market share; followed by tablets, with 23 percent of the market; desktops, with 18 percent; and Netbooks will occupy just a 17 percent share.
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