Market watcher heralds 'Age of the Notebook'
More laptops than desktops shipped in Q3, apparently
More laptops shipped in Q3 than desktops, the first time this has ever happen during a given quarter, apparently.
So said market watcher iSuppli today, though a close look at its numbers show there's not a lot in it: 38.6m notebooks to 38.5m desktops. What's a 100,000 units among friends? Laptop shipments were up 40 per cent year on year, while desktop shipments were down by just 1.3 per cent.
In short, it's not so much desktops losing the war - or even becoming unpopular - as laptops winning it. As the PC market grows, it's the mobile segment that's taking all the extra sales, essentially.
No great surprise here: way back in April, Intel said it had begun selling more mobile CPUs than desktop processors.
Will growth continue? iSuppli certainly thinks so - it's anticipating world PC shipments to rise 4.3 per cent in 2009, down on 2008's year-on-year increase of 13 per cent - that's what iSuppli is forecasting, anyway - and lower than the bean counter's previous prediction, of 11.9 per cent growth.
Is this really the start of the "age of the notebook", a period when "the notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it’s now a computer for everyone", as iSuppli puts it?
We'd actually date the start of such an epoch - if it really warrants being heralded as such; we're not sure it does - to at least this time last year when the market began to be flooded with dirt cheap (for late 2007) 15in notebooks, the product of a glut of LCD panels of that size.
More to the point, will it continue? It's easy to be cheerful about Q3 shipments, but Q3 ended more than two-and-a-half months ago. The real state of affairs will only be clear when Q4's numbers are in and we see what toll recession and government countermeasures have had.
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COMMENTS
its down to price
Laptops (notebooks) have got down to the price of Desktop pcs and if you only do a bit of browsing and such are more than adequate.
They still don't cut the mustard if you have a more intensive use for a computer though and have the inherent problems of computers that don't use standard parts (Dells/Mac/integrated computers) its a bin job when a laptop has a hardware problem apart from the hard drive, unless you want to spend nearly the price af a new one getting it repaired
Psion and Netbooks
I think they own the TM to them or something like that, so who knows, laptots might be in vogue, though UMC is still available :)
Sure, a desktop is for those doing heavy computer work, most people hardly work nowadays, lazy lot, and a laptop suffices.
And for those who do work and use a laptop, then a laptop desktop replacement suffices.
But, I love my <del>command cent</del> desktops and I will always have one.
What would be nice is the ability to build your own laptop, and it is coming along, but it will be great when you can just wander around picking out all the components, and having a multitude of flexible plural of chassis in which to house them.
More like
The age of the fool! Except for notebooks, portable computers are worthless - attempts to marry performance and portability are damned to fail.
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