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.
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.
Does this mean...
Maybe we'll see a few notebook designs with cases that don't bend, warp, crack, flex, deform, etc. during normal use?
Nothing new
I don't know about the rest of the world, but that's nothing new in Europe, the first time I read about this was back in 2005... And I remember Gartner or GfK also publishing on it later on. Here's the original publication, for reference (lucky I archive everything):
Tuesday, 2nd August 2005
NOTEBOOKS OVERTAKE DESKTOPS IN MAY 2005
Notebook sales have overtaken desktop sales in Europe’s top eight economies in May 2005 with 51.3% of the market, according to figures published by Context, with the UK the latest to see notebooks eclipse desktops. Italy still leads the way with 62.2% of notebooks.
Context’s SalesWatch research, tracking sales of business and consumer technology products through indirect channels of distribution in Europe, revealed that as notebook sales increased by 18.4% compared to a year ago, desktop sales fell by 12.1% over the same period, raising the proportion of notebooks from 43.9% to 51.3% in May 2005.
The UK joined the group of notebook-dominated markets with 55.4%, compared to 38.5% a year ago, while Italy is still ahead with 62.2%. The Netherlands and Sweden could follow soon with less than 55% of desktops in May 2005, but France remains behind as desktops still accounted for 61.2% of total PC sales.
Bill Gates, because you can't buy a PC laptop without Windows, although tied sales are illegal... Gotta be good news for somebody!
