Death of netbook exaggerated, says researcher
Down, but not out
Don't write off the netbook just yet, market watcher IDC has advised.
Yes, the gadget has taken a blow from tablets like the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it's not a mortal one.
Growth will continue, the researcher reckons, but at a "somewhat slower pace". So, it says, some 38.7m netbooks will ship this year - 10.3 per cent more than in 2009. But the compound growth rate over the next four years will slow to 4.3 per cent, taking 2014's netbook shipments total to just 42.4m units.
That compares with the most bullish netbook shipments forecast we've seen, 43m units in 2010, from ABI Research. That said, even than forecast was a big reduction from the full-year shipments estimate of 58m units ABI made back in May.
Market watcher ChangeWave last week charted the decline in consumer demand for netbooks over the last 18 months or so.
IDC said education still shows a keeness on netbooks absent from the consumer market, and while tablets may tickle Western tastes, they will play less well in the much more price-sensitive developing world
Acer and Asus shipped the lion's share of netbooks this year, followed by HP, Samsung and Dell, in that order. ®
COMMENTS
I miss the SSC
My eee701 was £200, it just plugs along doing stuff.
I'd replace it with a slightly bigger machine though, if netbooks weren't pricier than cheap laptops.
A tablet isn't what I am after either though
So the original market for these is kind of gone, because the companies went the windows route and no longer do them
They did it to themselves...
They allowed Microsoft and Intel to dictate what they were allowed to sell... I paid about $350 for one of the early Acer Aspire Ones... I like it. I do not need the 160GB hard drive and use very little of it. What I want is MORE than the 7 1/2 hr battery life that I can already squeeze out of it AND a vertical resolution that is better than 600 pixels... Apparently nobody is "brave" enough to sell one without charging over $400 for it. I do NOT need Windows and I do NOT need Intel. I'd be perfectly happy with an Arm-based netbook - kind of like the one Asus "apologized" to Microsoft for demonstrating more than a year ago... Where is it you GUTLESS VENDORS???
Novatech
Novatech do netbooks with no OS installed - so you bung lurid limpet or whatever silly name the new umbongo distribution is called.
Yep
Netbooks were supposed to be small and cheap, but then Microsoft waded in to stop Linux getting a beachhead and they got bloated and pricey. Then they got compared to notebooks, which is an unhappy comparison for netbooks.
It netbooks were essentially a tablet with a keyboard they could be far cheaper than notebooks and a real challenge to iPad et al.
When all the tablet hype has settled down...
I was reading a PDF of a book in bed on my Dell Mini9 a couple of weeks back and realised that it is REALLY nice for that
- it stands up by itself at whatever angle I want
- when I want input I have keyboard or mouse without losing screen real estate
- it works with all the files I already have, right now !
Conversely I tried an iPad in PCWorld and it was quite awkward to hold, not nice to enter data on when sat at a table, and pretty expensive.
Obviously depends what you want if for but for consuming media the mini laptop form factor is actually not as inconvenient as the hype makes out, and when you want to interact with data who can beat a fast typist who knows all the keyboard shortcuts ?
Plus my early Mini9 is totally solid state and doesn't cook your nads.
