Netbook shipments slump in face of tablet rise
Bullish forecasts reversed
Tablets outshipped netbooks in Q2 2011.
So says market watcher ABI Research, which recorded shipments of 7.3m netbooks in Q2 - down 13.1 per cent on Q1's 8.4m units - and 13.6m tablets.
ABI said it reckons some 32m netbooks will ship in 2011 as a whole - 16.m of during H2.
That is down 17.5 per cent on 2010's total shipments, which totalled 38.8m units, ABI consumer research chief Jeff Orr told Reg Hardware today.
As late as October 2010, ABI was forecasting 2010 netbook shipments would reach 43m units. Earlier in the year, the market watcher was bullishly claiming the annual shipment total would be 58m.
That's not entirely the result of tablets, of course. Apple sold 14.8m iPads, but not all iPads buyers would have opted for netbooks had the tablet not gone on sale.
Netbook shipments in 2010 rose around ten per cent over 2009's total, but will fall this year. Orr said he's currently working on the basis that netbook shipments will fall year on year from 2011 through 2016 by compact annual growth rate of minus six per cent.
That would explain Intel's seeming reticence to ship its latest Atom CPUs, expected at the end of September but still MIA.
Intel's Atom processor and chipset business revenues dropped 32 per cent on year to only $269m in Q3 2011. Almost all of the Atoms Intel sells go into netbooks. ®
COMMENTS
Well I still love my netbook... an Asus Eee 1005HA-P.
Intel Atom 1.66GHz, 2GB memory, 10" screen at 1024x600 res, runs Win XP at brilliant speed and consistently gives me 9+ hours of battery life 3 years after purchase (I can get a whole transatlantic flight worth of work done). Only weighs 1kg which is barely noticeable in your bag, and only cost £200 (much cheaper than those ultra-portable laptops). Plus it has a full keyboard with which I am typing this.
It's not one of those super-early netbooks that had no screen, no battery and no power. I didn't ever see the point in those.
Most tablets I've seen only seem to support cut-down "mobile" operating systems and don't have the ability to install things like jedit, gimp, inkscape, libreoffice etc.
It's the ability to do everything, everywhere that makes netbooks a winner for me. The thought of having to sub-edit an article or make some emergency edits to some code using a tablet just sounds like a nightmare.
Having said that, most people are idiots when it comes to computers and probably just want app stores and shiny things that work.
But you'll have to pry my netbook from my cold hands because I have no intention of ever replacing it with a tablet.
However I would consider a tablet if you could install an OS of your choice and they were made into more rugged sealed units for use outdoors.
Stagnant netbooks since end of 2008
To mirror what was mentioned above, my late 2008 Dell Mini 9 with its 1.6GHz Atom is now approaching its 3rd birthday - has there been a doubling or tripling of the power of netbooks for the same price and form factor in those 3 years? Nope!
I went looking for an upgrade but there are only small increases in power out there (chip wise not battery capacity) which is a real shame.
Atom
I have an Atom in a desktop...woohoo minority processor status.
-D
Netbooks
Oh yes, I remember them.
How soon we move on and forget.
The tablet thing is working out well as I've seen the Aspire One Happy model for AU$249 retail compared to the iPad/Transformer etc at just under $600. About time the pricing was more realistic.
