Tablet and laptop sales neck and neck
Era of the notebook over?
Brits bought as many tablets as laptops in August, market watcher GfK said today.
Good news for tablet proponents, that, but not for the folk making and selling computer kit. They make less money selling slabs than notebooks.
So while notebooks accounted for 33.6 per cent of IT sales revenue in August 2012, down from 34.5 per cent in August 2011, only 19.5 per cent of the same total came from tablet sales, GfK's numbers show.
Tablets' share of UK IT sales revenues rose year on year from 11.8 per cent.
Accessory sales were up too. Tablet-oriented keyboard sales were up 88 per cent in volume year on year, said GfK, and such keyboards now represent 15 per cent of the value of the Keyboard market in retail channels. That's good for sellers, not least because tablet keyboards are, on average, three times the price of traditional computer keyboards.
And clearly punters value the tablet and keyboard combo above products that integrate the two - notebooks and netbooks, in other words.
Sales of headphones, another popular tablet accessory, were up 25 per cent between August 2012 and August 2011.
Desktop sales fell from 14.5 per cent of total revenue to 13.9 per cent. Packaged software sales' share of revenues dropped from 13.8 per cent to 9.4 per cent, on the back of those declining desktop and laptop sales.
However, GfK highlighted a ten per cent rise on the average cost of boxes software, the result of expensive, specialist tools taking a greater share of sales as lower-cost, more consumer-centric apps are replaced by direct downloads to tablets. ®
COMMENTS
Era of the notebook over? Maybe for a lot of people. There'll always be someone who needs keyboards, meaty processors, etc.
Software doesn't write itself (yet).
When they say "tablet".....
Do they mean iPads?
I'd be really curious to see how that tablet number breaks down between iPads, Android-based tablets, and the odd Windows tablet PC.
Re: @Black Plague
Nexus 7 - a bigger version of your Android phone, but only £159.
Simples.
I'm not logged in as Andrew James.
No doubt when they do fire up the laptop, say to write a proper email or to upload pictures to the book of faces, it'll grind to a halt with all the windows, firefox and anti-virus updates.
Certainly all my Windows partition seems to do is update.
Mind you, Linux is no better, but at least it keeps it to the background and doesn't nag for a restart.
Re: @Black Plague
lol, about what I expected.
It's a shame really that Android sales haven't picked up. Though I'm part of the problem. Even after eyeballing a Tranformer Prime at the local electronics giant, I still balked at ponying up several hundred for a glorified toy that's just a bigger version of my Android phone. Though I balk at paying even more for an iPad, as well.
