Notebooks overtake Desktop in sales
Notebook shipments in the US market has surpassed 50% in the third quarter of 2008 overtaking desktop sales for the first time in the history of the industry. The share of notebooks shipped in the US in the last quaerter stood at a 55.2%, according to preliminary figures from IDC's US Quarterly PC Tracker.
The 55% ratio was made possible by a record volume of notebooks shipped in the third quarter with over 9.5 million units sold.
Almost all the leading vendors with desktop and notebook offerings shipped greater notebook volumes in the quarter. Some vendors such as Toshiba have long focused exclusively on notebooks. Others, including Sony, Acer, and Lenovo exceeded the 65% notebook ratio within their own PC client shipment base. Attracted by the opportunities of an expanded multi-PC-per user base, new notebook-focused vendors are making their way into the US market, including Asus and Samsung.
"The consumer market continued to be the top driving factor in the notebook offensive but the commercial sector played a critical role too" said David Daoud, research manager, US Quarterly PC Tracker and Personal Systems at IDC.
Source: IDC
I wonder what the next generation of computers will look like. Vision and speech technologies seem too immature to fundamentally change the way we will interact with computers.
But possibly more touch screen options (like in ipod) may become available in future computers.
Anyway do you think this is the start of the end of the desktops? Will laptops take over the world now?
Hi Venkata, interesting thought.
I think touch screens would be more suitable for hand-held devices.
Desktops are here to stay for a while, but their decline is sure indeed. One of the things which desktops are suitable for are the large display size, laptops come in large display size too but they are not the easiest of things to carry around. And desktop computing power is always a step ahead of laptops.
Desktops will stay in the power user segment - extreme gamers, used more as workstations and for server capabilites. The general consumer would largely prefer laptops.