RIP netbook (and the rise of the two-tablet executive)
This year will see the agonising death rattle of the netbook come to an excruciating, and inevitable, end.
Tablets and especially the iPad will finally put netbooks – which were always an interim compromise of price, performance and size – out of our misery.
Researcher Forrester expects 24.1 million tablets to be sold this year in the US, and we can expect a proportional number to be sold here.
But by 2015, the analyst sees 82.1 million in users’ hands and annual sales of 44 million; Ovum is more bullish, predicting 150 million “light OS” devices (including tablets) a year in the same time frame. Even those figures could be understated because they were compiled before Apple last month revealed it sold 14.8 million iPads in nine months – more than double the commentariat’s most optimistic forecasts.
While they continue to be mostly individual or BYO purchases for many, expect to see them handed down in the business, in homes and for the rise of the multi-tablet executive, because two screens are better than one.
But sales of smartphones may trail off as workers preference tablets’ bigger screens. Fortunately, they are unlikely to hit notebook sales in the medium term, because those devices are used for creation where tablets are more suited to consumption and curation of content.
As to which platform to back – Android, Apple or Windows 7 – the battle is clearly between the first two operating systems, with Microsoft’s trailing.
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