While PC shipments will grow to a million per day, netbooks are in decline
Summary: While PC shipments have staged a comeback this year, Gartner’s researchers have reduced their sales forecast for the second half of the year by 2%. Previous warnings by analysts were confirmed by an Intel statement on Friday that it was lowering sales forecasts.
While PC shipments have staged a comeback this year, Gartner’s researchers have reduced their sales forecast for the second half of the year by 2%. Previous warnings by analysts were confirmed by an Intel statement on Friday that it was lowering sales forecasts. It said: "Revenue is being affected by weaker-than-expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets."
Gartner is now projecting worldwide PC shipments of 367.8 million units in 2010, a 19.2% increase from 308.3 million units shipped in 2009. This will be the first time PC shipments have averaged a million per day.
Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal said in a statement:
"Consumers buoyed the PC market in 2009 as businesses delayed their purchases. The slow pace of economic recovery and austerity measures in Europe have made PC suppliers very cautious in 2010. However, consumer demand is likely to remain strong even if the economic recovery stalls because consumers now view the PC as a relative 'necessity' rather than a 'luxury' and will continue to spend on PCs, even at the expense of other consumer electronic devices."
This should not affect the ‘corporate refresh cycle’ as businesses move from Windows XP to Windows 7 because "businesses will find it very difficult to delay PC replacements further. The age of the professional PC installed base is already at an all-time high."
Atwal said:
"Businesses that delay replacing much longer risk alienating employees, burdening themselves with more service requests and support costs, and ultimately facing higher migration costs when they eventually migrate to Windows 7. The bottom line is that businesses need to refresh their PCs sooner rather than later. Thus, the full bloom of the long-awaited professional PC refresh can't be more than a few quarters ahead."
Gartner also sees diminishing sales of netbooks, which it calls mini-notebooks. Netbooks accounted for 20% of mobile PC sales at the end of last year, but Gartner expects it to fall to around 10% by late 2014.
"The recent decline in mini-notebooks' share of the mobile PC market reflects a general realisation among buyers that mini-notebooks are less-than-perfect substitutes for standard low-end laptops," said Gartner’s Raphael Vasquez. He said:
"Buyers who once would have bought a mini-notebook based solely on its low price now seem more inclined to buy a low-end standard notebook, especially since the prices of the two have converged. Mini-notebooks are slowly but surely carving out a market niche for themselves as companion devices. However, the emergence of media tablets is a growing threat to that niche."
Gartner counts tablets with "full-function operating systems" such as Windows 7 in with PC sales, but not tablets with a "restricted-function OS", such as iPhone, Android and Chrome. "Nonetheless, media tablets will affect the PC market, especially mini-notebooks, and the forecast reflects this impact," said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner.
Shiffler said: "The iPad hasn't had much of an impact on mini-notebook units so far, if only because it is generally priced higher than most mini-notebooks. However, we anticipate lower-priced iPad imitations will begin to take larger bites out of mini-notebook units as they are released next year."
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Talkback
> I would be curious to know what exactly they mean by "mini-notebooks are
> less-than-perfect substitutes for standard low-end laptops".
I haven't asked, but small screens with limited vertical resolution, cramped keyboards, slow processors and lack of optical drives could be limitations for some users.
> Netbooks are still quite a bit less expensive than low end laptops.
You can buy a low-end laptop for £300 or so, and some netbooks cost more than that. If you upgrade the netbook to 2GB -- which Amazon seems to recommend when you buy one -- you're probably not saving much.
> I have not heard a single complaint from people I know that run Linux on
> their netbooks, because it has all of the full features.
Really? I've heard mostly complaints about the poor and/or incomprehensible user interface, people struggling to install software, their inability to run popular programs and inability to get 3G dongles working. A lot of them went back and got Windows machines instread, all of which led to Linux being a disastrous failure in the netbook marketplace. (Linux went from 100% market share to less than 5%.)
No doubt some of these problems could have been solved if a Linux expert had been there to give them a hand, but there are not many around. The suppliers (manufacturers, telcos, retailers) aren't interested in the very high support costs of dealing with Linux newbies.
It's too bad that people aren't informed of the tremendous community support available. Plus, I would point my finger at the vendors if they released a netbook with Linux, that was not running with everything working out of the box. I would expect the same if it was running Windows, too.
"The suppliers (manufacturers, telcos, retailers) aren't interested in the very high support costs of dealing with Linux newbies."
Yes, but I bet they become overwhelmed with supporting Windows problems as well. Linux is and will always be "set and forget". No matter which OS they choose, support will always be an issue for vendors. When you call Dell and try to get Windows support, you get the attitude that you are the hundredth caller that day with the same issue.
I discussed this endlessly with senior people at all the big netbook suppliers including UK marketing and managing directors, a director of Europe, and two CEOs in Taiwan. I recommended that they all support a common Linux, and they all decided to do whatever they wanted as long as it was different. They all got screwed trying to deal with several different dongles across more than a hundred telcos in 35 different countries. Fact is, when things went wrong, *they* had a very expensive problem and their users had no hope. If they had a problem with Windows, somebody else would fix it.
To add to the pain, they had to sell Linux notebooks for less money, with no Microsoft advertising support, and no money coming from eg anti-virus suppliers. In fact, it also cost them more to ship those cheaper Linux units in terms of manuacturing, distribution, stock control and advertising. Then they ran into expensive support overheads and returns. All in all, it was pretty much a financial disaster.
I know Linux fans think shipping 20 million Linux netbooks is a piece of cake, but really, it's not.
Take the version of Xandros that came on the original Asus EEEPC. It was fine for what it did, but if you wanted to upgrade any of the (already very old) apps on there, it was a nightmare. It also hogged 2 Gig of its 4 Gig flash drive space for an OS “backup”. I was already half-way Linux savvy when I got mine, so I was able to wipe the whole thing and install Ubuntu, so getting that locked up 2 Gig back in the process.
But mum and dad Pc-world shopper simply aren't going to do such things. Neither is your local, friendly PC shop, either through sheer ignorance of Linux or because they see no up-selling potential in it for them (think Office and anti-virus). That's the ones that aren't too busy trying to steal your bank details or copy your beach holiday photos, of course.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Sky-News-Undercover-Laptop-Investigation-Repair-Shops-Caught-Hacking-Into-Personal-Files/Article/200907315343387
If the early Linux netbooks had all standardised on Ubuntu, as System 76 has done, they might have stood a chance. But only a chance, mind you. Microsoft's voluminous bag of cash and dirty tricks would likely still have won the day.
> If the early Linux netbooks had all standardised on Ubuntu,
Which is exactly what I told them to do.....
What I'm expecting to kill netbooks - or at least make them a much smaller part of the market - is ULV chips, especially from AMD, and the way that today's cheap notebooks and ultraportables are delivering what people thought they were originally buying with netbooks: a small, light, low-priced notebook. Adding hardware accelerators to Atom and putting it in a 10" case or going for a decent processor in the first place and having a usable keyboard, big enough screen, more storage and still decent battery life - when the price is much the same, netbooks end up being most appealing to those who want the portability above all and that's not the majority of buyers. The netbook's success was about the price tag and really nothing else; we should be glad they've pushed the whole notebook price level down to where there's a huge choice.
Windows 7 runs just fine on netbooks by the way, so there's no need to perpetuate that canard; I'm using it on 3 or 4 different models regularly. Add some of the terrible AV software that's still around and you can slow a PC of just about any processor to the speed of treacle; I'm routinely recommending people to remove Norton and use Microsoft's Security Essentials to get virus protection without destroying performance.
M
Obviously untrue. Here is several counter points:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140343/Linux_s_share_of_netbooks_surging_not_sagging_says_analyst
http://blog.laptopmag.com/one-third-of-dell-inspiron-mini-9s-sold-run-linux
@apexwm - "Jack doesn't state what his source was" He seldom does, especially when he makes wild statements like this one. It falls in the same category as "You can buy a PC for 1 pound a day" or "... 50 cents a day"... or whatever bizarre number he chooses to pull out of thin air.
jw
I didn't want to get involved in Mary's comments above about the Linux on early netbooks being "appallingly broken", because I don't agree with that. But to be perfectly honest, I found the SLED 10 preloaded on the HP netbooks to be pretty awful compared to any of the current Linux distributions, and I basically wiped and replaced it every bit as quickly as I did the preloaded Windows. We have to be honest with ourselves here - it's all well and good for me/us to say how bad Windows is on netbooks in particular, but if the preloaded Linux is no better, what are the alternatives? It is totally unrealistic to expect the average consumer to buy a netbook and then find, download and install some decent version of Linux themselves.
jw
When you see successful companies like System76 that are selling nice quality machines with good reviews and little to no problems, you would think vendors like HP and Dell would try to compete more. Sure, they've made efforts, but HP's decision to wander off with their own distribution was surprising. And Dell has made little effort at really pushing their line of PCs with Ubuntu. We shall see moving forward, if the vendors are really serious about selling PCs with Linux. In the meantime, we'll just have to continue buying Windoze, requesting the Windows Tax refund, and throwing out DVDs.
I'm interested in the people who run Windows day-to-day, the ones who aren't interested in the technology, the ones who don't know or care what an operating system is or what it does - or why - the ones who are also unlikely to be reading this but who, if they did, might saying: "I run Windows and it works for me because it runs the software I need for my work, my gaming, or my whatever."
Are those people throwing away Windows disks? Most don't have a Linux guru in their back pocket, so it's a risky thing to do, not just from their financial point of view but also the configuration issue - the fear of messing up their computer and never getting it back again.
Let's get real.