iPad Is Destroying Netbook Sales

Hugh Pickens writes "Fortune magazine reports that sales growth of low-cost, low-powered netbooks peaked last summer at an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate but netbook sales fell off a cliff in January and shrank again in April — collateral damage, according to Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty, from the January introduction and April launch of the iPad. In support of Huberty's theory, she offers a Morgan Stanley/Alphawise survey conducted in March which found that 44% of US consumers who were planning to buy an iPad said they were buying it instead of a netbook or notebook computer. In related news, Apple announced that it sold its one millionth iPad last week, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. 'One million iPads in 28 days — that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,' says Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. 'Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.'"

Comments

After a month of daily use...

[crumbz]

...I find the iPad to be a perfect web surfing device. Great for e-mail and watching video. I am actually considering selling my Macbook Pro, as it is starting to get dusty. That said, I wouldn't want to write a novel on it.

Re:After a month of daily use...

[gstoddart]

Why on earth would you want to use an iPad to browse the internet if you have a laptop? Tiny screen, no Flash support, no keyboard... when did it become hip to use crippled devices?

You know, if you're holding it at less than arms length, I suspect it's a pretty usable screen size since it' about the size of a book. I see people use their CrackBerry's for Google, and you'll notice they've got an even smaller screen.

As to flash, I don't have it installed on most of my browsers, so it's not like you're missing anything. I can't view flash on my current machine because I've chosen to do without it -- it' hardly mandatory. In fact, it's a bloody nuisance.

If you're truly browsing the internet, you mostly don't need a keyboard for the most part.

With a form factor more like a book, I can see sitting in a comfy chair looking up stuff on the internet or reading an e-book or what have you. And, with a purported 10 hour battery life, that's pretty good.

I'm not going to run out and buy one, but I'm keeping an eye on them -- might be something to ponder in a year or so if they come down in price.

Re:After a month of daily use...

[nine-times]

Yeah, I don't agree that it's "the perfect web surfing device"-- but not for the reasons you're going to get flamed for. People are going to call you crazy because it's a little screen, no Flash, no physical keyboard, etc., but after using an iPad for a while, that's not the stuff that bothers me.

The real problem with the iPad as a web browsing device is in how it handles tabbed browsing. I browse the web in a particular way, and it's not quite linear. When I'm reading through a page, if I come across a link that interests me, I open it in a new tab in the background. Then I continue on reading the page until there's nothing else I want, and I close the tab. That automatically brings me to the next tab, from which I do the same thing. It's a very easy and natural way of processing things, and I barely understand the point of having multiple web pages open at the same time if you're not managing things that way.

On the iPad, however, you don't really have tabs. Instead you can back into some other screen where all your open pages appear as thumbnails. Not only is the transition of moving in and out a bit slow and aggravating, but there's no way to open a new page in the background. If you "Open in New Page", it automatically zooms you out, opens a new page, and zooms into that page. Worse yet, a lot of times if you have multiple pages open and you switch from one to another, the page you've just switched to will automatically reload itself. ??!! The whole reason I'd want to be able to keep pages open in the background is so that they'll be all loaded up and ready to go. If I have to wait for them to load each time, then I may as well just bookmark them and avoid the whole shrinky-zoomy animation.

Apple needs to fix that experience. Along with everything else, they have these nice big touchscreens, and the best way they can come up with to change between web pages is to press a button that zooms you out to look at thumbnails? We can't get functionality to have a quick 3-finger swipe take you to "next tab"?

Not surprising

[TheRaven64]

NetBooks were always strange devices. Marginally more portable than a laptop (although not portable enough to fit in a pocket), and a lot less powerful. Their only real advantage was their cost. They were very cheap, but since the original EeeeeeeeeeeeeePC they've gradually crept up in price and now they're just too expensive for what they are.

The iPad, in contrast, is not just a cheap laptop. It fills a distinctly different need to a laptop. I've not entirely worked out what that need is - it seems to target a market that doesn't contain me - but it's clearly not the same set of uses as a laptop.

The iPad isn't killing Netbooks, they're doing that all by themselves. The iPad is just giving people who might have bought one and never used it after the first couple of months something different to waste their money on.

Hype-Cycle

[prefec2]

First there was no such device as a netbook. Then the geeks saw the OLPC and then they ran around, screaming "I want one of these!!!!" After some screaming, Asus thought it might be nice to sell some of these devices to geeks. Hey its about money. And then more people saw that netbooks are nice devices so they bought one. As the demand for netbooks was high the sales jumped up (because the industry suddenly provided a portable product which was very much needed by many people). Now most of those people who want a netbook have a netbook and so the sales are going back. Also there was/is a financial crisis going on. And while the crisis more or less hit the public in the US very quickly it took some time to have an affect countries with "social backup systems".

So in short: It is not a falling of a cliff it is just the end of a peak. And yes, as already mentioned, there are no really cheap netbooks anymore.

Netbooks did themselves in...

[ISurfTooMuch]

...with help from notebooks.

When netbooks came on the scene, they were dirt cheap. Sure, they could do less than a notebook, but, again, they were dirt cheap, they were small, and battery life was good. Just what you needed for Web browsing and light productivity work. Oh yeah, and they were dirt cheap, easily several hundred less than most notebooks except that once-in-a-blue-moon sale you might run across.

However, this didn't last. Companies started cramming more and more into these things, which drove the price up. In and of itself, that might have been OK, but notebook prices started coming down, and they offered more features. They were bigger, but you could do more with them, and I really believe that a significantly lower price is what drove netbook sales, not merely their size. So, people could spend maybe $250-$300 for a netbook, or, if they caught a sale, they could spend $350 for a basic notebook, which offered much more bang for the buck. That's what killed netbook sales, IMHO.

Look and Feel

[savanik]

A friend of mine has one that I got a chance to try out. It's an interesting little device - I'm not going to get one, but then, it's not meant for me.

The iPad does notably excel in one simple thing that I have been missing for the past few years. It has no interface lag. My phone? When I'm switching screens, it lags for a couple seconds. My two year old laptop I got fed up with and threw out because the power jack kept breaking? Opening a directory took a noticable amount of time. Even my streamlined, power-user, performance gaming desktop has moments where its trying to access things and it chugs along before giving me any feedback.

The iPad's interface is responsive. It does what you want it to, when you want it to. When you drag an icon around, it responds immediately. When you poke at a link, it responds instantly with feedback - the webpage might take a moment to load, but it lets you know it's heard you immediately. And everything else in the environment remains responsive. You access the dropdowns, they come right down. You hit the 'menu' button, and you don't get 'the application is waiting to close' hourglass or anything like that, you get MENU.

I can see how that would appeal to many consumers in a world of stuttering, jerky computers.