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iPad Isn't "Killing" Netbook Sales, According To Paul Thurrott
mantis2009 writes "Paul Thurrott, the prolific technology analyst and Windows expert, reacts strongly to an article highlighted on Slashdot. Thurrott takes numbers from IDC and the Wall Street Journal, indicating that netbook sales have not in any meaningful way been affected by sales of Apple's tablet computer, the iPad. Money quote: '[N]etbooks and sub-12-inch machines will sell 45.6 million units in 2011 and 60.3 million in 2013. If I remember the numbers from 2009, they were 10 percent of all PCs, or about 30 million units. Explain again how the iPad will beat that. Please. Even the craziest iPad sales predictions are a small percentage of that.'"
We should note that Paul here has both a vested interest in dogging on the ipad and a long history of making hyperbolic statements about how the iPad can't or won't succeed. Also, the original graph clearly showed the growth rate changing, a flow variable, not the number of units, the stock. If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover? What manufacturer will net into a market where the rate of growth is much less than it was even 6 months ago.
Didn't they sell a million of them last month? That's about 25% of netbook sales (48million in a year would be about 4 million a month). That doesn't sound like a small fraction to me.
Even if he's 100% correct in what he says about the figures, I wish /. would not give this guy a platform to rant on. I've written many a rebuttal to his posts simply because he says things simply to be controversial He's an 'expert' in nothing other than being a total asshat
I think if the iPad had a competitive price point it might be an interesting battle, one in which the iPad might win... But right now the iPad is priced like a laptop. If you look at the typical Netbook price and the cheapest iPad then we are talking above 100% price increase.
ePC - £199
iPad - £429
"Full" Laptop - £400
However what you might see happen is the iPad gets bundled with 3G mobile services and winds up costing a fair bit less in relative terms... Netbooks have tried to bundle with 3G but I think it is safe to say it has been fairly unsuccessful.
So let me get this straight, the argument here is that the iPad isnt effecting netbook sales because the projected number of netbooks to be sold in 2011 hasn't been changed in the last month ...
Seriously, someone fucking fire timothy, he hasn't posted anything that wasn't a blatent slashvertisment or flat out obviously wrong in at least 2 years.
Why don't we wait until someone gets some real sales numbers and there has been more than a month before we start talking about how its effecting the market.
I don't think the iPad is going to effect much either, but I don't try to back that up using sales PROJECTIONS made by people who aren't actually doing the selling. The WSJ must be pretty damn smart to predict the future with 0 input to base it on.
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Seriously? This guy has been so wrong on apple over the years that I think taking his opinion on apple or anything tech would be like believing exRaider Jamarcus Russell that he was doing well at QB.
seriously slashdot should have higher standards than Thurott
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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Could you please provide a link to where these ARM based netbooks or Android tablets are being sold? Cheapest netbooks I've seen start at $400 CDN and functional tablets have been pretty much vapourware..
As a content creator, for me, the Ipad just doesn't cut it.
As a plumber, I can tell you that the iPad's not very useful for that, either.
Did you have a point?
I dropped 300 bucks for my netbook last year on a whim. I had a pretty burly laptop at the time...then the nVidia sli bug kicked in and fried my video cards. I had nothing else and I had another project come up, so I took my netbook in and used it for development (obviously hooked it up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc.). Worked like a charm for me. And I do a lot of .NET development and SQL stuff, but that little Atom processor and the 2GB of RAM was plenty enough for my needs (and actually, I was able to catch a timing bug that I couldn't replicate on a higher end Win7 notebook, but I digress).
See, I can get actual WORK done on a netbook. I can do paperwork, make website edits, do a whole lot of other things without having to lug around (or pay for) a much more expensive high end laptop...and I don't see myself replacing that netbook with a bigger laptop anytime soon unless I'm stuck using higher end systems for a client. If I need to do something really high end, I use my desktop at home or whatever a client dumps on my desk for work purposes. Otherwise, the netbook is all I'd need...the only real reason I had my old laptop was for gaming, and I'm better off doing that on my desktop at home anyway.
The problem that a lot of folks have with understanding why tablets just aren't that much a threat to netbooks is that netbooks and tablets sate two different market segments. Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.
Generally speaking, affect is a verb and effect is a noun. When you affect something, you produce an effect on it. Even in the passive voice, something would be affected, not effected.
Netbook sales were already leveling off. Looking at the sales figures, they have continued their downward growth trend that started months before the iPad was released. I have no idea how this is stretched into an iPad effect.
The iPad is best suited to enable the consumption of media (movies, music, web, ebooks, etc) whereas netbooks are most often used as simply small, inexpensive notebooks. Every person I know who owns a netbook uses it for work computing- Office, presentations, e-mail, scientific computing, I even use my old Eee 900 for editing and managing photos when I travel.
Currently the iPad is better suited to consumption.
But that's a software issue... all of the things you mention - presentations, editing documents, email, photo editing - those already work pretty well on an iPad, and in fact photo editing/review that you do on the road can be a lot better done with an iPad unless you are a heavy photoshop user. Over time, we'll see even better software to meet those needs.
I can actually type really fast using the onscreen keypad, but if you were replacing a small travel laptop many people could easily include a small bluetooth keyboard, like the kinds they have made for years now for other mobile devices. You wouldn't need to use it all the time but for more serious editing in a hotel room it might be nicer.
I say this all not to say if the iPad will or will not supplant netbooks, just to note that if you think of it as only a consumption device you are missing out on a lot of what it can do, and do well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe iPad sales are cutting into netbooks, maybe not. But what makes people think Apple can keep this up?
The MacBook Air looked like the granddaddy of netbooks, it was shiny and hot; and a year or two after its release, its just another expensive, light, and slow laptop for Mac users with too much cash.
The same is likely going to happen with iPads. Apple pushed the thing out the door quickly, but low-cost tablets have been in the pipeline for a couple of years, and you're likely going to see $200-$300 tablets with better specs than the iPad and no software restrictions this year.
Worked like a charm for me. And I do a lot of .NET development and SQL stuff... ....
The problem that a lot of folks have with understanding why tablets just aren't that much a threat to netbooks is that netbooks and tablets sate two different market segments.
And the problem with people that think the iPad lives in a different space is that they do not realize how few people need to do things like .NET development that cannot be done on an iPad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and you're likely going to see $200-$300 tablets with better specs
Why then is the Crunchpad (sorry, JooJoo) $500?
Before it was released, it was supposed to be $200 too... I'll believe that price point when I see it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's one for $80. And here's one for $90. And another for $130. And of course there is the Archos 7 tablet which runs Android, and has an MSRP of $199.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
My thoughts exactly. Paul Thurrott is a well-known (and quite succesful) troll. He will bash anything Apple does, he will love anything Microsoft does and he's often not even subtle about it. He even manages to like the Kin phones and claim "most reviews are positive", while in fact every major tech website hates them. When reading something from the hand of Paul Thurrott, you quickly realize RDFs aren't Apple-exclusive.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
None of the linked products are competitors to the iPad or a typical netbook. With a 800x480 screen and puny single-core ARM they have specs equivalent to a high end phone - except that a phone can fit in a standard trouser pocket and make voice calls.
Show me a netbook that's projected to sell 10 million units and support a media and application infrastructure that will allow it's manufacturer to continually reap income from the device long after sale?
Thought not.
Come Christmas, the iPad will be *the* tech item to buy.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
- the iPad is mainly a device designed with a "consumer" mind set.
I totally disagree. It's a large flat touch screen with one button and a large number of input (touch, bluetooth, network) and output (video, network, display) options. It is anything software makes it.
For starter it lacks a real decent input device like a real practical keyboard.
I think you missed the part where I said "I can type very fast on it". Is it better than a physical keyboard? No. But I can type almost as fast due to the larger keys and built-in correction. The keyboard is far from awful, it works really well even for typing longer text.
I can type OK on an iPhone too (thumb typing) but on an iPad I can type almost as fast as a full size keyboard.
For very long typing sessions, someone who couldn't get used to the on-screen keyboard CAN use a very nice keyboard if they must - a bluetooth keyboard works just fine.
People were gushing over a netbook a moth or two back where you could detach the screen and convert a netbook into a touch screen tablet. Well why is it not just as good to have a similar thing where the screen starts out detached?
NetBooks are mainly designed around a "producer" mindset.
And here's the key - only of text, and even that marginally so. By the very nature of the things the screen is not great, the keyboard tiny. And what if you want to draw? There is more than one kind of input.
Netbooks are not designed around a mindset other than "small and cheap", they do not help producers or consumers by design - at least not any further than giving you a computing device that is somewhat compact with good battery life - the same as the iPad.
lots of users can have needs (typing text documents, e-mails, chats, etc.) which a device designed to have on your lap and consume media with just can't fulfil.
Except is can, and is. I know a number of people that use iPads in meetings to take notes, and when traveling to work on documents and presentations. If the device were no good at production, there would be no Keynote or Pages for it, and those work quite well - as does Numbers, the spreadsheet program.
If anything has to be afraid of iPad, that would be the e-Book readers
Being a dedicated, fixed device that can attempt to fill one role better - they have much less to worry about. I worry for the Kindle though because Amazon is trying to branch out what the device can do with the developer SDK, in the end I think it will water down the product and allow comparisons between applications you can run on a Kindle vs. an iPad (or iPod touch).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I find it funny that people get so emotional over someone else's choice in computers.
I also find it funny that only on Slashdot you can find people comparing computing devices that were engineer well enough to actually revive a basically dead touch tablet market, to pieces of crap thrown together at a Chinese assembly plant.
Let's use Slashdot's mandatory car metaphor as an example:
Sure we can all drive to work on a Vespa scooter, but I prefer to drive my Honda automobile. There is a tangible difference between having the capability to drive to work, and actually wanting to use the vehicle to drive to work. The same applies to computers.
Sure I can spend a lot of time figuring out how to get that $80-$190 off brand device to do what I want, or I can spend a little more money and get something useful like a $300-$400 Asus netbook or $400 - $800 Apple iPad.
That's not even taking reliability into consideration, I have yet found anything that is both really cheap and reliable. Face it the only thing those cheap pieces of crap found only on ebay are good at is to provide some flimsy evidence to a Slashdot poster so that they can say "See I can find something cheaper that technically could do something similar to that expensive computer you like so much!!"
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Okay, the "correlation is not causation" loons have reached a new plateau of insanity. As far as i can tell there is neither correlation nor causation in the statistical sense involved here. There is an easily verified claim that the netbook market is currently larger than the iPad market, and there is an impossible to prove (except with the passage of time of course) but entirely reasonable belief that that will continue to be the case in the future. So where is the supposed correlation that is being incorrectly claimed to indicate a causation?
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My o' My. What venom I hear from the likes of those Apple Panboys. Did us Apple Fanboys sound like that back in the late 1990s when the whole PC industry was eating our lunch?
Wow!
More and more people are buying Apple products. They weren't sheeple or stupid idiots or people with money to burn and no brains when they weren't buying Apple products, and they aren't that now. These are willy consumers and see nice products at somewhat reasonable prices. Reasonable prices? A JooJoo tablet is the same price as an iPad. The WeTab (formally, the WePad) will be selling in Europe for $600. Remember the Zune? Came out at the same price as an iPod -- and the Zune was physically bigger, heavier and was brown. And, of course, there's the Adamo XPS which is just like the MacBook Air, but costs $500 more.
Looks like when companies build products to take on Apples' products, those products also take on Apple pricing too. You cannot build a 9" touch screen, well made tablet for under $500 and still make money. Even the HP Slate is going to sell for the same price as the iPad when it comes out in the end of July (running WebOS).
I don't know who this Paul is, but netbooks have been in the doldrums for a few months before the iPad, and sales have continued to drop since the iPad came out. There suppose to be 50,000,000 of them netbook suckers? He's an idiot.
The question is how other companies are viewing the iPad. Quite a few have quietly dropped working on up coming models, and instead are working on various tablet computers. Looks like these companies see the writing on the wall -- the netbook is pretty much dead.
And good riddance for netbooks too! Netbooks were money pits for most of these companies. You can't make money selling $300 netbooks. Heck, the Windows 7 license itself was close to $100. (Yes, I know: Linux is the answer. I use Linux too, but Linux based netbooks never sold very well. Linux is a nice kernel, and the GNU utilities are nice, but the Gnome and KDE desktops suck. Non-geeks hated them).
Nope, these companies see the writing on the wall: They're all coming on with tablets. HP's Slate will be coming on at the end of July running WebOS. Android tablets are in the works for Dell and other companies. They're not waiting around for ChromeOS which will be a disaster. Anything that'll run on ChromeOS will run on a iPhone OS or WebOS based tablet. Besides, the trend is people using web-based data in native apps. Look at all the Android and iPhone apps, and how many of them are simply apps that give you the same data you can get from the company's webpage? And, people are PAYING for that instead of using the free webpage. That should tell you something. It's the real reason why Flash is dead. Despite what Adobe thinks, nobody want to run an AIR app when they can run a native app instead.
And, all of these companies will sell their tablets for about $500 -- matching the iPad's price. Why? Because you can make money on a $500 tablet which is something you cannot do with a $300 netbook.
By the way, nothing I mentioned called netbooks worthless or that you were an idiot buying one. You bought them for a good reason and are probably pleased your bought one.
The problem is that netbook computers not profitable to build. And, that's their real downfall.
puny single-core ARM they have specs equivalent to a high end phone
The iPad has a "puny single-core ARM" that's not significantly faster than the 1GHz Snapdragon that is currently in many high end phones.
The numbers look pretty grim for netbooks since the pre-iPad hype that dominated CES, and they get worse after the iPad introduction and worse again after the iPad shipped. But even so, I wasn't really sure that iPad was killing the netbook until Thurrott said it's not.
Thurrott was pro-tablet right up until Apple reinvented the tablet. Now he will be anti-tablet right up until Microsoft has an iPad copy for him to promote.
The guy is paid by Microsoft and Dell and has no credibility.
He whined and whined and whined about iPhone v1 and v2 not having "such a basic feature" as Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications. Then when Microsoft announced they were killing Windows Mobile in 2009 and would be back in 2011 with "Windows Phone 7" which would lack both Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications, Thurrott cheered them. So, keeping score: not having Copy/Paste in 2007-2008 during your first 2 years in the phone market is just totally inexcusable, while removing Copy/Paste in 2011 in your 10th year in the phone market is just fine, no biggie.
He also said of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" that "he can't disagree more" with it. That shows Thurrott knows nothing about mobiles, where there is no FlashPlayer at all, and nothing about the consumer market, where vendor neutral standardized audio video is not just the norm, it's a religion.
To the actual issue of tablet versus netbook: it's clear that perceptions of the tablet and netbook have been changed, same as iPhone versus the smartphones of 2007. A month ago, HP released an HP Slate teaser video, then just recently they bought Palm and we hear the Slate has been canceled because Windows 7 is apparently not a mobile OS. (You don't say!?) Compared to a netbook, iPad is half the size, half the weight, double the battery life, and 1000 times sexier. It makes a netbook look like a pocket protector. Half the size and weight and double the battery life ... that just can't be argued with. Even with a small Bluetooth keyboard added, iPad is still much more mobile than a netbook. And you can use a 100% scale Bluetooth keyboard and get real typing done.
The netbook had fatal flaws anyway. If you're going to have a keyboard, make it 100% scale. Every PC maker CEO spoke out against netbooks, even when they were most popular. So it would actually be surprising if we could have this Year Of The Tablet in 2010 and not see the netbook be very much affected. Walt Mossberg said iPad replaced 80% of his notebook use in the first week, so where does that leave a netbook? He's a techie. For consumers it is even worse, they are finding iPad replaces 95% of their Mac/PC use.
Yikes! Using a remote desktop solution might be okay for managing servers, but I can barely stand the performance of VNC from across my house at 802.11g speeds. I can't imagine the sheer torture of trying to use it for everyday tasks, much less connecting to a home computer served by a DSL connection over a 3G connection. That would make the slowest netbook on the market seem positively snappy by comparison even with SpeedStep locked at the slowest setting.
Also, you would have to:
I can understand the desire to have a larger screen, but... 17 inches? Are you serious? An iPad the size of the largest MacBook Pro? The whole point of iPad is that it is easier to carry around than a laptop....
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If people have 500 bucks to spend on the Ipad, this is definitely a sign that the recession is over. Thank you Ipad, for serving as our bellwether. No matter what its features are, the interface is too clumsy to be useful for much, other than flipping through photos. Lets face it, mouse and keyboard are far superior to touchscreen, for almost any task. Plus there is a great advantage to a traditional laptop that folds shut, in that the screen is protected quite wonderfully in transit. The average Ipad is going to get scratched up rather quickly, much like the Ipods do, which will ruin watching movies on them for a lot of people. If people are willing to actually spend money on something that is way less user friendly than a laptop, but also will look like a scratched up piece of junk in a month's time, the economy is doing just fine.
Always remember the chickens that have gone before