Asus and HP hinted that Apple’s iPad may be the reason behind declining netbook sales and a particularly slow start into the back-to-school season.
Apple iPad
Asus told investors that it is now expecting top ship about 1.4 million netbooks in the third quarter of this year, which is down from 1.5 million in the previous quarter. HP stated during its Q3 conference call that “strong” tablet sales have negatively impacted notebook sales, but the growth is apparently back on track.
According to Asus CEO Jerry Shen, there is no question that the iPad is responsible for the drop in demand, but it is somewhat surprising that Apple did not find the iPad cannibalizing its own notebook sales, that Dell has seen virtual no impact as its mobile sales grew in line with the entire company and HP indicates that there has been short term impact only.
According to HP’s Todd Bradley, who is in charge of the Personal Systems Group at HP, “notebook sales were likely impacted by strong sales of tablets”. However, growth was bouncing back and HP hopes to play the tablet game with a Windows tablet that is coming “very soon” as well as a WebOS tablet that is due early next year.
2011, however, appears to be Apple’s market to lose, as the company is estimated to take more than 85% share of the tablet market this year as product choice remains limited. If you are looking for a tablet and you do not want an iPad, you could be looking in a much more specialized eReader such as the Kindle or Nook, a smartphone tablet such as the Dell Streak, or early tablets such as the Archos 5 or 7 as well as the Pandigital Novel – or relatively expensive experiments such as the Toshiba Libretto W105 dual-screen tablet.
In 2011, choices will increase with tablets that are expected to be released by HP, HTC, RIM, Asus, Samsung, Motorola and Best Buy. We are also waiting for the WeTab (formerly WePad), the Stream TV tablet eLocity A7, the Notion Ink Adam or the Carmangi Web Station.
Hp beliebves that the market is big enough for more than just the iPad and that there will be variants of tablets that can be sucessful: “We’ve never felt like the market was one [in which] one product or one device would become ubiquitous,” HP CEO Mark Hurd said during the earnings call. “We believe that the world is going through a series of more and more mobility, not less, and more and more differentiation between what users want to have in terms of capability all the way from a purely voice product up through a smart phone capability through a tablet through a notebook, and we expect to play across that gamut of capabilities the customers want, and that’s where we expect to go.”
The impact on the netbook will be interesting to watch, but there are early signs that the excitement for netbooks is fading and the general focus is shifting to other platforms. Besides analyst shipment expectations, we were especially surprised that Intel’s netbook app store “AppUp Center” is apparently not attractive enough for developers. Over the past eight months, it saw its software content grow to only 420 applications, which compares to almost 250,000 applications in Apple’s App Store. Intel may have a different problem, especially the fact that its AppUp Center needs to compete with traditional download services such as download.com, but, if we believe developers, the focus of today’s software development clearly is moving into a different direction.
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