Bleak future for Netbooks

Netbooks were created to fill the gap between laptops and smartphones, and they sold like hotcakes for a while. Now, a study has found that the category is in freefall.

IHS iSuppli predicted just 264,000 netbooks will be shipped in 2014 and none will go out in 2015.

“Netbooks shot to popularity immediately after launch because they were optimized for low cost, delivering what many consumers believed as acceptable computer performance,” wrote Craig Stice, senior principal analyst for computer platforms at IHS, in the report. “However, netbooks began their descent to oblivion with the introduction in 2010 of Apple’s iPad.”

The IHS study reported that netbook shipments were 32.14 million when the iPad hit the market, but just 14.13 million last year. This year, IHS predicts only 3.97 million will be shipped, a drop of 72% in just 12 months.

“The problem is netbooks aren’t better at anything,” the late Steve Jobs was quoted as saying once. “They are slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky, old PC software. We don’t think they’re a third-category device.”

Where are all the iPad alternatives?

Crunchgear recently featured an interesting posting about the state of many of the e-readers/ slates/tablets that were expected to come to market this year. Some devices have made it but others have been delayed or scrapped entirely.

The end of netbooks?

With the booming success of Apple’s iPad, many people have predicted the beginning of the end for netbooks and other mini-notebooks. A recent article from InformationWeek presents this same idea, rationalizing that the birth of the tablet computer will be the end of these other products.

“The last quarter of 2007 heralded the birth of the mini-note PC (netbook)," John F. Jacobs, director of notebook research at DisplaySearch, said in a statement released Tuesday. "Q1’10 signaled the birth of the slate PC, and possibly by extension, the beginning of the end of the mini-note PC.”

With new devices being announced and unveiled every day, we will have to wait to see how the industry progresses in order to determine the accuracy of these predictions; in the mean time, many intriguing devices continue to be released—some even incorporating ideas from both the notebook and the tablet. In a recent press release, Toshiba unveiled the Libretto W100, a dual, touch-screen, hybrid PC—a mix between a tablet and a notebook—in addition to two other new products. This device, which has two 7-inch multitouch screens, will be the first dual-screened device to run on Windows 7, and it will double as an e-reader. An article from Wired goes into more detail about the device.