Why netbooks will soon go extinct
The short-lived era of netbook computers may soon be coming to an end. The netbook market will eventually fade away in 2013, this report from Digitimes predicts, thanks in part to manufacturers such as Asustek Compute and Acer to announce they won’t produce any netbooks in the coming year.
As the Guardian notes, Asustek and Acer were the only two companies still making netbooks, while other firms such as Dell were dipping their toes into the tablet space.
The slowdown actually began in 2010, the Guardian writes. “…early that year, sales ‘took a nosedive,’ IDC’s David Daoud told PCWorld, falling from over 2m in Q1 2010 to only just over 1.5m by the end of the year. By the fourth quarter of 2011, US netbook sales had fallen to about 750,000.”
Also to blame is our own activities and functions when it comes to computing needs, GigaOm writes. “Legacy application suites are getting replaced by a seemingly never-ending stream of smartphone and tablet applications. Cloud services for productivity and storage are the new Microsoft Office and hard drive. Touch computing is becoming the norm, not the exception, and mobile operating systems are optimized for it. Simply put: Netbooks are just another example of old-school computing and world is moving on.”
Another contributing factor to netbooks’ decline is the rise of tablets. Shipments of tablets in 2011 overtook those of netbooks – 63m against 29.4m, as the Guardian points out. Tablets can accomplish some of the tasks netbooks were designed to handle and battery life for tablets has caught up with some of the netbooks available.
Do you think netbooks will die a slow death in 2013?