iSuppli Announces Laptopaleolithic Age
by John Paczkowski
Posted on December 23, 2008 at 2:12 PM PT
“We believe that the shipment crossover of desktop PCs to mobile PCs will now happen this year and not next year, as we originally anticipated.”
Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini made that prediction this past April, and it would appear he’s been proven right. Global shipments of notebooks surpassed those of desktop PCs for the first time ever in the third quarter, according iSuppli Corp. The market-research firm’s metrics reveal that notebook shipments rose almost 40 percent in the third quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007, to 38.6 million units. Meanwhile, desktop shipments fell by 1.3 percent to 38.5 million units.
While the mobile computing era was obviously born quite a while back, iSuppli’s report would seem to make its advent official. “This marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli. “The notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it’s now a computer for everyone. While the third quarter will be remembered as the time when the scale of the global economic/credit crunch truly became apparent, the PC market managed to deliver strong unit shipment growth during the period.”
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