Immense flocks of passenger pigeon darkened the N. American skies before European settlers blasted the species into extinction by around 1914. Shall we say the same on the netbook, which IHS iSuppli predicts will soon disappear from the shelves of the earth?
"Once a white-hot PC product that sold in the tens of millions of units annually," iSuppli says, "netbook computers are now marking their final days, with the rise of tablets causing their shipments to wind down to virtually zero after next year."
According to the analyst netbook 2013 shipments will drop by -72% to 3.97 million units (down from 14.13m in 2012 and a 32.14m high in 2010) before falling to just 264000 in 2014 and 0.00 by 2015.
Tablets are not the only cause of the extinction-- high-end notebooks are also to blame. As iSuppli puts it, "squeezed in between [tablets and notebooks] netbooks could only pass off pricing as strong point, losing out in other benchmarks that consumers deemed important, including computing power, ease of use such as touch-screen capability, and overall appeal."
However the analyst concludes with good news for the PC market, saying "2013 brings again a year of hope for the PC market." iSuppli predicts around 8% growth on 2013 shipments of 370m units.
Such optimism contrasts with the Q1 2013 IDC and Gartner reports, which paint a fairly grim picture of global declines for both consumer and commercial PC markets for the current, and upcoming, quarters.
Go PC Market Looks to Rebound from a Disappointing 2012 (IHS iSuppli)
