Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld, “Steve Jobs saw it coming. He explicitly referred to netbooks during the iPad launch, dismissing the whole category as follows: ‘They’re slow, they have low quality displays and they run clunky old PC software. They’re not better than a laptop at anything, they’re just cheaper: they’re just cheap laptops. We don’t think they’re a third category device, but we think we’ve got something that is, and we’d like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it, the iPad,’ he said.”
“See, Jobs was right. These things might have been cheap, but they had no legitimacy beyond their status as a cheap laptop. As soon as a choice hit the market, consumers adopted a device that gave them something better and the iPad beat them on battery life, functionality and design,” Evans writes. “Netbook sales collapsed, falling from 32.14 million units in 2010 to a projected 3.97 million netbooks this year, the analysts claim, down 72 percent from 2012.”
“The iPad now accounts for one out of every six computers shipped and the huge decline in recent PC shipments shows shoppers are either slowing down planned purchases in response to the stark prevailing economic melt down, or adopting cheaper, cooler devices, such as an iPad. This pattern is going to continue, and if you extrapolate it it becomes pretty clear it isn’t just the netbook the iPad is devouring — it’s the PC,” ,” Evans writes. “Call it post- or plus-PC (semantics are just nature’s way for smug people to look smart) the effect will be the same — it won’t be long now until your iPad will be the first PC you buy.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Like most things, Steve Jobs certainly did see it coming:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
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