In January 2003, Steve Jobs announced to a slightly surprised Macworld audience that “this is going to be the year of the notebook for Apple.” There was a clear ambition to push up the sales of portables — on which margins tend to be better than on desktops.
Jobs was right in spotting an unstoppable trend: the rise of the laptop. This is a category that now includes not just “notebooks,” as Apple always refers to them, but also, since last year, the smaller “netbooks.” As Moore’s Law — a doubling in size for the same price — has applied to processors, RAM and even disk storage, laptops have become not just an interesting option for a second computer, but the primary machine for a lot of people.
Apple didn’t quite manage to make 2003 the year in which sales of laptops exceeded those of desktop; it was July 2005 before that happened, and April 2006 before it began to happen consistently. But now laptop sales always exceed desktop sales for the company.
And Apple is not the leader in this trend. Laptops are taking over computing, especially with the rise of netbooks.
Looking at the trends in computer sales, you may wonder when laptop sales will overtake those of desktops worldwide. The answer is simple: they already have. For this year, 159 million portable machines (a segment that includes both notebooks and netbooks) will be sold, compared with 124 million desktop machines, the research company IDC says. Gartner says that in the first quarter of this year, desktop sales declined 16 percent year on year; laptop sales fell by 3 percent , but netbook sales leapt sixfold, so that they now make up 20 percent of all laptops sold.
For computer makers, the shift to laptops offers a chance to increase profit margins. Netbooks have once again eroded those margins, but the fact that you can’t build your own laptop leaves more margin in that sector. Those are the bald numbers — but they hide a much more subtle and far-reaching shift in the way we now live our lives, said Richard Holway, the veteran analyst who is chairman of TechMarketView.
“The obvious and banal answer [to why laptops are selling better and better] is that people don’t sit at desks any more,” Holway said.
“In about 2002 or 2003, we started to talk about ‘mobile Iinternet devices’ which were, at that stage, only available in one form — your laptop. Which, I would remind you, weighed about 3kg, cost US$2,500, and was something that was at best luggable even then,” he said.
“But we said then that the world was moving towards a situation where ‘knowledge workers’ would do things on the move, from a number of different devices, which had to get smaller and be able to link to the net at broadband speeds, anywhere,” he said.
The point, Holway said, is that people don’t just want to do computing anywhere in the world — they also want to do it with a multitude of different devices.
That change could have dramatic effects on how companies think about their investments in computers, and how they should expect people to work.
The spread of mobile Internet access has changed approaches to connectivity. Just as mobile phones evolved over the past 20 years from being a luxury to a cheap necessity, so Internet access on the move is evolving too: driven by the widening access to 3G networks, Wi-Fi connections and even WiMax, a sort of long-distance Wi-Fi.
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