Notebook Shipments Grow by 100 Million by 2015

Analysts again stepped up to state the fact that, despite the premature assumptions of certain parties, there is no way tablets will remove laptops from the picture any time soon.

People might not have noticed it, but the whole hype surrounding the tablet market is more or less identical to how netbooks were received when they first came out.

A small and light form factor, compared to everything else currently out, connectivity, portability and the $500 price point are what all tablets have in common.

This was almost exactly the case with low-end mobile PCs in their beginning months and, just like with tablets, analysts thought they would keep growing in sales more and more, for years.

It is true that laptop sales didn't quite reach the levels expected by analysts before slates became such a prominent element in the media.

Anyone who expects them to push aside notebook, however, is greatly off the mark as far as analysts can tell.

Apparently, mobile PCs, notebooks as it were, will keep growing in sales over the next few years, tablets or no tablets.

Number-wise, this will lead to shipment levels, in 2015, higher than the projected 2011 one by about 100 million units, to 324.9 million.

“Despite the intense competition from media tablets, notebooks remain a useful tool that has become an essential part of modern life—rather than a luxury item,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research at IHS.

“Compared to the consumption-oriented media tablets, notebooks are superior platforms for content creation tasks, ranging from developing websites, to building rich documents, to editing high-definition videos and photos. Because of this, the notebook PC will continue to be an important, expanding market—even if its sales growth will be slower than it was in the past.”

All in all, laptops are just too important and versatile, and this goes for the enterprise, business and industrial markets, not just the consumer segment, especially with Ultrabooks coming into their own.