14 DAY TRIAL // Coming to dispel any concerns some might as had in regards to the motherboard industry, now that slates have more or less taken off, Gigabyte spoke out on the matter of these two fields' unlikely competition.
Since the PC market as a whole seems to be going through the effects caused by the rapid rise of tablets, one might wonder how other segments will be affected.
The slowdown of netbook growth and of the laptop market as a whole is something easy enough to understand, what with them being somewhat close in terms of features and target consumer base.
Still, even though there doesn't seem to be much chance of it, concerns about what tablets will do to other products, like desktops and, by extension, motherboards, exist as well, especially with some analysts thinking end-users will slow down in their PC upgrades as slates get better and better.
Turns out that Gigabyte wanted to make sure people didn't start to worry themselves without cause, so it stepped forth and quite self-assuredly said that there won't be any sales issues of this sort.
"We see tablet PCs as a companion device to desktops. Users want to have the benefits of a full-featured desktop PC at home: more CPU processing power, larger screen real-estate, multi-terabyte storage capacity, etc. which they will use to create, store and share their content. They will then utilize the improved mobility of tablets and smartphones to consume content wherever they want, said Vincent Liu, associate vice president of sales and marketing at Gigabyte.
"It is true that tablets are having an effect on the overall PC market, but this is mostly isolated to the notebook sector, and in particular netbooks. Tablet PCs can be seen as a viable replacement for notebooks in many scenarios due to their overlapping feature sets in terms of mobility and connectivity. But in the case of why and how consumers use a desktop PC, there is little to no overlap."
All in all, tablets are made to “consume” content, while desktops and notebooks will ever be used to create it.