Remember Netbooks? Those teeny-tiny little computers with tiny screens, awkward touchpads and funny operating systems? Well, it would appear that they’ve had their time in the sun and have been summarily usurped by tablets and smartphones, according to new numbers released this week.
In 2011, the Liliputian laptops saw a 25% decrease in shipping numbers, while notebooks saw an increase in shipments of between 2 and 7 percent.
The real winners though? Smartphones and tablets. Tablets saw a 270% increase in units shipped last year, meaning that 63 million smartslabs made their way around the world last year, as did 487 million smartphones. That’s more than half a billion devicesthat don’t rely on “traditional” PC technology, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that made people like Intel very nervous.
Why Intel? Well, they don’t make the processors that power these units, and the more that tablets and smartphones take market share away from Windows running Intel machines, the less chips Intel will be able to sell – not fantastic news. Intel still hold a dominant position in the notebook market (where over quarter of a billion units were sold last year) So it’s not likely to be the beginning of the end for them, but it’s certainly a sign that the world of mobile personal computing is changing.
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