Hello, tablets. Good-bye, netbooks!
Seven trends are conspiring to usher in a tsunami of tablets — and sink netbooks — Computerworld - Look, I know you like the netbook idea — and you love netbook prices. If you're like most people, you think tablets are expensive, slow, heavy and a pain to use.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a prediction piece landing at the pivot point of a two-year arc: Ars Technica flagged stylus-era Tablet PCs gaining ground back in May 2007, Technology Review profiled 'a new breed of netbook' in April 2009 as the cheap-laptop category peaked, and CrunchGear spent September framing the coming tablet wars before any major vendor had shipped a modern slate.
Computerworld's contribution is the kill shot thesis: seven converging trends — price, weight, touch interfaces, content ecosystems among them — will make tablets eat the netbook segment that was supposed to be the next big thing. The argument matters because netbooks were the fastest-growing PC category of the late 2000s, so a demand rotation away from them reorders the whole entry-level laptop market.
First-order effects
- Netbook vendors face their growth thesis being challenged at the moment of maximum momentum — Computerworld's seven-trend argument targets exactly the buyers who made netbooks the hot category of 2008-2009.
- Consumers weighing a sub-$500 keyboard laptop against an incoming class of touchscreen slates get a genuine fork in the road for the first time, since the 2007-vintage Tablet PCs were premium business machines rather than mass-market alternatives.
Second-order effects
- PC makers that hedged on netbooks as their volume engine now have to fund tablet development programs simultaneously, splitting R&D and component budgets across two competing small-device bets.
- Component suppliers and carriers who built netbook economics around cheap x86 parts and data plans see pricing power shift toward whoever controls tablet silicon and app distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the netbook becomes a bridge product between full laptops and appliance-like devices rather than a lasting category — a structural question about whether cheap general-purpose computers survive once consumption-oriented slates arrive.
- A tablet-led entry-level market would concentrate differentiation in software ecosystems and industrial design instead of spec sheets, rewarding vendors positioned as consumer brands over traditional PC box-makers.
The trend: Personal computing is rotating from low-cost portable PCs toward touchscreen media appliances, and the 2009-2010 tablet launch window will decide whether netbooks stay a category or end up a transitional product.