30 percent of netbook shoppers bought an iPad instead, survey says
Nearly one in three buyers who had been considering a netbook waited for, and then bought, an Apple iPad tablet instead, according to a survey of more than a thousand US consumers spread across gender, age, income and location demographics.
Context & Ripple Effects
Retrevo's survey of more than a thousand US consumers, picked up by VentureBeat, puts a number on something the trade press had only been arguing about since the iPad's April launch: the tablet is eating netbook demand rather than merely sitting alongside it. Nearly one in three shoppers who had been considering a netbook waited for the iPad and bought that instead — defected demand measured at the point of sale, not expressed interest.
It lands amid a run of Apple momentum stories in late May 2010: unconfirmed reports that the iPad may already be outselling the Mac (a claim still short of verification), the confirmed end of the 'Get a Mac' campaign, and Apple's escalating pressure on Flash in its fight with Adobe. The survey matters because it quantifies cross-category substitution from a device class Apple doesn't even sell.
First-order effects
- Netbook vendors lose close to a third of their consideration pool before those buyers ever reach a checkout — Retrevo's data shows the loss happens at the decision stage, when shoppers wait for and choose the iPad instead.
- Apple captures spend from a low-price portable segment it does not compete in directly, widening the iPad's early install base beyond customers who would otherwise have bought Apple hardware.
Second-order effects
- PC makers whose netbook lines were their fastest-growing category are pushed to field tablet answers of their own or cede the low-end portable market, since a third-party survey gives retailers and carriers evidence to shift shelf space toward tablets.
- If the unconfirmed reports that the iPad is outselling the Mac prove accurate, Apple faces its own cannibalization question — the same substitution effect hitting both rival netbooks and its own laptop business.
Third-order effects
- If the substitution pattern holds, the netbook settles into being a transitional category squeezed between smartphones and full laptops, and tablet share of the portable-computing funnel becomes the metric that determines which hardware makers keep a seat at the low end.
The trend: Tablets are beginning to cannibalize the budget-laptop segment, with the iPad converting would-be netbook buyers outright rather than expanding the market around them.