Here’s another tidbit from Intel’s quarterly earnings results yesterday. GigaOm reports that Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that he expects netbook sales to double in 2009.Â
That projection doesn’t seem all that unrealistic, since netbooks didn’t really start taking off in earnest until mid-2008. Up until that point, only a handful of vendors including Asus, HP, and Everex were even selling low cost mini-laptops. So all computer makers would have to do to double netbook sales in 2009 is do a bit more than twice the business they did during the second half of 2008.
Otellini says demand for netbooks remained high during the first quarter of 2009, and that he expects larger thin and light laptops to do well this year as well.
This is to be expected: the high end semiconductor market is being canibalized by the cheap “good enough” atom / netbook market: https://tech-no-media.blogspot.com/2009/04/microprocessor-market-contracts.html
On the other hand I wonder why he is so optimistic for “normal” laptops, as I would not expect that market to do well during the recession.
Sales of netbooks doubling is not a difficult prediction. Predicting what percentage will have an Atom processor is.