Some British analysts have hypothesized that the laptop market will trump desktop sales by 2011. The group has issued a report predicting that laptop sales will expand by 16.1 percent each year while desktop sales increase by just 3.8 percent.
The group cites that 82 million portable computers and about 140 million desktops were sold in 2006. These numbers equate to a 26.3-percent growth for laptops compared to less than 2 percent for desktops.
And if you want one more shred of information of dubious utility, the same group also found that 80 percent of laptops had WiFi and 88 percent of laptop users used wireless networks at home. Joy.
Laptops set to out sell desktops [BBC Technology]
I am actually pretty surprised that this isn’t happening sooner.
As far as home use goes I think these guys are totes right, but I don’t see a move towards more laptops in the business world. The risk of Data loss and security issues are way too high to have every employee carrying a laptop. And really unless we start seeing laptops with either solid state drives or faster hard drives along with a drop in price I’d bet that more people will opt for the better performance and lower cost of a desktop.
Seems pretty obvious – people like the smaller form factor and the all-in-one simplicity. And considering the “average user” doesn’t do anything more than read email and watch videos on YouTube, the average laptop has more than enough power.
Whoops! I was wrong I guess I don’t keep up enough on my hardware, as I just read about 15k SAS drives for laptops, not surprisingly Apple doesn’t have a portable that supports SAS. I’m guessing they will in the next couple years.
I wonder how much these numbers are skewed by the fact that only recently has wireless internet and portable computing become more accessible. Look at your laptop. If you look at most laptops that were manufactured before the most recent years (letsay 2 or 3 years), you are looking at a lot of big and clunky laptops. Also look at the miniaturization of hard drives, the coming about of flash memory, and also the increase in wireless internet. Of course you can predict that laptops are going to become much more popular, especially amongst homeowners.
Also 25% growth is a lot compared to 2%, but one has to consider the sheer number of PCs that are out there already. Thus any growth in a small production market such as that of laptops is a huge jump in growth, especially with the popularity of laptop computing.