Apple is one of few companies that seems to succeed with almost anything and even if the relation between iPod and iPhone is pretty close, Apple’s first mobile phone has been selling like crazy and according to some it has been the one reason the smartphone market is still doing OK. A new product category has appeared that has broken all kinds of sales records. Not surprisingly it is the netbook market that we have been covering over the last few months. These small, power efficient and most of all truly portable machines are flying off the shelves.
In the third quarter, people bought more than 5.6 million netbooks according to Gartner and DisplaySearch, while at the same time Apple “only” managed to sell 4.7 million iPhones. Even if it may sound a bit farfetched to compare netbooks to Apple’s iPhone it was actually Steve Jobs himself that claimed that iPhone can anything that a netbook can and that netbooks are not doing well.
If this development continues, perhaps Apple has to consider launching a netbook of its own, but whatever may happen there, no one can deny that that the netbook market has grown strong and the holiday shoppings will hardly make things worse.