Asus and Acer are the last two manufacturers of netbooks, but these two companies announced that they would not manufacture netbooks starting from January 1, 2013. Prior to them, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard and Dell stopped production of the netbooks. This means that the life cycle of netbook officially ended.
Back to 2009, the U.S. market research firm ABI Research was very optimistic about netbook's future, they said netbook would open a new era for PC market and predicted netbook shipments would reach 139 million units in 2010. But the end result was netbook shipments units were only 39.4 million in 2010 which is much less than the prediction. This number is still higher than the tablet PC shipment units(23 million). But in 2011 the situation changed dramatically, tablet PC shipments were 63 million units, while the netbook shipments were only 29.4 million units. In 2012. tablet PC shipments were 122 million units, netbook shipments is not worth mentioning any more.
Tablet PC is the netbook killer. Two advantages of netbook are: light and cheap. But compared to tablet PC, these two are not so obvious, tablet PC is lighter than netbook and it has touch screen as well As for price, tablet PC may be more expensive than netbook, but with the release of Nexus and Kindle Fire, the original price advantage of netbook is also gone. The manufacturers have said that they will focus on tablet PC after the discontinuation of the netbooks.
In short, regardless of the reason, the result is netbook is saying good bye to us. We will not see many netbooks on the market in the near future. If there is no market, then they will be forgotten and manufacturers will give them up.
Source : http://www.36kr.com/p/200477.html
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