Laptop Sales Exceed Desktop Sales Globally

For the first time ever, laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales worldwide, nearly four years sooner than anticipated.

For the first time ever, laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales on the global level, at least according to iSuppli, a market research firm.

In the third quarter of 2008, PC laptop sales increased forty percent over Q3 2007, to 38.6 million units sold. This is in contrast to desktop PCs, which dropped 1.3%, with a total of 38.5 million units sold.

HP came out the victor, having sold the most laptops at 14.9 million units sold in Q3 2008. Dell came in second, with 11 million units sold, with Acer, Lenovo, and then Toshiba coming in for the roundup.

This change, while anticipated, was not expected until 2011.

“This marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook. The notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it’s now a computer for everyman,” said principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli, Matthew Wilkins.

So what caused laptop computers to jump so rapidly?

Netbooks.

Thanks to the small, cheap, mass-selling devices, which often run Intel’s Atom processor and a Linux distro or XP, the overall laptop sales numbers have jumped tremendously.

iSuppli lumps the two together-laptop and netbook-and that certainly helped bump Acer into the number three seller in the last quarter, which experienced 45% market share growth over Q2 of the same.

Unfortunate for Apple, which is yet to release anything like a netbook, their market share dropped almost half a market share, throwing them into the position of number seven.

In fact, according to Peter Lin, the loss is due to netbooks: “When it’s competitors grow faster, it will lose market share. So I think the main reason [for the drop] is Apple has not provided a netbook yet.”

The total sale of PC worldwide rose 15.4% in Q3 2007, a total of 79 million PCs. Considering this, iSuppli changed it’s 2008 number from 12.5% to a full 13%, though they expect the number to drop to 4.3% in 2009, due to hard economic times.