Has the Netbook Market Peaked? IDC Thinks So (as does Intel)

Posted 04/27/2010 at 5:06am | by Paul Lilly

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You knew the run would have to stop at some point. After all, as explosive as the netbook market has been in the past couple of years, the segment can't continue to grow forever. But has the netbook craze peaked?

IDC believes it has and later this week will release figures that back this claim, CNet reports. The figures will show a decline in Atom processor shipments as a percentage of Intel mobile chips, which is a 180 from before when Atom chips continued to swallow larger percentages of mobile chip shipments every quarter.

"Atom in netbooks is plateauing," Sane Rau, an analyst at IDC, said in a phone interview with CNet. "With the market recovery, I think end users are going to look for more value than just low-cost devices. This is an opportunity for higher-end mobile PCs, for example, that have better performance, bigger screens, bigger hard drives."

Citing figures to be published later this week, Rau says that Atom processors as a percentage of Intel mobile chips fell to 20.3 percent compared in the first quarter of this year, compared with 24.3 percent in th fourth quarter of last year and 23.5 percent in the third quarter.