Non-Apple Ultra-thin Notebook Vendors Unlikely To Surpass Apple’s MacBook Air In 2012

Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien reports that while many notebook brand vendors have been aggressively investing resources into the development of notebook products that feature ultra-thin design (Ultrabook) as well as support of Windows 8 and touchscreens, these vendors are still unlikely to be able to compete against Apple.

Ms. Chien notes that Apple’s ultra-thin MacBook series products (MacBook Air) already account for 50% of global ultra-thin design notebook shipments, with MacBook Air shipments in the fourth quarter expected to surpass the combined shipments of non-Apple notebook brand vendors’ Ultrabook and ultra-like notebook products.

She observes that in June, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) shipment weakness resulted in global top-six brand vendors achieving a meagre on-month growth of 2% combined; although the top-three notebook ODMs are expected to have achieve 21% on-month growth in June shipments after experiencing a weak April and May.

However Microsoft’s announcement of a $14.99 Windows 8 upgrade plan on June 2 that was intended to boost notebook demand didn;t achieve a result as good as the company originally expected, says Chien, whi projects that the top-six PC brand vendors’ notebook shipments in the second quarter are only expected to increase 1.3% sequentially, lower than the average performance of 6-8% in the previous years.

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