Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Dunn said that sales are slowing in general on bigger gadgets, and that the hot products are the iPad, e-readers like the Kindle, and digital cameras. Instead of upgrading televisions, many people are sticking with the ones they own and spending the cash on iPads and other things they don’t already have.
But the biggest surprise is that 50% figure. It’s an internal, Best Buy estimate, but proves what we at Gadget Lab thought all along: that Mom and Pop would switch from cheap, unreliable and hard-to-use laptops and buy the iPad instead, an intuitive device which covers 90% of their computing needs. When the iPad gets a FaceTime camera (and hopefully a video-capable version of Skype) then the only people buying laptops will be those who need the horsepower for work.
Best Buy: iPad replaced half of laptop sales
Posted on Saturday, September 18 2010 @ 0:21 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn claims Apple's iPad has cannibalized around half of all laptop sales, while slowing TV sales as well: