Another one bites the dust

Acer Halves Tablet Forecast
[Via Daring Fireball]

Bloomberg:

Acer Inc., the Taiwanese PC maker battling excess inventory and a share-price slump, more than halved its tablet forecast because of concerns a weaker European economy may damp demand.

Tablet shipments will be about 2.5 million to 3 million units this year, President Jim Wong said in Taipei today. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer JT Wang as recently as May 10 forecast selling 7 million of the devices, which compete with Apple Inc.’s iPad and Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Tab.

Via Dare Obasanjo, who tweets:

Acer finds out what I’ve always said, there isn’t a tablet market, there’s an iPad market.

[More]

Competing with Apple iPads is not so easy. Samsung may be able to hang on because it was the first “competitor” although that may have happened through back door ‘technology transfer’ fromApple, since Samsung is a major partner in the manufacture of each iPad.

The Macbook Air – the stealth fighter of the PC world

by Travis Isaacs

Sustained growth of MacBook Air may provide Apple $3.0B-per-year opportunity
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple is poised to realize a $3.0 billion opportunity with its line of MacBook Air computers as “break-out” growth of the portables continues, according to one analyst.

[More]

Non-Air Macbook sales were down about 10%, in line with the rest of the PC market. But Macbook Air sales were up.

Yet hardly anyone really notices them. And nobody has really tried to produce a competitor.

With the iCloud and other approaches, having a large PC with a disk drive will not be needed as much. In a post-PC world, something like the MacBook Air – a truly portable laptop with the low weight and battery life of a tablet will become more ubiquitous.

Netbooks do not have the weight or battery advantages of the Air – having a disk drive and a hard drive makes that a reality. The lightest netbooks cost as much as a MacBook, so where is the advantage?

I think that MacBook Airs will become the laptop of choice in a mobile society. Sure, some people will need a Pro, but what do the regular laptops have to offer that a cloud-enabled Air does not?