With 3rd quarter sales, revenue, and earnings posted and evaluated, several surprising facts come into play. iSuppli, a market research firm, has evaluated desktop and laptop sales, and for the first time ever, laptop shipments this quarter have been above desktop shipments.
38.6 million laptops were sold last quarter, only slightly above 38.5 million desktops sold. Notebook PC shipments rose 40 percent over 3rd quarter 2007, while PC shipments fell 1.3 percent over 3rd quarter 2007.
HP held the top spot for notebook shipments and PCs (14.9m units), with Dell in 2nd place (11m units), but Acer is quickly catching up (9.7m units). Acer accounts the large increase in notebook shipments to it"s Aspire One Netbook line, a small and cheap laptop. Following Acer was Lenovo and Toshiba.
The laptop and netbook market is expected to grow even more in the current quarter due to the holidays and netbooks being even more aggressively priced. Also, several cellular networks are supposedly beginning to roll out savings plans to make netbooks even cheaper when bought with a data plan.