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Best Buy CEO says Apple's iPad has halved some notebook sales

Internal estimates at Best Buy suggest the iPad has cut into notebook sales by as much as 50 percent.

The news came as part of a change to Best Buy's retail strategy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn announced Tuesday that the iPad will be coming this fall to all 1,093 Best Buy retail stores.

The Richfield, Minn., company reported a 61 percent jump in profit Tuesday, as sales shifted away from big-screen televisions and PCs toward hand-held gadgets and consumer devices. In addition to several accounting changes, increased sales of smartphones and portable computers, especially the iPad, contributed to the surprise profit.

"People are willing to disproportionately spend for these devices because they are becoming so important to their lives," said Dunn.

Earlier this week, Dunn announced he views the iPad as a "magnificent shining light" in the new category of tablets. Dunn estimated that the iPad "had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%," according to the Journal's report.

This holiday season, Best Buy hopes to capitalize even more on this shift in consumer spending by heavily promoting Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle in its stores.

However, Best Buy likely won't be the only major retailer with the iPad this holiday season. Target is rumored to be getting the iPad as early as Oct. 3. In April, a Walmart VP told BusinessWeek that the company expects to carry the iPad by the end of the year.



57 Comments

matrix07 15 Years · 1993 comments

To be fair, maybe not many people buy notebook at Best Buy?

ascii 20 Years · 5930 comments

That just shows that people were previously buying something more complicated than they really needed. This is a good thing, it means people are saving money, getting something closer to their needs. Or from a whole-of-society perspective, things just got more efficient.

addabox 23 Years · 12567 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by matrix07

To be fair, maybe not many people buy notebook at Best Buy?

It doesn't really matter. Unless you want to put forward a theory that people who buy notebooks at Best Buy are particularly susceptible to being wooed by a tablet, as much as half represents a significant defection on the part of this particular segment of buyers-- a segment that surely, at least in some ways, is representative of buyers in general.

jahonen 17 Years · 364 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii

That just shows that people were previously buying something more complicated than they really needed. This is a good thing, it means people are saving money, getting something closer to their needs. Or from a whole-of-society perspective, things just got more efficient.

Otherwise I'd maybe agree, but saving money? With an iPad vs. Netbook?

If we talk about a trasition to tablets in general. Maybe, when competing and cheaper tablets come into play. Majority will likely buy cheaper comparable tablets, which fill their needs well enough (people tend to be cheap in general). Kind of like Macbooks vs. other notebooks.

Regs, Jarkko

algr 15 Years · 28 comments

Quote:
Maybe, when competing and cheaper tablets come into play. Majority will likely buy cheaper comparable tablets, which fill their needs well enough (people tend to be cheap in general).

The long term effect of netbooks may have been to teach the "Good enough" crowd the difference between "Product can do this." and "Product can do this well enough that it is worth the effort of trying." If that is the case then cheep knockoff tablets will continue to do badly in the market as they did before the iPad.