An IHS iSuppli research forecasts that despite sluggish sales, conventional notebook PCs equipped with hard disk drives (HDD) as their main storage medium are unlikely to have their market share threatened in the near term by rival notebooks.
These rival notebooks or Microsoft’s new Surface tablet PC entirely eliminate HDDs and instead employ solid state drives (SSD).
Among all notebook PCs outfitted with either HDD or SSD as their storage media, models with hard disks larger than 500 gigabytes (GB) and priced from $450 to $550 accounted for 32%, the biggest share of the market in the first quarter, according to a storage market brief from the research firm.
The second-biggest segment of 26% belonged to notebooks integrating hard disk drives larger than 320GB and priced between $350 and $450.
Only 3% of the market belonged to 128GB SSD laptops or very high-end HDD notebook PCs both priced above $900.
IHS storage systems analyst Fang Zhang said the market-share rankings show that SSD-based notebook PCs like Apple’s MacBook Air presently pose no threat to the much larger universe of HDD-based mobile PCs.
"SSD-equipped notebooks are faster, more lightweight and sport a thinner profile — some of the characteristics that make them popular and desirable to consumers — but they are also more expensive and feature less overall storage space," Fang added.
"The price of a MacBook Air with just a 64GB solid state drive can reach $999, while an HDD-based notebook PC at that price can boast significantly larger storage space."
Because the Surface tablet PC from Microsoft is set to launch in the third quarter, its appearance will be too late to have any significant negative impact on the notebook PC market in 2012, IHS believes.
Contention could conceivably arise in the form of the Pro version of the Surface, whose SSD storage of 64GB to 128GB SSD means the tablet could be used as a functional PC, even though its real bearing on the notebook market cannot be gauged until the Surface Pro is introduced sometime early next year, the research revealed.
HDD-based notebook PC space could come under fire should the price of either SSD-equipped notebooks or the Surface tablet PC fall below $700, the sweet spot for pricing currently for notebook computers as a whole.
IHS iSuppli cited an example where a price cut by Apple on the MacBook Air will likely affect the future prospects of HDD-based notebooks.
The analytics provider also noted that HDD-based notebooks have options of their own and more capacious and priced affordably, HDDs currently enjoy an advantage compared to the relatively low storage capacity of tablet PCs or the currently high price of SSD notebooks.
As such, HDD industry can continue to explore opportunities in the segments where hard disk drives count continuing support areas such as the enterprise space, security applications, external drives and the online cloud.
