The iPad isn’t even two years old yet, and already it’s making a huge impact on the consumer electronics market. The tablet has sold phenomenally well, chipping away at netbook and other PC sales in the process. Android-based tablets are slowly catching up, and will undoubtedly be fueled by the Kindle Fire, but the iPad is expected to remain dominant for at least four more years.
This is all great news for Apple and the consumers who love their products. It’s less thrilling for its competition, quite obviously. But it’s also a bummer for companies that manufacture RAM chips.
Manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in particular have lost about $14 billion in the last three years, according to Bloomberg. A big part of the reason is the popularity of the iPad and similar tablets, which use considerably fewer memory chips than laptops. Meanwhile, DRAM makers have invested heavily in their operations, expecting pre-iPad PC growth to continue.
With the holiday shopping season just getting underway and a new iPad expected to launch in March, the tablet market is far from finished growing.
The iPad isn’t the only culprit, but its 40 million units in sales have helped exacerbate trends that were already underway thanks to the slippage in growth of the Windows operating system and the economic downturn.
RAM chip photo by comedy_nose.
