Who knew in the late 1970s when the first laptop was being built in a small workshop that a couple of decades down these will be the most powerful tools for entertainment and work? Today the laptop industry has grown many times over and the winner is the users. No matter what your particular need for a notebook is, there is a machine with your name on it.
Even in India, laptops and netbooks are selling well. Sales are zooming. But manufacturers are producing something new every now and then not only to captivate the target customer, but also to see off any competition, especially from the rapidly growing tablet segment. Companies are attracting buyers by making today's laptops faster, more powerful, better equipped with the latest multi-core processers, large RAMs, terabytes of hard disk space and dazzling screens. Unlike the past, these monstrous configurations are well within most budgets. While there are a few premium brands that tempt only a select clientele, there are an army of machines jostling for prominence in the entry- and midlevels, that is between Rs 30,000-60,000 for laptops and Rs 15,000-25,000 for netbooks.
If it were not for the fact the laptops are becoming hotter and more powerful, the tablets would have had an easy outing in the field of personal computing. News from the US says that companies like HP and Dell have reported decline in sales, with analysts saying the tablet is one of the factors for this. But laptop and netbook makers are optimistic of regaining lost ground on the strength of better innards like APUs and multi-core processors.
