Geeks everywhere are hoping Steve Jobs plays Santa Claus this year. It’s going to be “a monster holiday season for Apple,” according to a ChangeWave Research note.
ChangeWave surveyed nearly 3,000 U.S. consumers and found that demand for electronics is spiking. Twenty-six percent of respondents said they’ll spend more on consumer electronics over the next 90 day, compared to 17 percent who said the same thing last month and 23 percent this time last year in a similar survey.
Laptop purchases lead the way with 10 percent saying they’ll buy a laptop in the next 90 days. Many will buy pricy laptops, too. Thirty-six percent of planned laptop buyers said they’ll purchase a Mac—”The highest level of planned laptop buying ever in a ChangeWave survey,” says ChangeWave.
The hot Apple product in the category, of course, is the latest ultrathin MacBook Air unveiled last month. The new MacBook Air, which range in price from $1,000 to $1,600 depending on screen size and features, relies on flash storage built into the motherboard. Without hard drives, there’s more battery space and instant-on capability.
A surge in MacBook Air demand will come at the expense of Dell and Hewlett-Packard, according to ChangeWave. The percentage of buyers who said they’ll purchase a Dell or Hewlett Packard laptop slipped from last month.
“A lot of the PC manufacturers play in the $499, $599, $699 price range but have aspirations to get up in the same price range that Apple occupies and compete with Apple,” Gartner analyst Van Baker told CIO.com. “But now Apple has brought [new MacBook Airs] to market that are going to blow them away.”
And then there’s the Apple iPad, which ranges from $500 to $830. Consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers about their plans for the holiday spending spree, and the iPad came out on top.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and his team spent seven hours inside Apple retail stores performing “channel checks” on Black Friday and found that predictions about the iPad are coming true. According to Munster, Apple was selling 8.8 iPads an hour whereas Macs had a similar rate as last year, 8.2 per hour. (Apple Black Friday deals included $101 off the MacBook Air and $41 off the iPad.)
One of the keys to the MacBook Air and iPad holiday success is that their prices work together. The iPad pricing is aimed at the netbook market, and by many accounts the iPad is winning that war. Earlier this month a Retrevo survey found that the iPad is taking market share directly from the netbook.
But the iPad’s lack of a physical keyboard has been a problem for many shoppers. Now, for a couple hundred dollars more, these same shoppers can pick up an entry-level MacBook Air. “The previous MacBook Air was not that successful anywhere. It was too expensive and had too many limitations,” Baker says. “These new MacBook Airs are priced much more aggressively by comparison.”
Nevertheless, holiday demand for these Apple products boggles the mind of industry analyst Rob Enderle. In these tough economic times, will people really drop $500 on a single gift like the iPad? “The iPad is still expensive,” Enderle says.
Retrevo might have an answer for this: Consumer electronics spending as a whole is on the rise, while travel spending is taking a dip. Electronic entertainment and virtual communication appears to be trumping traditional forms. After all, why travel when you can FaceTime?
Tom Kaneshige covers Apple and Networking for CIO.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline. Email Tom at tkaneshige@cio.com.
