The booming sales of laptops reflect falling prices and improvements in features, as much as image, Semico President Jim Feldhan said. In the past, laptops were generally relegated to being the second computer for a consumer or an employee. The laptops did the mobile computing, but they did it with concessions. They offered less storage space on their hard drives, less processing power, memory and slower modems. Feldhan and other analysts say today's laptops compare much more favorably with their desktop cousins.
Laptops still cost more than desktop units, but they have closed some of the gap.
The price of flat screens in particular has fallen. And with the bigger, more affordable screens, the portable computers are beginning to compete with the desktop versions. When notebooks offered a 14.1-inch screen, it started to get into that type of rivalry. A 15.1-inch notebook monitor has 15.1 inches of viewable area. The differences are getting smaller.