Trouble on horizon for ‘white box’ PC makers

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Apple might be the flavor of the moment in the consumer PC world, but hundreds of thousands of customers every year continue to choose plain vanilla “white box” PCs. Those purchases go on as Hewlett-Packard and Dell churn out millions of name-brand PCs every quarter, Acer enjoys double- and triple-digit growth rates, and Apple continues to be the darling of the hardware business.

But the growing popularity of notebook PCs spells big trouble for the future of white-box manufacturing. The “white-book” market has dwindled from an already-small 8.5 percent share to a 5.6 percent share between 2003 and 2006. That comes while notebooks have, over the same period of time, become the dominant PC form factor for top vendors Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer, accounting for two-thirds of consumer PC sales.

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