Not one question from Berenbaum and Covello believes I pads are the greatest thing since sliced bread
James Covello – Goldman Sachs
I mean, you are right. These are really, really difficult things to kind of triangulate around, but I guess the thing I struggle with is overall consumer spending on tech was pretty good. I mean, smartphones were good in the third quarter; tablets were good in the third quarter both relative to original expectations. And so, it’s just hard to kind of reconcile that notebooks which had been really robust for an extended period, suddenly there was weakness in that one segment in the markets where the iPad was launched and that was all just kind of attributed to consumer weakness even though there was strength in other segments in consumer.
Paul Otellini
Remember, we had a record, all-time record for mobile microprocessors in this quarter. So, I have a hard time using the word weak in front of that.
James Covello – Goldman Sachs
I guess I should have said weak or relative to expectations, you are right.
Stacy Smith
Okay, that’s fair. In one key changes, we saw some economic uncertainty that hit in mature markets. Our demand I believe coincided much more with that tablet cannibalization here. We have seen in the past that consumers act pretty quickly and then they come back because of the importance of this technology in their lives. We saw that in 2009. So, I believe it has much more to do with just economic uncertainty than tablet cannibalization. As Paul said, the margin there probably is some cannibalization, and overtime we will know if it plays out like netbooks and it ends up being additive to the market in which case it ends up being a very good thing for us, because anything that expands that market for devices that compute is something we can sell into and we plan to have the best products in that space.
James Covello – Goldman Sachs
Great. Thank you so much. |
