Jobs: The iPhone is Apple's netbook

Continued...According to Gartner, netbooks made up about 5% of U.S. mobile PC sales last quarter, one to two percentage points over the same period the year before. Their strong sales, said Gartner, were due in large part to the gloomy global economic climate.

"I don't know how Apple can play there," said Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa in an interview last week. And ignoring netbooks could come back to haunt Apple. "Mini-notebooks are expanding the market, but if you're not in the mini-notebook market, your market share will definitely shrink," Kitagawa said. "People will want to save $50, $100."

Jobs disputed the idea that Apple is required to participate in the battle for netbook market share, and he disagreed with the thinking that the company had to fight off rivals by reducing its prices. "Is the downturn going to drive some of our customers to those lower segments of the marketplace and get to buy lesser products?" he asked. "I will be surprised if that happens in large numbers, and I actually think that there are still a tremendous number of customers that we don't have in the Windows world ... who would like to and can afford to buy Apple products. So we'll see what the ratio of those two things are, but we're not tremendously worried."

Apple sold a record 2.6 million Macs in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 30. Sales of its laptops, up 24% from the same time last year to 1.68 million, also set a record.

The company sold 6.9 million iPhones during the quarter, and it has sold more than 10 million of the devices since it launched the smart phone in July 2007. Apple does not break out sales of individual iPod models. End.

Source