Register Hardware and others are pointing out that Apple’s market share in the US jumped up to 6.6. In doing so, they took over fourth place on the list of units sold by computer makers, passing up Toshiba. Dell, HP, and Acer were in first, second, and third, respectively.
Register Hardware is also reporting that Intel will ship more mobile CPUs than desktop CPUs this year, rather than a year or two down the road as previously predicted. This is helped by the netbooks (or Small, Cheap, Computers – SCCs as they call them) such as the Asus Eee PC, and will be helped even further when Intel’s Atom platform starts rolling out this quarter.
A Red Hat Press Release mentions that Red Hat won’t be creating “a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future”, which is a big deal for laptop users who prefer to install Linux distributions from Red Hat (but there are options).
That doesn’t necessarily mean that those wanting to stick to Red Hat for the laptops are out of luck – Red Hat goes on to mention that you will still have three other options:
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (commercial)
* Fedora. (Free, sponsored by Red Hat)
* Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD) (supplied/installed by resellers, including Intel channel providers, could end up installed on low-budget netbook-style laptops)