Shrinking iPads, Ultrabooks Will Lead To Notebook Revival: WD Boss

The Register’s Joe Fay says that storage drive maker WD has just endured a riotously chaotic period, withas the surge in the popularity of SSD-based tablets and notebooks combined with the 2011 floods in Thailand ensuring a torrid few years. WD has announced its thinnest hard drive – the UltraSlim Blue 5mm 500GB device, a Blue 7mm 1TB device, and and its 5mm hybrid devices.

However Fay notes that while WD is cautiously optimistic that the devices give the PC industry a chance to fight back after an almighty kicking from the iPad over the last few years, its job, as Rich Rutledge, SVP and general manager of its data centre storage business, puts it, is to “get storage into the hands of people who need it”. Whether those platters are spinning within a discrete device or in a cloud providers data centre is really not its concern.

And while Mr. Rutledge isn’t predicting that the notebook PC wll stage a storming comeback, it is at least on the brink of reclaiming its primacy as the primary computing device for most users with the tablet market shifting away from 10-inch tablets, and even Apple launching a 7-inch device (see: http://goo.gl/yQKml), while phones are getting bigger and Mr. Rutledge observing that: “We’re very comfortable seeing the tablet as the third or fourth device in your home[for mobile] we’re comfortable that the PC is the first one.”

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