Acer in 2009: Overtaking Dell and the Budget Notebooks That Did It

How Acer got to second

The 2008 recession hit business PC purchasing hard, and Dell, which sold mostly to businesses through direct orders, felt it more than anyone. Acer sold mostly to consumers through retail shelves and had bet heavily on two products the recession favoured: netbooks, which Acer sold in enormous numbers, and 15.6 inch notebooks priced under 500 dollars with just enough specification to feel like a real computer. Shipment figures from the main research firms showed Acer passing Dell in the third quarter of 2009, and this site's post reported the milestone. It was the high point of the netbook era in corporate terms.

The numbers behind the headline were reported by the research firm iSuppli and carried by InformationWeek in December 2009: Acer shipped 10.7 million PCs in the third quarter of 2009, up 16.6 percent on a year earlier, while Dell shipped 10.3 million, down 5.9 percent. That put Acer on 13.4 percent of the world market and Dell on 12.9 percent. Acer had been sixth in 2003. Computerworld's summary of iSuppli's full-year figures in March 2010 showed how narrow the margin was: over the whole of 2009 Dell held second by two tenths of a point, 12.9 percent to Acer's 12.7 percent, with HP first on 19.7 percent. Notebooks made up nearly 80 percent of Acer's shipments that year.

The notebooks that did it

The reviews on this site were fair rather than glowing: the machines were slow at anything demanding, the screens were dim with narrow viewing angles, and the plastics creaked. They were also astonishingly cheap for what they did, and for a family that needed a computer for homework, email and video, they were the sensible buy. That is the whole story of Acer's 2009: adequate laptops at prices nobody else matched, rather than better ones.

What happened next: the netbook era ends

The netbook as a category began in 2007, when a Taiwanese rival shipped a 7 inch machine weighing about 0.9 kg with a solid-state drive and a cut-down Linux desktop. Acer and others followed within a year, and by 2009 InformationWeek could describe netbooks as mini-laptops selling for as little as 300 dollars and the fastest-growing part of the PC market during the recession. The category then converged with ordinary small laptops: buyers wanted Windows rather than Linux, the operating system that replaced Windows XP needed more memory and storage, and each step pushed netbook prices and specifications toward the cheap 15.6 inch notebooks they were meant to undercut.

Tablets took the casual buyer from 2011. In September 2012 Acer and two other makers announced they would stop building 10 inch netbooks, and by the end of that year the word had all but left the shops. The gap they left was filled a couple of years later by Chromebooks, which sold in the same price band to the same buyers and, by 2014, had become some of the best-selling laptops in the market. Acer still sells Chromebooks, so in one sense it kept the customers even as it lost the category.

The corporate consequences took a little longer. Acer had built its whole strategy on volume at the low end, and when buying habits shifted it had nowhere to go. In November 2013 both the chairman and the president resigned over the company's financial performance, and a new chief executive took over at the start of 2014. Lenovo, growing fast in China and through acquisitions, moved past everyone to take first place in 2013. Dell recovered as business spending returned. Acer restructured, then re-emerged with a gaming brand, Predator, and strong positions in Chromebooks and education machines. As of 2024 it was the sixth-largest PC maker by unit sales, which is a long way from second and still a very large business.

A 2009 budget laptop against a 2026 one

The Aspire 5517 and 5542 were the cheapest full-size laptops on the shelf in 2009. The table compares what a buyer expected then with what the same kind of buyer expects from an inexpensive 15.6 inch laptop today. The 2009 column comes from this site's original coverage; the 2026 column describes the common configuration in the same price band, allowing for inflation.

Every row moved in the buyer's favour, and one row explains most of the others: the switch from a spinning hard drive to a solid-state drive did more for how a cheap laptop feels than any processor upgrade.

Reading an old laptop review today

A 2009 verdict that a machine was slow tells you nothing about a 2026 machine, but the reasons given, dim screens, creaking plastics, a drive that thrashed, are the same failure points a cheap laptop can have today. Three habits make an old review worth the time.

• Read the complaints, skip the benchmarks. Benchmark scores go stale within two product cycles. Complaints about build, screen and noise describe design trade-offs that recur at every price point.
• Check what the price bought. A 2009 laptop at 450 dollars sat at the very bottom of the market; the same nominal price sits mid-market for a used machine today and near the bottom for a new one. Adjust before comparing.
• Notice what the reviewer did not mention. Battery life and weight barely came up in 2009 budget reviews because everyone expected them to be poor. Their absence tells you the assumptions of the time.

Reading the league table

• Unit share rewards volume at the low end; it says little about profit. Acer's second place came with thin margins.
• Rankings swing with who is buying. Consumer booms lift retail brands; business recoveries lift direct sellers.
• The maker who owns the category that is about to shrink looks strongest right before it does. Netbooks in 2009 are the example.

This is part of the archive of consumer tech news. Acer's rise rode the netbook boom, and the modern small laptop guide explains what replaced it. The same year's manufacturing shake-up is in the LG Mexico plants story, and the high end of 2009 in the 18 inch Qosmio retrospective.