According to Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn, the iPad has replaced as much as half of all laptop sales. Further, the little tablet is also slowing TV sales, despite the manufacturers' desperate push to shift 3-D sets.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Dunn said that sales are slowing in general on bigger gadgets, and that the hot products are the iPad, e-readers like the Kindle, and digital cameras. Instead of upgrading televisions, many people are sticking with the ones they own and spending the cash on iPads and other things they don't already have.

But the biggest surprise is that 50% figure. It's an internal, Best Buy estimate, but proves what we at Gadget Lab thought all along: that Mom and Pop would switch from cheap, unreliable and hard-to-use laptops and buy the iPad instead, an intuitive device which covers 90% of their computing needs. When the iPad gets a FaceTime camera (and hopefully a video-capable version of Skype) then the only people buying laptops will be those who need the horsepower for work.

Over on Fortune.com, Philip Elmer-DeWitt cites unrelated figures from Morgan Stanley showing that notebook sale growth has been steadily slowing. The bank's analyst takes a more cautious conclusion, stating that "tablet cannibalization" is at least partially responsible for the decline. Since Apple has been the only significant tablet maker on the market for most of the past five months, that really means "iPad cannibalization."

These crazy iPad sales are taking their bite out of Windows market-share, too, not the Mac's. Mac sales, which are mostly notebook sales anyway, continue to grow every quarter. This means that people are dropping Windows for the iPad. With the lack of any viable Windows-based iPad competitor, Microsoft should be getting very worried indeed: after all, the bulk of its business comes from bundling its OS with commodity hardware – the exact hardware that Best Buy has seen drop in sales by half.

UPDATE 4pm Pacific: Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn issued a statement saying that what he told the WSJ was "not an accurate depiction of what we're currently seeing. In fact, we see some shifts in consumption patterns, with tablet sales being an incremental opportunity."

Retailers Turn to Gadgets [WSJ]

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

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