An analyst firm has found out that more than 70 per cent of customers who were thinking about buying an iPad opted for a netbook or a notebook instead.

Retrevo.com, a consumer electronics shopping and review site made a study of online individuals. The sample size was over 1,000 distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States. Most responses have a confidence interval of 4 per cent at a 95 per cent confidence level. They asked people if they were thinking of buying a netbook, notebook or iPad.  At the time of investigating 78 per cent were thinking of one of Jobs' Mobs' toys.

However they came to buy the shiny gizmo they found that the keyboardless netbook was pointless and opted for a netbook with a keyboard instead.  Only 30 per cent actually went and bought a Jobs's Mob iPad as they originally intended. Either the sales people for netbooks are better than Apple's geniuses, or there is a wave of more discerning buyers out there.