IT hack Paul Thurrott has had a pop at those who say that the iPad is killing off the netbook. The claim started when Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty's proprietary research shows the impact of the iPad and other tablets on the broader gadget market, starting with netbooks. As her chart shows, sales growth of these low-cost, low-powered computing devices peaked last summer at an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate. It fell off a cliff in January and of course the iPad was credited with the drop.

However Thurrott points out that this happened before the iPad. Netbook sales peaked, way before the iPad. Before, in fact, we knew what an iPad was, Thurrott pointed out. He said that other figures from the beancounters at IDC show that netbook unit sales are still on the way up but it has been slowed because of stronger-than-expected sales of larger, full-featured Windows 7 notebooks.

Microsoft's data—based on unit sales for its operating systems in the first quarter—indicate that laptops in the $550 to $850 range grew faster than the 35 per cent year-over-year growth in overall Windows unit sales to consumers. Netbook sales, meanwhile, grew less than 20 per cent, stabilizing at around 12 per cent to 18 per cent of the consumer market in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

IDC also says that "the current slowdown is not because of the iPad, it is simply a combination of seasonality and the law of big numbers" and that the company "doen't expect much in the way of iPads stealing way sales from netbooks."