Laptops, TVs Top Shoppers Holiday Wish Lists

Nov. 5, 2007 — -- As stores gear up earlier than ever for this year's onslaught of holiday shoppers, electronics companies are racing to release the newest gadgets and tech toys to entice consumers to pick up their products and place them in their shopping carts.

But despite their efforts, according to analysts, shoppers will largely be delving into already-covered territory.

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"What people are going to buy is similar to what they've [been] buying the last few years: notebooks, flat-panel TVs and video game and video game consoles," Steve Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group, told ABCNEWS.com.

Consumers are expected to spend about $475 billion during November and December, according to the National Retail Federation, which means that every shopper will spend, on average, $619.51. According to Jupiter Research, online shoppers will spend $39 billion on the Web during the holiday season.

As TVs have gotten larger, set prices have fallen, according to Baker, and this season shoppers will buy more televisions with screen sizes larger than 50 inches than ever before.

Michael Gartenberg, the vice president and research director at Jupiter Research, agreed.

For high-definition televisions, "prices are getting about as low as they can. People will make a lot more purchases in that arena to gear up for football season -- Super Bowl in high-def," Gartenberg said, and "of course things like higher-end sound systems to go with that high-def experience."

Laptops will also surge in popularity, according to both analysts, despite no significant changes in the products from last year.

"For notebook computers, don't expect a lot of differences than what we've seen over the past years. Prices will be a bit lower. Most everything that's out there is a pretty great deal," Baker said. "Desktop sales are much slower."

Those who are using desktops are spending more for a state-of-the-art media system instead of the increasingly cheaper versions that are on the market, Baker said.

"Consumers are spending more on desktops than they have in the past. Instead of buying cheap desktops, they are buying notebooks," Baker said. "Desktops that sell best are mid-size. [The new] digital home entertainment environments are going to need a really robust PC to anchor the whole network and ... the content they're collecting. A desktop is still best solution for handling that kind of need."

Despite that, few consumers are using products, such as Apple TV and Xbox 360, which connect their computer to their television, according to research conducted by NPD. Only 8 percent of Americans own these devices, and fewer than half of those use the computer content-sharing features of these products.

"Most if not all of those products are launched with a lot of hype. Customers are still digesting the move to HD, the move to DVR, those kinds of things," Baker said. "While everybody says at some point they want to be able to move content around their house ... most of the devices aren't ready for them to be able to do that. ... The infrastructure hasn't caught up yet with what the market wants to do, but we will."

Gartenberg believes, however, that Apple will buck the trend of customers sticking with the same old, same old.

"IPods and probably anything that has an Apple logo on it," is going to sell well, Gartenberg said.

Video game consoles and their accessories will also be in hot demand this season, according to Gartenberg. Leadership at Nintendo has told reporters repeatedly that it's unlikely the company will be able to meet demand for the Wii this shopping season.

"Game consoles -- there's probably a strong demand for all of them," he said.

Baker also predicted that digital cameras and digital photo frames would be big sellers this holiday season.