After the Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on September 14 that the retailer’s internal estimates reveal that the April-launched Apple iPad has cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by “as much as 50 percent”, Best Buy has now evidently retracted the statement, saying that Dunn might have overstated the facts.

The WSJ story, which quickly reverberated through the tech news world as well as the manufacturing and retail industry, irked netbook manufacturers who were obviously not happy to hear the CEO of Best Buy - one of their biggest retail distributors - rebuffing their products ahead of the holiday retail season.

As such, in a Friday statement, Best Buy said that though the iPad is cutting into the sales of laptops and netbooks, the extent to which the sales of PCs have been affected by the iPad is not as much as 50 percent, as was reported recently.

Nearly implying that he had been misquoted in the WSJ report, Dunn said in a late Friday statement: “The reports of the demise of these devices are grossly exaggerated. While they were fueled in part by a comment in The Wall Street Journal that was attributed to me, they are not an accurate depiction of what we're currently seeing.”

Further adding that Best Buy stores are witnessing some shifts in consumption patterns, “with tablet sales being an incremental opportunity,” Dunn stopped short of offering a more updated or precise percentage of iPad’s cannibalization of PCs.