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Apple Now the Top PC Vendor, For Some Values of PC

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-personal-does-it-compute dept.

tsamsoniw writes "While research companies including IDC and Gartner deemed HP the PC leader for Q4 2012, Canalys has a different perspective. The analyst firm has declared Apple the top PC vendor for the past quarter, thanks in part to the booming success of the iPad and the iPad mini. By Canalys's reckoning, Amazon, too, now beats out the likes of Acer and Asus as leading PC vendors, having shipped 4.6 million Kindles in Q4."

7 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. So tablets at PCs now? by erotic_pie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Do tablets really count as a "PC"? If that's the case we might as well start considering smart phones PCs, since a modern tablet is basically just a scaled up smart phone.

    1. Re:So tablets at PCs now? by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Informative

      Do tablets really count as a "PC"?

      Well, let's see .. it has a CPU, memory, can do input, processing, and output (the Von Neumann definition). It's capable of doing Turing complete things, and writing code written for it.

      It's personal, and it meets all of the definitions of computer.

      we might as well start considering smart phones PCs, since a modern tablet is basically just a scaled up smart phone.

      By any meaningful definition, a modern smart phone is more of a computer than what we had 20 years ago -- by a huge factor.

      So, tell us, what aspects of a phone or tablet make it not a computer in your mind? They'll both run rings around an old 486.

      We're no longer talking about things which are hardware specific to a task, and you could easily port any programming language to that platform. The absence of a physical keyboard or mouse don't make you not a computer (because they used to have neither).

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:So tablets at PCs now? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

      The personal in PC means the device was designed primarily to be used by one user at a time.

      No, it means the device was intended to be owned by people, which was a change from when computers were big giant things in dedicated rooms nobody ever went near and no individual could ever hope to own.

      My 486 Linux box could run more than one user back in 1993 -- was it not a "Personal Computer"? It was mine, it was a computer. Or did it magically become a server instead of a PC?

      The number of intended users is not now, and never has been, part of the definition of "personal" in PC.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:So tablets at PCs now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      What about NES, SNES, various Gameboys, N64, GameCube, DS?

    4. Re:So tablets at PCs now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      OK.

      From Wikipedia:

      SNES - 49m
      Gameboy - 118m
      Nintendo 64 - 33m
      GameCube - 22m

      Wii - 99m
      Nintendo DS - 153m

      Total for Nintendo - 474 million.

      iPad - 84 million
      iPhone - 250 million
      iPod Touch - 46 million

      Total for Apple - 380 million.

      Now, should we praise Nintendo as one of the leaders in PC market?

    5. Re:So tablets at PCs now? by jedidiah · · Score: 2, Informative

      > There is nothing that could be done on an original IBM PC that cannot be done on tablets and smartphones today.

      The P in PC stands for personal. That means that you can do whatever you like with it. It is a GENERAL PURPOSE device IN YOUR OWN CONTROL.

      You can write the next killer app for the PC and you don't have to worry about anyone getting in your way. You don't have to worry about your company's IT department or Apple corp because you are in control.

      That's not the model for tablets.

      Tablets are more like game consoles.

      It's not a PC because you aren't free to create your own code or the next visicalc or netscape.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  2. Re:Let's just set an official category definition. by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 3, Informative

    Considering you can do SSH which gives you access to vim, you can do anything you're happy to do in Vim. There's Pythonista too for writing Python.