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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."

4 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).

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      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.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  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.