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

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."

Comments

Re:Let's just set an official category definition.

[cbhacking]

You can run an ssh server on your iPad just fine without jailbreaking? Fascinating. After you ssh into it, do you prefer to start vim or emacs for your coding? Do you compile using gcc or clang? How good are its manpages? What shell do you use? Do you prefer to elevate privileges using su or sudo? If you ssh in from an unrecognized terminal, how difficult is it to install new terminfo? How many users can ssh into your iPad at once? If you wanted to install Python for iOS on your iPad, what command would you enter over ssh to do so? After doing so, could you demonstrate for me a Python script that checks the iPad's entire storage for any software which hasn't been started in over six months and offers to uninstall it?

Or, did you completely miss the point about 'uses applications not truncated "apps"'? While I dislike the terminology, that right there really is one of the defining differences between PCs and whatever category you want to put iPads in. Software for iOS is crippled. Yes, you can run an ssh client on your iPad and consume the services of a server (or any real PC, even a Windows one). You can even use the iPad to produce stuff on that server or real PC. But that doesn't make the iPad into a PC. Consumption-based doesn't mean it can't be used to produce anything, merely that the intended uses of the OS are not focused on productivity. This is the exact opposite of PCs, which at their inception could be used for very little except productivity.

The other difference, of course, is the degree of control. A Windows machine does not come with an ssh server, but if I want to install one I can. Ubuntu doesn't allow logging in as root by default, but if I want to change this, I can. If I buy a Windows PC but then decide I'd rather have it be a Linux PC, that's as simple as re-installing the OS. If I buy a machine with Ubuntu and decide that its graphical user interface is crap, I can remove Unity and install FVWM and have it start that after login instead. None of these are possible on an iPad. Sure, you can install software... if it's Apple-approved, content to run in a sandbox with restrictions that you can't control, and doesn't require mucking with the system configuration. Even the relatively incompatible Macs of the 90s didn't actively prevent you from installing your own OS on them... marketing aside, they were PCs. iPads simply are not, though.