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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."
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.
the worst influence and bully in the tech industry hits the already much abused PC form factor.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Apple is now the top politically correct vendor. That must be because they censor apps.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
McDonalds is the top PC vendor, if you include Big Macs.
Everyone knows Apple only sells Macs, not PCs.
I'll start. Here's how I use the words:
Personal Devices (Very limited, proprietary software)
-- Feature Phone
-- GPS Device
Personal Computing Devices (Limited, Consumption-based OSes, optional other-source software)
-- Tablets
-- Smartphones
Personal Computers (Traditional OSes like Windows, Linux, etc.; uses applications not truncated "apps")
-- Laptops/Notebooks
-- Netbooks
-- Desktop Computers
In what universe does someone consider an iPad to be a personal computer?
Well, the Slashdot universe, for one. Well, at least they consider Android tablets and phones to be "Personal Computers"; so it should follow for (at least jailbroken) iPads/iPhones, too.
The "tablet is not a PC" crowd will attack. And then the "tablet is a PC" crowd will counter-attack. Out of nowhere "some tablet are PC" crowd will join, but haven't shown their alliance. The "Apple is evil" along with the "Android/Chrome OS FTW" groups will join forces to fight everybody. Unfortunately, the hills may not protect us from the "Win8 will kill everyone".
Calling a tablet something other than a PC, was a move to lock out/down the platform. You can;'t install your own software on an iPad because Apple makes more money this way. If they let you you would have the ability to install apps. Not being able to do this wouldn't fly on a PC. sSo the post PC thing was grandstanding to let Apple control the user. If it was a PC you'd have rights, same goes for a smartphone. Yet here we are on Slashdot being led by the nose and missing the bigger issue. I thought you guys were better than this..It is a sad day indeed.
The Mac existed as a "Personal Computer" for several years before it was capable of compiling its own programs but nobody had any trouble calling it a "PC".
We counted Apple IIs and Commodore 64s as PCs. These new systems are far more powerful and capable, why not call them PCs too?
Taking the Apple click-bait out of the equation, this sounds about right from a broad view: Tablets and "smartphones" as PCs from a decade ago or-so in terms of computing power with funny form-factors and interfaces.
To all the apparent fanboys who think that dedicated media consumption devices should be PCs just because they perform better than something from two decades ago, there is one very obvious distinction that you are all blatantly but unintentionally pointing out:
All of these devices were still the cutting edge technology of their time, especially as far as personal productivity and capability was concerned!
Sure the very original mac couldn't compile its own code. But it also beat the hell out of a typewriter.
And the iPad's A# processors destroy the original Cyrix, 3/486, Pentiums what have you! I'm surprised we even bothered with those processors at all, pfft!
Now crawl out of the reality-distortion fanboy bubble and look at today and what do you see? These devices are far from forefront of doing anything productive, have just good-enough specs for media consumption, and are a pain to use even if you look at the most modest metrics of productivity such as responding (no, not just reading) an email, or working with a spreadsheet.
Yes, personal computers did used mean something. And I believe they still should.
Funny I can ssh and code on my iPad just fine without even jailbreaking.... also my iPhone. So sorry that "consumption" category is bullshit.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Dude; Did you ever see Mario Paint for the Super Nintendo? This was a 16-bit PRODUCTIVITY APPLICATION. It turned a "game console" into a paint program and it was was even capable of doing animation. So, yes, a game console *is* a PC -- I mean, you do realize that in Japan, the Nintendo was sold as the Famicom, and even came with a keyboard, right?????
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Nonsense. My jailbroke(en ??) iPad does more, much more than my first "personal computer" - a Morrow MicroDecision running CP/M. The developer's license is a bit of a non-sequitor. Computers have required specific development software / hardware bits for ages.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Take your smartphone, tablet, kindle, whatever... that device you don't consider to a be a "PC". Now stick it in a Time Machine and send it back to 1985. Show it to the editors of BYTE Magazine and ask them if it's a personal computer or not. They will tell you that it is.
Furthermore, your "device" in 1985 would be the most powerful PC there is, and actually qualify as a supercomputer, and be restricted from export from the USA because it would qualify as a threat to national security. Think about that.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
WTF is up with many tablets not having an SD slot?
Probably tablet makers not wanting to pay their tithe to Microsoft for the use of its file system patents. Windows XP can't write to any file system that isn't FAT or NTFS. Windows Vista and later can write to UDF, but SDXC mandates Microsoft's ExFAT, not UDF.
"Can run software applications, and is not specialized to run one particular category of software" is probably a better definition - and both tablets and smartphones qualify. iOS and Android are both Unix variants, if you recall.
An iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad is specialized to refuse to run video games including realistic violence, roulette (whether chat or Russian), satire of an identifiable organization, card counting apps, apps that let the user log locations of seen Wi-Fi hotspots, apps that "download code in any way or form" such as a game maker, web browsers that implement HTML features that Apple has left out of Safari, launcher replacements, and more.
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.
Composing a complex word or excel document. Serious coding. photo retouching. Any that requires multiple programs to be side by side.
It's not so much that they can't be done, it's that it's impractical and cumbersome to do for an extensive period of time. And if you're going to carry around a keyboard and mouse to do "real work" with the tablet, it kind of defeats part of the reason of having a very portable all-in-one computer.
When the computer that you carry around in your pocket is not a "Personal Computer", but the computer whose permanent home is on the floor, it's called a "Personal Computer"???
Very odd!
I think John Gruber's take on David Pogue's Surface review nails it:
DP: "Everybody knows what a tablet is, right? It's a black touch-screen slab, like an iPad or an Android tablet. It doesn't run real Windows or Mac software -- it runs much simpler apps. It's not a real computer."
JG: "That's the same shortsighted opinion that command-line DOS advocates had of the Mac in the '80s. Anyone who thinks OS X and Windows PCs are "real" computers and that the iPad (and Android tablets) are anything less just isn't getting it."
My dad was one of those people. Back then (mid/late 80s) "computer" meant "I can write programs on it." Every computer today looks like the Macintosh did back then: windows, icons, WYSIWYG documents, etc. "Computer" came to mean "something you can use to create documents on and play games."
Remember, once upon a time, what we call "personal computers" themselves weren't considered "real" computers at all by those who were using "computers" (i.e, big iron in schools and businesses) at the time.
Q: Who's the #1 mainframe vendor today?
A: Who cares?
So just as "computer" once meant one thing and now refers to what we call PCs, the definition of "PC" will change over time too. It's a continuum, not black and white. Does a "PC" become not a PC when you take its keyboard off? Does a "tablet" become a "PC" when you add a keyboard? Is an iPad you can hold in one hand less personal, or less of a computer, than an old Kaypro luggable?
I think I'll write a children's book: The Velveteen iPad (or How Tablets Become Real).
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's absurdly irrelevant. What if someone cuts your ethernet cable on your PC? What will you ssh to then? OH NO.
I can still write code on my iPad without SSHing somewhere. I just can't compile it without some special work.
But that's no different from a windows PC that you buy at the shop. It doesn't come with a compiler built in. These are all irrelevant distractions from the point.