HP Surpasses Apple in PC Sales Thanks to iPad Shipment Dip
Canalys has been the only major market research firm that includes tablet shipments in overall PC shipments, which resulted in Apple gaining the top spot in the fourth quarter of last year. But iPad sales in Q1 were not good enough to stay ahead of HP.
According to Canalys, a drop of iPad shipments from 15.8 million to 11.8 million between Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 allowed HP to surpass Apple again by approximately 40,000 units. Canalys noted that tablets showed about 200 percent annual growth in Q1, but esktops and notebooks were climbing as well. The only category that lost was the netbook, which was down 34 percent year over year. The total PC client market, including tablets, was 107 million units in Q1 (up 21 percent from Q1 2011), Canalys said.
"Most of the leading PC vendors have done a reasonable job of offsetting the declines in their netbook shipments over the past year with increased pad business," said Canalys analyst Tom Evans. "Samsung and Lenovo are two that stand out in terms of substantially increasing overall volume, though Asus has performed well too. The challenge is breaking out into the really big volumes to challenge the leaders – Apple and Amazon. So far, only Samsung has shown it can routinely ship more than a million pads a quarter."
Canalys said that tablets make up about 19 percent of all client PC shipments. Netbooks are down to 5 percent.
Secondly, who the duck is so stupid to count tablets as PC's? Give me a break.
Well, technically, some tablets exist that run Windows and can correctly be called a PC because they have a laptop X86 CPU in them. They're a little pricey and heavy, but they are tablets.
I also have to wonder if the Windows 8 ARM/Medfield tablets will count as PCs or not. I think that they should.
Actually, this is false. A "PC" is a personal computer. SO, as much as Apple wants to separate themselves from the term "PC", they can't. Unless they drop their iMacs, Macbooks, Mac Pros, and Mac Minis... then they'll be left with an iPad. I think there's a certain level of usefulness that must be met before you classify a device as a "computer". The iPad can take the PPOS acronym.
Actually a PC is a computer running Windows and is a marketing term of M$'s. Yes, it's an abbreviation for Personal Computer, but it belongs to M$ and is actually an umbrella term for computers running Windows. Look it up if you must. Even Apple acknowledges this.
Actually you're wrong. The term PC has been used long before Windows was released and Microsoft was founded. Also Microsoft doesn't own the trademark PC or personal computer and to my knowledge no one owns it.
Apple used the perm PC to try to differentiate itself from Windows without ever having to mention the name Windows in their ads.
However, Apple has made a point of telling everyone in world-wide campaigns that their computers are NOT PCs, they are Macs, so, as pretty much everyone has said, they don't make PCs. Never mind that they are made exactly like PCs, except for the proprietary chips that prevent you from running OS X on anything but Apple products (unless you hack it).
I'll tell you the truth here; I think Apple is paying some people in the media to hype their products and try to make them look more popular than they are. I think that some of the media types that got hooked on Macs when they were better suited for graphics related media are such fanboys they will lie to pump up their favorite product. I think the confusion about tablets being PCs is intentional, not just stupidity.
I'll tell you this, too; it pisses me off, it makes me feel more anti-Apple than I already do, and more scornful of media types in general. They are willfully stupid people, and these days not only are they clueless, but they can't even spell, spell-check, or use a minimal level of grammar quality.
Not all of them are willfully stupid (that means they choose to be stupid, for those not familiar with the phrase) of course, but almost all of them don't care, including the ones in Tomshardware. How do I know? Because they never call out the bad ones, that's how. They seem to have some kind of "code amongst thieves" for journalism.
Modern journalists, especially those in television, are hand-in-hand with politicians responsible for the "dumbing down" effect on the world. They both intentionally report hazy and incorrect information to paint emotion-driven stories for sensationalist purposes. Politicians do it so you'll vote for the most popular, not the best, and journalists do it because they can, and because it's far easier than finding the real facts. "That's what sells". Bull.
The average modern journalist is no better than the ones that wrote stories about cowboys and Indians in the 1800's. They are pulp-fiction writers that pass off their excrement as factual stories. Actually, they aren't even that close to most pulp-fiction writers, who do know how to spell.
I'm sick of this crap. Can you tell?
First, they count iPad's as PCs, which is ridiculous (as many posts said already) for all the reasons in the world...
Then, they keep quiet about the most important event of the day, which is Samsung's next Galaxy Phone, launching in London. If this were an Apple event, they would have built anticipation for at least a month in advance with 3-4 "rumor" articles/day.
That's why I just visit this site nowadays to get my daily fun by poking at the News' comments and to give help to people in need of advice on the Questions forums. I get my real news elsewhere.
A Mac is a personal computer. A phone won't be classed as one until it approaches the kind of flexibility one associates with owning a desktop or laptop machine. Tablets... blur the line. In the end, it's probably more to do with what you as an individual terms a PC, but to many it's a stigma. To me, a PC is a device designed to give you the freedom to perform any number of different tasks from productivity to multimedia to purchasing. Sure, a phone can do all these, but not to the same level. That's my personal opinion and no doubt differs to those of others here.
It is completely clear that that is happening.