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."

Re:So tablets at PCs now?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a ridiculous thing to say. Defining by input device? Specifically, one which can optionally be added to any tablet? One which comes as part of a full laptop form factor in tablets like the Asus Eeepad? Idiot.

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

[eepok]

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

Re:So tablets at PCs now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we should treat game consoles, both home and portable, as PCs too. So that makes, for example, Nintendo rather significant PC vendor.~

Tablets and at the very least iPads are no PCs

[angel'o'sphere]

First of all in iPads you can not install your own software and you can only have crippled programming environments on it (some Basics e.g.)
So everything that defines a PC is impossible on an iPad.
Android might be looking better ... at least it is a "computing platform" on wich you indeed can compute and instal your own stuff and have an accessible file system.

Re:Tablets and at the very least iPads are no PCs

[spacepimp]

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.

Re:So tablets at PCs now?

[Lodragandraoidh]

'General purpose computer' is the key statement there. General purpose implies programable BY THE USER.

By that definition, barriers of entry to do IOS programming (cost to gain access to deploy your work on the device) would imply they are NOT PCs - and proprietary game consoles would also fall into that area. While programable - you can't program them in practice.

Android devices are programable by the end user (download SDK and go - no barriers to entry - in fact there is an SDK you can load on the device itself and do all your development there - not that I would want to without a bluetooth keyboard etc - but you could), so I would say they could perform all the functions of a PC out of the box.

Imagine this...

[tekrat]

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.

Re:So tablets at PCs now?

[Altus]

What slashdot believes about tablets is completely irrelevant. They talk about tablets as just scaled up phones like the size of the screen doesn't make a huge impact on the use of the device. It represents a huge change not only to the display but also to the input device. To call them the same thing is to ignore the entire interface paradigm, something sadly common among engineers actually.

Slashdot will be parroting this "tablets are only for consumption" thing forever regardless of how people are actually using them in the real world.