Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
Summary: There are many objections to the argument that tablets should be counted as a kind of PC. I dismiss five of them.
Market research firm Canalys made a gutsy move today: it became the first major market tracker to start lumping consumer tablets like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab together with other PCs.
This has major implications. First, doing so vaults Apple into third place globally in Q4 among PC vendors, behind HP and Acer, according to Canalys. By contrast, Gartner and IDC, who are better-known for tracking the PC market (and presumably thus more conservative in their methodology), do not (yet) count iPads as PCs.
Also, calling a tablet a PC means that we are acknowledging a tablet is a real computer, not a dismissing it as some limited-use mobile device.
At the risk of wading into a 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' type of debate, let's examine the arguments against counting tablets as PCs in order to knock them down. Shall we begin?
1) "There's no [physical] keyboard." Yes, but as BetaNews' Joe Wilcox points out, IDC counts Windows tablets as PCs, even though a large percentage of them are stylus/finger input only.
2) "Tablets suck for doing real work like type long memos or build slide decks." I know plenty of businesspeople, especially managers, who spend the majority of their time in Outlook or Lotus Notes, sending and receiving e-mails. Are they not doing *real* work? Does that mean doing e-mail on a tablet is suddenly not real work? What about pulling up sales leads or mining deep Business Intelligence data via rich analytical dashboards? Sounds like real work to me. These are all business tasks at which tablets like the iPad already excel.
3) "Canalys is just doing the bidding of Steve Jobs and other Apple fanboys." Actually, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in lumping iPads with its MacBooks or iMacs, judging by its recent fiscal Q1 earnings call. Nowhere does COO Tim Cook refer to iPads as PCs or computers. In fact, Cook implies that Apple internally sees iPads as being different beasts than Macs: "The iPad teams are building the best iPad for the future, and the Mac teams are building the best Mac, and I can tell you that both groups believe that they can continue to grow and do great stuff, and I believe that."
4) "Neither iOS nor Android are full-fledged operating systems." By what metric? Lines of code? Android has 12 million lines of code. Windows NT 3.51 had 10.1 million. Do we retroactively declare that those servers running NT 3.51 weren't "real" computers? Or do we base this on the fact these iOS and Android run apps, not applications? Well, Mac OS X now has its own App Store. Or is it because iOS and Android run on ARM chips, not Intel? Well, then let's start thinking of a new category to put Windows in after Microsoft ports it successfully over to ARM.
5) "Tablets aren't as powerful as PCs." Actually, ARM's single-core CPUs last year were already more powerful than their Intel Atom counterparts, according to chip researcher, The Linley Group. The latest dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs due to arrive in tablets this year should pull ahead of Atom even more, especially when bolstered by powerful graphics such as Nvidia. Indeed, the graphics chip in the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset, the 8-core ULP GeForce GPU, supports 1080p video output on up to 2 simultaneous displays (1920x1080 resolution). That's far better than any laptop I've ever owned.
Perhaps we should just let Canalys' analyst Daryl Chiam, who made the call to redefine tablets as PCs, speak. "Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync," said Chiam. "With screen sizes of seven inches or above, ample processing power, and a growing number of applications, pads offer a computing experience comparable to netbooks. They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist."
"Each new product category typically causes a significant shift in market shares," he continued. "Apple is benefiting from pads, just as Acer, Samsung and Asus previously did with netbooks. The PC industry has always evolved this way, starting when Toshiba and Compaq rode high on the original notebook wave."
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Do you buy the argument that tablets should be lumped together with PCs?
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Talkback
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
The personal computer landscape is going to change drastically in the next 3-5 years. This of course will continue to change the Internet landscape and business environment. Just as the Apple ][, the IBM PC, the Macintosh, and Palm Pilot were disruptive technology in their times, as will be the iPad. It already has proven to be.
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
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RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
Well duh, the writer didn't even mention desktops once in his write up.
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
And after that you can't move it to where you need it to be, because it's got dangly bits. It's fine for a static shared workstation, where anybody can sit in a vacant cube and use it - but that's not personal. It's completely inferior to a real Personal Computer, which goes with the person to where he need to compute. Concur. The Desktop is not a PC.
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
What the author is exposing is that they are PCs. That is "Personal Computers", computers owned by individuals and competing for the mind share and wallet with Windows- and Mac-compatible systems.
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
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Tablet form factor is what people have been *dreaming* of all along
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
That said, though there may be some unclear cases, a USEFUL definition of 'X' (whatever X might be) will track our concepts, such that those things that clearly aren't X's don't fall under the definition, while those that clearly are X's do.
One problem with the above article is that it seems to wish to embrace a broad definition of 'PC'. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with doing such a thing, but in this particular case such would seem to broaden the definition to include all manner of devices (such as mobile phones) that clearly are NOT 'PC's (at the very least they are a different market), despite their being both 'personal' and 'computers'.
You can call whatever you want a PC, but...
If a marketing research company wanted skew numbers to convince the public that Apple is more successful that it already is, then they could simply pollute terminology "PC" and claim that anything Apple makes is a PC. Viola, Apple is now selling many more PCs.
Android Phones could be called PCs as well, so what does that make Google?
Computers with Linux installed on them by their owners don't even count as PCs in traditional marketing speak. Or if they are counted, they are counted as Microsoft PCs. How can that be? Because there is no good way to measure the incredible success of Linux using traditional marketing methods based on revenue. It is also possible that marketing research companies would rather cater to the folks that pay them--the big vendors who pay for marketing "research". Marketing stats suggest the Windows is run on 95% of computers world-wide, this is obviously bunk.
Personally, I would call the iPad a "BIG skipper" and the iPhone a "little skipper". If I had either, I would toss them into the river to see how many times they skip before sinking into the murky depth. Apple sells "Skippers". The Skipper market is doing very well.
Tablets with bluetooth keyboards; High powered desktops
Tablets and Netbooks are not PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
Why not make EVERYTHING a PC?
What about Sony's new PSP that was just announced? This supposedly has the same graphical power as a PS3, with a fully functional OS, web browser, and room for apps. Surely it won't be considered a PC (not unless it makes billions like the iPad, then we'll see).
I see how everything in terms of technology is beginning to become one in the same, and inter-connectible, which is good! But an iPad is not a PC, just as much as a PSP is not. The damn thing can't even run flash!
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
RE: Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs
It's about money, not specs