I am sure you might have thought that is a misleading headline, right? But no. This is what is being actually claimed by analytics firm Canalys. In its latest report, Canalys has gone ahead and clubbed the Apple iPad in to the PC Segment – thereby pushing down the ranking of traditional PC Makers like HP, Acer and Dell. The report talks about PC shipments in the last quarter of 2012. Here is what the report says:
“Apple continued to lead the PC market, shipping 27.0 million units and taking its share over 20% for the first time. HP shipped 15.0 million PCs, beating Lenovo by 200,000 units to regain second place, with both vendors taking an 11% share. Samsung, buoyed by strong pad shipments, had its first quarter in the top five, shipping 11.7 million PCs, giving it a 9% share and fourth place ahead of Dell. “
Here, the Canalys report nonchalantly adds the iPad as well as Apple’s Mac line of products in to the PC Segment thereby taking the number of total units shipped to 27 million. The same has been done with Samsung whose tablet shipments was 7.6 million units. If we were to segregate Apple’s tablet and Mac sales, we notice that its “traditional computer” – (you know, the one with a touchpad, mouse et-all amounted to only 4.1 million units.) This is way behind the number of PC units sold by the traditional PC makers.
The question now is, is the iPad – and the rest of the tablets versatile enough to be clubbed in to the same category as that of normal PC’s? If yes, Canalys’ analysis is spot on. Anyway, this is a debatable issue. Do you really think we have entered the much talked about “Post PC era” already?
