Jan 26
Those are words I never expected to type, three years ago. According to new numbers from research firm Canalys, Apple is the third largest global maker of PCs, smaller than only HP and Acer.
Of course, as one might imagine, there’s a pretty major caveat here that puts the company just ahead of Dell (the two manufacturers are at 11.5 and 11.4 million shipped units, respectively)–the number includes iPads shipped. Apple nabbed 10.8 percent of the total PCs shipped globally for the fourth quarter of 2010 (HP and Acer got 17.7 and 13.6 percent).
When the company’s popular tablet is factored in, Apple’s shipping volume increased 240 percent from Q4 2009 to Q4 2010 (versus a less staggering 19 percent growth of the industry overall).
Canalys justified the inclusion of the iPad thusly,
Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync. 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. As with smart phones, some users will require a physical keyboard, while others will do without.
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