Soaring iPad Sales Again Fuel Talk of Fading PCs
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012The news keeps getting better and better for Apple, with its $13.06 billion in net income (double last year’s figure) in the quarter ending in December, driven largely by a doubling of iPhone and iPad sales.
Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, said the company sold 37.04 million of the trend-setting smartphone in the quarter and 15.43 million of the market-building tablet computer in the quarter. The iPad figure is a whopping 111 percent increase over sales in the same quarter last year, and ahead of predictions.
The iPad 2, thinner and faster than its predecessor and with dual cameras, was released less than a year ago, in March.
Bad News for PCs?
Analysts and media were quick to note that the surge in iPad sales put the device ahead of personal computer sales by a leading manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard, for the same quarter. HP sold 14.7 million computers in that time period, according to Gartner.
Overall, worldwide PC shipments declined slightly, by 1.4 percent, to 92.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with the same period of 2010, after two quarters of positive growth.
Separate research from IDC found that HP shipped 15.1 million computers, while Lenovo shipped 13 million and Dell, 11.9 million.
Last year, an analysis by J.P. Morgan said tablets cannibalized about 18 percent of the PC market in 2010.
“I truly believe, and many others in the company believe, that there will come a day that the tablet market is larger than the PC market,” Cook said in an earnings call late Tuesday with Wall Street analysts, as reported by Computerworld.
But how soon that happens depends on how we define PCs, said Jeff Orr, ABI Research’s group director for consumer and mobile consumer electronics research.
‘[Cook's] comments have to be placed into context, such as what constitutes a PC — desktops, laptops, netbooks,…
View full post on NewsFactor Network