The computer market with, without the iPad

With in 10 years the iPad will do what the laptop did to disk top computers, when the first laptops came out they ware very underpowered compared to disk tops. The first tablets came out ready to kick butt!

Mac sales booming, so if ultra low end PC, read Netbooks, have tanked after the iPad, not iPhone introduction the correlation is pretty good. An interesting note would be that average selling price of PCs rising due to Netbooks falling, but profit on sales remains low. In other words, PC sales remain ultra-low margin undifferentiated commodities - this is a picture of innovation disruption eating from bottom up. Unfortunately for PC makers, the high performance PC market is dominated by Apple iMacs, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs. These provide design and performance capabilities the PC commodity market can't match since Apple has strong supply chain management and key technology advantages. I place the credit for this with Tim Cook. Eventually the analyists will swallow their pride and figure this out. Especially when MS and now HP treat tablets like PCs in their planning.

The iPad might be different than a PC, but it obviously can take the place of a PC. I know several dozen people that stopped using their PC on a daily basis to do the exact same things on an iPad.

Why people stopped (or never started) including the iPad in laptop/netbook charts is really beyond me. Although some people use the iPad merely to surf the net, and read books, most people use it to read and write emails, write documents, prepare presentations, make videos and a million other things.

That makes it a PC in my book - a portable one anyways.

As well, it is very useful to see the decline of traditional PCs in comparison to the iPad. They are obviously directly related, unlike what many companies would have you believe.

Sorry, just because one thing affects another, doesn't make it that other thing. Is a car a horse because the number of horses used for transportation declined when the car came out? Obviously the two are in the same class, in most respects - computing and transportation respectively. Regardless, an iPad is not a PC because it affected the PC market.

I think that the iPad should be considdered as the lowest end of the PC market now that OnLive has allowed us to experience the windows desktop in what feels like an almost local experience. As technology gets better and better, who knows? Maybe the Ipad will be the future form of the computer?

"Windows 8 will blur the line between tablet and PC because the same operating system will run on both desktops and tablet devices."

It will be even more confused since ARM-based Windows 8 tablets won't run software compiled for Intel CPUs.

Interesting concept.

However, the graphic bugs me.

To do this properly, I would like to see iPad sales since Spring 2010, when it came out.

Also, making a line chart that is partially time based, but then shifts into a different category, makes the graphical very confusing. Line charts should not be used in this way.

Why should iPads be considered PC's? They're not. When televisions were introduced and started becoming affordable did they want to say the TV was a radio? Think about it..