A couple of years ago, the Little Tikes Company of Hudson, Ohio playfully announced that the best-selling car in America wasn't the Accord, Taurus, or Camry—it was the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, over 10 million of which havd hit the road in the 30 years of the toddler-powered two-door's career. Now the other shoe has dropped: Research firm Canalys has declared that it expects Apple—whose market share lands at a lowly 5.2 percent, according to analyst outfits, Needham & Co., and IDC—to overtake Hewlett-Packard as the leading global PC vendor before the second half of 2012.
You've already guessed the key to the controversy: Canalys's math includes tablets, led by the selling-like-hotcakes iPad 2, as PCs. IDC does not, snubbing iOS in favor of Windows and Mac OS X. To Canalys, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are contenders (and may keep Apple from unseating HP as soon as the fourth quarter of 2011, though the iPad 3, the company says, will definitely put Apple over the top). To traditionalists, it's still about x86 chips and hard disks.
Are iPads—and Android tablets—PCs? It's the flip side of the question editor-in-chief Dan Costa gets asked by earnest young media execs who say we should change the name of the site from PCMag.com to Computing Devices or Personal Silicon or Popular Electronics (oops, taken). And it inspires a variety of responses, most of which I can anticipate without waiting for the comments below:
Yes, they are: The iPad 2 has more computing horsepower than a desktop PC of a few years back, not to mention the most elegant interface outside of Minority Report. Tablets have real operating systems with vast libraries of available applications. It's petty to say they're not personal computers.
No, they lack a hallmark of PCs, expandability: Few people hold out for drive bays and PCI slots in this age of laptops and nettops, but it would be nice if tablets had a few more USB ports.
No, they lack a hallmark of PCs, keyboards: In the absence of tablet speech recognition to match Star Trek standards (or at least to match Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking on PCs), data entry is critical, and onscreen virtual keyboards are like fake breasts: Some of them look nice, but none of them feel right.
Yes, and if you say tablets are PCs you have to say the same of smartphones: Even if you don't count phones that actually turn into PCs via the laptop docks of Motorola's Atrix 2 and other models, today's phones are miniature marvels, complete development platforms with thousands of apps. Candidates for the top slot in PC market share include Samsung and HTC as well as Apple.
On the other hand, this discussion is a belly flop down a slippery slope. I think we can agree that purists who define PCs as x86 systems running Windows are behind the times—not only are Macs and Linux systems PCs, but the combination of Windows 8 and ARM processors is going to blow a hole in the theory. Right now I'm lusting after one of this year's nifty new ultrabooks for $1,000, but talk to me next year and I'll be lusting after a Windows-on-ARM clamshell—the 2012 successor to the netbook, or maybe the Windows CE or Psion mini-keyboard handhelds of my youth—for $500. (And if someone would put Linux Mint on a clamshell, I'd be in bliss.)
But is everything with a chip in it a PC? Surely not, or we're embracing embedded systems and appliances that have one or two applications at most. A digital camera isn't a PC any more than a digital picture frame is, even though it may offer simple in-camera image editing. Nor is it easy to call something a PC when its fans say it embodies the post-PC era (a phrase I dislike because it implies PCs are going away, though I admit "not-just-PC era" or "PC-and-other-stuff era" doesn't sound as catchy, but that's another column).
For me, it comes down to another couple of current catchphrases: content consumption versus content creation. A smartphone can do scores of things. With DataViz's Documents To Go, it can even do a little Word and Excel editing in a pinch. But I'm sorry, composing a text message does not count as document creation. A phone is not built to do what a reasonable user considers as PC tasks.
Nor, primarily—I admit I'm leaning on primarily here—is an iPad. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are impressive apps, like Documents To Go on steroids. But of all the iPads (and infrequent Android tablets) I see day to day, virtually none are running those apps. People are using tablets for e-reading, Web surfing, and movie viewing. And—at least for now, at least if you focus on real-world usage patterns—I say Canalys is wrong to count tablets as PCs. What do you think?
Me, I think they ruined the Cozy Coupe in '09 when they put googly eyes on it, just as they did the Corvette when it went from pop-up to fixed headlights.
