Apple Becomes Number One PC Maker, If You Include Tablets

Apple (News - Alert) just went above and beyond all other PC manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert), and claimed the throne of the world's number one maker of personal computers. Its iPad sales allegedly helped pave the road to victory, although the iPad is far from a traditional personal computer.

The high demand for tablets in Q4 2011 was partially responsible for helping increase the global computer market by 16 percent compared to Q4 2010. The data shows that 120 million computers were sold in this time, although no one's really clear on what the definition of "personal computer" is anymore. If you remove tablets from the "personal computer" spectrum, the market for computers shrank 0.4 percent, according to Canalys, a firm that researches and forecasts markets and recently started to include tablets in the personal computing analyses. Many other companies also believe this is the way to go, since tablets are personal and they're computing devices. Other reports interpreting Canalys results say that the market shrank 0.1 percent, as opposed to the 0.4 percent figure.

Since the inception of the iPhone (News - Alert) and iPad, Apple has sold 37.04 million phones and 15.43 million iPads, making twice the amount of sales compared to the figures from the year before. We might be seeing even more growth in 2012 due to the anticipated release of the iPad 3 and iPhone 5. The iPad 3 is rumored to come out some time in February.

Still, the definition of a personal computer pretty much fits tablets, and its inclusion in Canalys' analyses might prove useful to the personal computing market. There's still that common opinion, though, that desktop computers cannot be matched even by the highest performance tablets.

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