What’s a Computer? (Premium)

Those of us who have been around a while always recoil a bit when confronted by how the personal computing industry has changed. In the good old days—the pre-iPhone period, basically—it was all about Microsoft. But in more recent years, Microsoft, Windows, and the PC market they fostered have taken a back seat to online services and mobile computing devices, especially the smartphone.

As such we have to deal with things like today’s news, where Apple is somehow the number one maker of PCs in the world. You know, if you look at it in an Obi-Wan Kenobi “from a certain point of view” way. And trust the source, which is Canalys and not a major analyst firm like Gartner or IDC.

I’m fine with the latter I guess. But I’m still mixed on the former.

What you need to accept with the former assertion—that iPads and iPad-like tablets are somehow PCs in the same sense that traditional PCs and Tablet PCs are PCs—is in any way reasonable. And for that to be reasonable, two things need to be true: that iPads (and iPad-like tablets) can replace traditional PCs for many people, and that there is some competitive wave of tablets made by traditional PC makers that could help ensure that this deck isn’t arbitrarily stacked against the PC to begin with.

The first of those two items is undeniably true. Users have a range of needs and expertise, and the iPad is capable enough to replace a PC for some segment of the population. There’s no use in arguing this generally, though I guess we might quibble over how big that number is and so on. Whatever.

The second of those two items is what makes news like this so mixed, if not irrelevant: Apple is the only company on earth that makes a unique platform for tablets, and lumping in those products with more capable and sophisticated PCs in some ways seems unfair. The rest of the world uses Android or, to a lesser extent, full Windows on true tablet form factor devices. Most Windows-based “tablets” are really just PCs, meaning they are convertible laptops or detachables, not consumption-focused tablets like the iPad.

To play the devil’s advocate here, I will point out that I’ve argued in the past that every company, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, goes to war with the army that they have. Meaning that it is up to every company to determine how they will compete in an open market using whatever platforms, form factors, and the like. So, for example, Apple can be disadvantaged in some ways in, say, the PC market, by how they compete as the only maker of Macs. But that is their choice. So, on the flip side, Apple can be advantaged by also making iPads that can replace PCs, and maybe those should be counted, disadvantaging those companies—most of them—that don’t do this. It’s only fair to see both sides of this.

If you do not count iPads, Apple is the fourth largest PC maker on earth as of full-year 2021, with 7.8 marketshare. And as I pointed out when I published that article, Apple was unable to gain marketshare last year despite the M1 boom: the rest of the PC market actually grew more quickly.

If you do count iPads, of course, everything changes. And regardless of whether you believe or trust the Canalys numbers, anyone measuring this would arrive at the same place: in this scenario, Apple is now the number one marker of personal computers—I can’t bring myself to call them PCs, that’s my bias, I guess—in the world.

(What if we included smartphones? They’re personal computing devices too, after all. Apple would once again be the overwhelming biggest maker of personal computers in the world. That said, I’m not aware of any recent measurements of this “market,” and since this is even more controversial, let’s just move on.)

But here’s the thing. This Canalys promotion of Apple as the world’s biggest maker of personal computers is based on a single quarter—Q1 2022—and not a full year. And that particular quarter was a bloodbath for PC makers, with an overall decline of 6 percent. And that only happened because Chromebook sales fell through the floor, while sales of Windows-based PCs did not. And so even this measurement is skewed.

Even the Canalys report shows this: Apple’s marketshare (Mac + iPad) gained by just 1.1 percent year-over-year (YOY), it says. Meanwhile, Lenovo’s sales (PCs + Chromebooks) fell by 12.2 percent. And HP’s (same) fell by 17.6 percent. Dell, which doesn’t rely on Chromebook sales as much, gained 6.1 percent YOY. (These are all Canalys numbers.)

If you look at my report about the quarter, which is based on Gartner and IDC data, Apple’s marketshare (in this case, Mac only) was up 6.45 percent, which makes sense, since we know iPad sales actually fell 2.6 percent by revenue in the quarter (YOY). So the iPad hurt Apple overall (in that one quarter). Lenovo was down 10 percent, HP was down 17.8 percent, and Dell was up 6.1 percent. (The same percentage Canalys reported, interestingly.)

Ultimately, what this all comes down to is whether you believe that the iPad is a computer, and whether that computer should be compared, from a unit sales or revenues perspective, to traditional PCs. Which, by the way, do include Tablet PCs and convertible PCs that can be used like consumption tablets too.

And again, I’m mixed on that. I see both sides of it. My gut tells me that the iPad is not a PC. But maybe that evolves over time. It certainly has in the years since the iPad was first released.

So I’ll leave it with this one final note: when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he asked rhetorically whether there was “there is room for a third category of device in the middle” of the smartphone and the PC. And he held up the iPad as proof that there was, celebrating each sales milestone as a step forward in the so-called “post-PC” era. He was wrong about that bit, but it’s undeniable that the iPad did introduce a third device category into the market.

Thus Jobs and Apple, at least back then, saw the iPad as something that was not a PC.