Sales of the iPad tablet propelled Apple first place in the top PC producers in the world in the last quarter of 2010. In addition to Macs, iPad tablet sales were also taken into account because we are talking about a PC tablet. Apple sold over 10.2 million PCs in the last quarter of last year, with almost 1 million more than HP which was ranked 2nd. Apple has a market share of 17.2%, 1.7 percentage points higher than of HP and over 3 percent higher than Acer Group. The iPad tablet together with the MacBooks have generated record sales for Apple and companies such as HP, Dell or Toshiba are being overtaken by a company that a few years ago was on the verge of bankruptcy.
While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple's iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate," said Richard Shim, Senior Analyst at DisplaySearch . "Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalization seems limited at this point.
It all started with an iPhone, continued with an iPad tablet and who knows what other revolutionary products we will see from Apple in the near future. One thing is clear, Apple is on the wave and it would be good to stay there because the competition is forced to bring more and more new things to the market and we, the ordinary users, have the most to gain.
