With new Apple iPads, tablets move closer to passing PCs in sales, as Steve Jobs foretold

“Three years ago, Steven P. Jobs compared personal computers to trucks and tablets to cars. PCs will still be around, he said, but more people will want tablets,” Brian X. Chen reports for The New York Times.

“Apple on Tuesday took another step toward making that prediction come true. It souped up its iPad tablets with faster processors and zippier Internet connections,” Chen reports. “The company upgraded its iPad Mini, the smaller tablet, with a higher-resolution display. The full-size iPad with a 9.7-inch screen was renamed the iPad Air, because it has a slimmer design and has lost some weight. [The iPad Air is about 20 percent thinner than the previous iPad and weighs one pound, down from 1.4 pounds.] The small iPad starts at $400 and the bigger iPad will cost $500. Both iPads will ship in November.”

“Mr. Jobs, who died in 2011, declared at a business conference in 2010 that the era of the personal computer was nearly over. He said that tablets, which are more portable and easier to use, would cut people’s ties to old-school computers, relegating PCs — like trucks — to carrying the heaviest loads. ‘When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,’ Mr. Jobs said. As cars became faster and easier to use, trucks became passé, he said,” Chen reports. “Tablets are already devouring the PC market. About 120 million tablets were shipped in 2012, nearly seven times as many as in 2010, when the Apple iPad was first released, according to Gartner, a market research company. IDC, another research company, predicts that sales of tablets will surpass those of PCs in the fourth quarter of this year, and on an annual basis in 2015.”

Read more in the full article here.

Related articles:
Hands on: Apple’s new 64-bit iPad Air makes the full-sized tablet a one-handed device (with video) – October 22, 2013
Hands on with Apple’s new 64-bit iPad mini with Retina display (with video) – October 22, 2013
Apple unveils 64-bit iPad Air and 64-bit iPad mini with Retina display – October 22, 2013

23 Comments

        1. Alas, I fear your campaign to regulate the unruly passions of our cowboys will continue to be met with indifference. Surely you realise that pure reason can’t persuade the victim of an insult to swallow it, to turn the other cheek, when the overwhelming, primordial impulse is to choke the upstart with your bare hands. Besides, CBS does suck.

      1. So embarrassing and ignominious that it makes one crave a different life, perhaps as an anthropologist working with the great apes, who inhabit a sensible ecosystem, practice meaningful rituals, communicate effectively, groom one another, and gaze at us humans as pathetic versions of themselves cursed with diseased brains

        1. Yes Hannah. I actually have a story that is just about that. I’ll give you a vague quick plot. A study of humanity is discovered and no one knows where it came from. They read it and are appalled. When they find out what aliens actually wrote it, they are surprised to find it is their best friend species. More I cannot say.

    1. The new iPads should now be light and thin enough that the fat clown’s kids and wife could hide them easily at home…just don’t hide it where a fat clown could sit on it.

      I was not at the helm … — Captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino

  1. MS lost the first mover advantage in 2007 with iPhone and then again with iPad and now with free creative & productivity apps.

    Der Fuhrer in Redmond simply wanted to believe his own bullshit.

    Apple is so aggressive that I think MS has permanently lost critical mindshare that is needed to keep them in the OS & Apps market, except for marginal office uses as they slowly drift into irrelevance.

  2. “As Liet taught us” –
    “the slow way always wins you young pup” –
    “the man in a rush never sees the edge of the cliff” – well, Microsoft is still falling off that one. . . . .

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