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

13 years ago

“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.”

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