Research firm DisplaySearch today released the results of its estimates of mobile PC sales for the second quarter of 2011. The study includes both traditional notebooks and tablets, and Apple was able to ride the strength of the iPad to the top of the list with 21.1% of the market on 13.6 million units shipped. Apple comfortably topped second-place HP, which came in at 15% share with 9.7 million units shipped.
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The report notes that Samsung and Dell led the way in year-over-year shipment growth among notebook PCs, but that performance was overshadowed by Apple's iPad growth, which saw unit shipments more than double year-over-year.
On the tablet front, quarterly shipments of non-Apple tablets have quickly risen to 5.6 million units, although many manufacturers appear to be having difficulty translating those shipments into actual sales to customers. Overall, tablet shipments were up 70% quarter-over-quarter and 400% year-over-year.
Top Rated Comments
It can be included as "a PC" when it benefits Apple's figures.
I realize it's a grey area in the industry, but it runs the same OS and iPhone and iPod Touch. So if you're going to include the iPad, you need to include those too. The defining factor for mobile PC should be a full OS with a navigable file system. Tablets don't (and shouldn't) have these qualities. So while the iPad is a mobile device, I don't think it should be included as a "mobile PC".
The report said 80% of Macs shipped were iPads. If you exclude those, you get around 2.7 million Macs. However, you then have to exclude tablets and maybe other form factors from competitors, too.
Their category is mobile personal computers, not laptops or notebooks. I think that's their rationale.
Luckily, this specious argument goes away with iOS 5.
:D Good one. A product can be compared in many different markets. For example, no one complains when laptops are compared in the PC market and separately in the mobile PC market.
Because the iPod touch and the iPhone don't compete with PCs. A significant number of people have been shown to choose an iPad over a netbook or other laptop. The same cannot be said for the iPod touch.
Again, this report is a market analysis, not a semantics argument.