so Ipad sales drop for the first time yoy for a quarter, and profits dropped as well. Should Apple decrease the prices? Should they be worried?

[famousringo]

Zappykins said:

famousringo said:

 

 

Microsoft will tell you that tablets are PCs. You think they don't know what they're talking about? That they'd gamble with Windows on a whim? Tablets are PCs in that they are literally Personal Computers and in that they are displacing conventional PCs for the same use cases, plus a few more. Please tell me how many quarters of contraction the conventional PC market needs to endure before you'll accept that tablets are PCs.

Apple never had a dominant hold on the phone market or the PC market. Apple's pre-iPad best showing in PC marketshare came in 1984, when the Apple II and Mac earned a combined 21% slice of the market:

http://jeremyreimer.com/m-item.lsp?i=137

They did lose customers in PCs, but now they've gained them back with the iPad and I doubt that momentum is spent.

As for the phone market, Apple has 9% and is still growing. No lost customers here:

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816

 

I think it really depends on which tablet you are comparing.  The Microsoft Surface RT - it more of an consumer web browsing tablet. It runs an ARM processor and a special version of Windows 8 RT.  It's great for browsing, reading books, watching movies, some email, word processing but you wouldn't want to create much content heavier on it like you would a PC.  It is very comparable to an ipad, but can multi task and a few other things.  It's not all that expensive product at $349.

The Surface Pro is a full fledged PC running a very good Intel Core I5 CPU that is also a tablet.  It's more powerful than many laptops.  It runs a full Windows 8.  You can plug it in on a stand on your desk and used like any other PC.  (People are expecting an Intel Haswell version soon - and upgraded less power using CPU.)  It starts at $899 so a much different league.

PCs are not defined by what processor they use, what OS they run, how they multitask (iOS has always been able to multitask, BTW), or what interface they use. By arguments like this, the Commodore 64, the Altair, the Apple II, even early IBMs weren't PCs, and that's obviously false.

Here's Ballmer declaring the iPad a PC, BTW:

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/tablets/the-ipad-is-just-a-pc-ballmer-to-jobs-20100604-xioj.html