The iPad - a tablet of miracle

Since the marketing of the iPad, analysts are scratching their heads to bring the miracle tablet in their accounts. The iPad has to weigh it in the market share of computers? Tablet PC? Is there a separate category ("media tablet")? Is it different from a desktop or laptop?  With 5.2 million Macs and 15.43 million iPad sold on its last quarter record, Apple is by far the world's largest manufacturer of computers if the tablets were not aloof (Gartner estimates that HP has elapsed 14.7 million PCs in the last quarter).

There is the "scientific" definition of the computer, and the meaning we will actually use. There was a time when the lack of removable media (floppy disk, optical disk or other) was sufficient to disqualify the unit.

The computer is not defined by its input-output devices, or by its user interface, or by its type of use: in the strict sense (curiously softer than the ordinary sense), it is of a machine capable of executing instructions to apply operations on data. As such, anything that contains a processor fits this description. And these days, it goes to the toy car, ATMs and …. Obviously these machines are not comparable and do not come into competition. The question is much less settled on the iPad. Even by reducing it to a single function of consultation, many users have exactly the same approach to IT in general: read emails, web videos, play games, that could well summarize the digital activities of a significant portion of the general public. 

Some maintain that the iPad does not compare to the computer because it would use less convenient for some tasks, such as writing text on the virtual keyboard. The iPad coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard will quickly reduce this charge to nothing, but it is there after all that criteria whose relevance is questionable, since it is applied to an iPad typical use of "old world". We could reverse the rhetoric emphasizing that the iPad is the only computer that can be used easily standing, which returns the keyboard issue. If the iPad was initially need to synchronize with a computer, this has not prevented an unknown number of users to do their only computer machine, a number even more likely be significant since IOS 5 cord. 

Of cut the same, some maintain that the iPhone and iPod touch are not in competition with the handheld, though some titles are common to all mobile platforms. The fact remains that the use of handheld consoles and the iPhone have an intersection and that the iPhone already following us everywhere. Both are competing in a budget that does not extend to infinity and generic use: the handheld gaming. Uncharted fans remain loyal to the Sony console, but what about those who do not have these requirements? Similarly, all recreation and entertainment, from sports to theater, compete in our free time and money you can invest, despite very different natures. In fact, iOS competition was felt both in the results of Sony and Nintendo, as in their business model, with the phasing of physical media and pricing approaching from the App Store, as in the design same equipment as the PS Vita associated itself with a touch input.

But beyond those who only use the iPad, the Apple tablet has already demonstrated that it was actually competing with computers: netbook sales, although recorded in the overall production of computer manufacturers, have collapsed since the marketing of the iPad. Windows 8 will make it more clear the arbitrariness of this separation and illusory, since the next Microsoft system will work equally well on shelves and computers "by right", and will work equally well on each other both interfaces (Windows "classic" and Metro), as are applications that will be dedicated to each of them. 

What hair pulling for those who continue to account separately for the sales of tablets and computers. The mere fact that Microsoft has made the gamble to integrate Metro Windows shows that nobody is under any illusion about the importance of the iPad, and beyond the touch interfaces for the entire industry. If markets were also sealed that analyzes market share, there would be no interpenetration. Even if Tim Cook competition recognizes the iPad to the Mac, it's not out of sheer bravado: "There is a cannibalization of Mac by the iPad, but we still think there is a greater cannibalization of Windows PC with the iPad. 

You can see that it begins to appear virtually everywhere. "In short, Steve Jobs, who considered that the PC was a truck and a car the iPad, and Steve Ballmer, who believes that the tablet is a PC, were both right. The iPad is hardly a new iteration of the PC, offering first a simpler and direct, to do old tasks in new ways, and new tasks in their own right. Undoubtedly, there are conceptual differences between the traditional PC and the iPad. But as mobile platforms will grow, reaching audiences previously sealed to computers, these nuances may seem from another age.