Is the iPad a PC?
A debate as been raging since the introduction of the iPad back in early 2010. A debate wether the iPad should be considered a PC or if we should take the class of tablet computers as a completely different category all together. This debate has intensified whenever anyone or any company that deals with as fascniating things as statistics has been bold enough to publish and such with the iPad included in the much more general “PC” category.
This is again not the first time I have been thrashing the concepts that have evolved over time. Both the notion of the PC, as it is described by a lot of people in the tech industry as well as in some parts of tech journalism, and the concept of the “post-PC era” are things I want to rebel against. I do want to point out that I do not have a grudge against the term “personal computer”, which is by all intents and purposes quite functional still to this day. It’s more the use of the term “PC” that irks me somewhat. Or perhaps I should call it abuse of the term “PC”, which is closer to the truth.
By every definition of “PC” I can find, the iPad matches the description or one part of the description as a whole. If I choose to look in the Mac OS X built-in dictionary I find the meaning of PC to mean “a microcomputer designed for use by one person at a time.”, which is a good description, I my opinion. I look at wikipedia and I get the answer that a PC is “any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator”, which is also a fine description of the device. I chose to check with Nationalencyklopedin, the Swedish national encyclopedia, to see what they had to say about it and they said it’s a “dator avsedd för en användare, antingen bärbar (knädator) eller stationär (bordsdator)”, which translates to “a computer intended for one user, either portable (laptop) or stationary (desktop computer).”. Yet again, a quite apt definition.
If I look at these descriptions and look at the iPad, I want to classify it as a PC any day of the week. It, like smartphones, is perhaps the very most personal computer I can imagine, one that we do not just toss around, but feel closer to. Although that is very subjective and up to the person in question, I still say that it at least is a device that is both made for one user at a time, a general purpose computer that is useful to individuals and it is very much portable.
Of course, this is most likely not the way in which a lot of people choose to define things. In their world, the term “PC” means a computer that is compatible with the x86 architecture, runs a version of Microsoft Windows and is either a laptop or a desktop computer of some kind. Excluded from this way of categorizing computers is the modern smartphone, modern tablet computers and any kind of a server. Any computer from Apple would also be excluded, since they are categorized as a “Mac”, which is not the same as a PC, despite that the company started mass producing some of the earliest PC’s back in the late 1970s.
We have now since long left the realm of technology and are now instead contemplating the use of a common term in everyday communication. But either way I choose to look at the phenomenon, I come to the conclusion that the iPad is indeed a PC. It’s not a PC of the definition that a PC must be x86 compatible and run Windows, but most certainly a PC that is a personal computer.
Wether we should include the iPad the overall category of devices commonly known as PC’s might be a slightly different question, but I still feel that it should. As more and more tablet computers come out on the market, some that will be running windows and some that will be x86 compatible, might I just add, it will make an awfully large mess to start picking and choosing which of the different devices is or isn’t a PC. Would we exclude the future tablet computers running Windows 8 from the PC category, simply because they run on ARM instead of the x86 architecture for instance?
As time moves on and technology improves even more, all these different classes of device will meld into one another more and more. While we might not be able to do anything and everything on a smartphone, it will eventually turn into a computer more than it is a phone. You might argue that this has already happened, given how sophisticated modern smartphones are. In a way, it would already be more appropriate to classify them as pocket computers, rather than a name like “smartphone”, which makes them sound like slightly clever telecommunications devices. As we all know, they are far more capable than just glorified cans on a string!
How we define a whole class of devices is really no small matter, given how we refer to the computers we use on a daily basis is based on the terms coined some 30 odd years ago. Fortunately, languages change and evolve over time and I hope that the misuse of “PC” will pan out at some point, hopefully in the near future. I don’t pretend to be an authority on linguistics or how terminology is shaped and used over time, I just get a headache when people use words to keep common sense out of the game. Even more so if the ones using the words happen to be playing pretty poorly in the game, compared to some other players.
I say and stand by that the iPad is indeed a PC. It might not be able to do exactly everything you can do on a Windows computer or a Mac, but it sure as heck does a lot of what most people need to do on a computer in their daily lives. I find no reason why we should keep any silly charade going where we pretend that a device that sells well is or is not something, just because some companies become uncomfortable in their respective seats when sales statistics are presented.
