"Apple iPad still the post-PC flagship"

TECHNOLOGY»APPLE 

Two years after the launch of the first iPad, even a former Microsoft man says we are in the post-PC world.

The new iPad features a high-definition retina display, five mega-pixel camera and voice recognition software

"Apple has its feet planted firmly in the post-PC future," Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, told those attending the company's iPad event on Wednesday.

Cook was onstage at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco to launch Apple's new

iPad but he was also there to deliver a declaration of intent. The iPad is the standard bearer for a new class of computer, one that is, in Cook's words "more portable, more personal, and dramatically easier to use than any PC has ever been".

Steve Jobs, Apple's late chief executive, compared PCs to trucks - powerful and multi-purpose - and argued that tablets were like cars - less flexible but better suited to everyday tasks. As America became an urban nation, Jobs said, so cars replaced trucks. Now, almost everyone needs a lightweight computer for everyday tasks; a PC is too much power but a tablet is perfect.

Apple would say that, of course. The company is selling not one but three post-PC devices: the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Those products made up 76 per cent of Apple's revenue last year. In the final quarter of 2011 Apple sold 15.4m iPads, no PC manufacturer sold that many computers in the same period.

Ray Ozzie, formerly chief software architect at Microsoft, agrees with Apple's assessment. He told a conference in Seattle this week: "Of course we are in a post-PC world."

Ozzie, who was once described by Bill Gates as "one of the top five programmers in the universe", added: "That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things."

That said, analysts Gartner expect the PC market to pick up slightly this year after a flat 2011. The firm predicts 4.4 per cent growth for PCs this year, driven in part by the arrival of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system and a new range of 'ultrabooks' - super-slim but high-powered laptops themselves inspired by an Apple product, the MacBook Air.

Ranjit Atwal, of Gartner, said: "PC shipments will remain weak in 2012, as the PC market plays catch-up in bringing a new level of innovation that consumers want to see in the devices they purchase."

Just as there are still some people who really do need trucks, so there will always be some who need a PC. Most people, though, are discovering that a tablet is enough.