Apple's iPad accounted for 74 percent of tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2011, as combined Mac and iPad sales made Apple one of the top five PC vendors in the world by volume.
In a marked shift from his former belief that sales of the iPhone would dry up after two years, Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist who has invested heavily in Palm and Facebook, said in an interview that Apple will likely lead a 10-year technology growth cycle with the continued success of the iPad and its App Store ecosystem.
Apple's line of Mac computers saw great success in the U.S. in the first quarter of calendar 2011, growing 9.6 from 2010, while the rest of the American market fell 10.7 percent and netbook maker Acer tumbled 42.1 percent.
In a comparison of 10 tablet devices, Consumer Reports ranked Apple's iPad 2 the best product available, in contrast to its controversial refusal to endorse the iPhone 4.
Following a blockbuster start to sales for Apple's iPad 2, sources in the Far East PC supply chain have reportedly indicated that PC sales have seen "weak demand" to start 2011.
The founder of Acer, the second largest PC maker globally, has acknowledged that the company must overhaul its operations to focus on profit margins rather than market share in reaction to the success of Apple.
Executives from rival technology companies Dell and HP spoke out against Apple this week, with a Dell executive predicting that the iPad will fail, while an HP executive criticized Apple's relationships with its partners.
Without providing a price or release date, Dell has begun showing a non-working prototype representing a 10 inch tablet running Windows 7.
Apple's lead over HP and Dell in customer service satisfaction rankings has narrowed over the last year, but its customers still reported fewer nuisance issues and greater satisfaction by a significant margin.
With Mac and iPad sales combined, Apple computer sales grew 241 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2010, vaulting the company into third place in worldwide PC sales research, firm Canalys revealed on Wednesday.
Technology journalist Walt Mossberg listed the iPad as his best reviewed product of the year, while he called out the Dell Streak and Google TV as the worst products of 2010.
A lawsuit filed this week accuses a number of major electronics companies, including Apple, of violating a patent related to playback of MP3 files.
An insider trading sweep by federal prosecutors that led to the arrest of five suspects included a senior director for Apple supplier Flextronics, who was arrested on charges that he leaked confidential details about an upcoming iPhone and the unreleased iPad.
A new survey has found a "corporate explosion" of interest in tablets, with the potential market for Apple's iPad doubling in the first quarter of 2011.
For the first time ever, Apple is the dollar share leader in the U.S. home PC market, with the Mac taking 29.4 percent of every dollar earned from domestic home computer sales.
Two of America's largest banks are actively testing Apple's iPhone as a replacement of their existing RIM BlackBerry devices for corporate email.
Reclassifying the iPad as a PC in terms of sales would catapult Apple past rivals Dell and HP, elevating the Mac maker to the No. 1 computer manufacturer in the U.S., one Wall Street analyst has noted.
Microsoft on Monday announced its initial arsenal of handsets built around the new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, in what many believe is the company's last-ditch attempt to regain traction in the mobile handset arena that's fallen into the hands of rivals like Apple and Google.
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Sam Oliver
Josh Ong
Katie Marsal
Slash Lane
Neil Hughes
Daniel Eran Dilger
AppleInsider Staff
