Michael Dell again saved his company”s core business this weekend after CEO of Apple Tim Cook took swipe at PCs during an interview with British newspaper.
“Why would you buy a PC anymore?” Cook wondered during an interview with the Telegraph, echoing former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ pronouncement in 2010 that the “post-PC era” had arrived.
“The post-PC era has been great for the PC,” Dell quipped in an interview with the Telegraph. “When the post-PC era started, there were about 180 million PCs being sold a year and now it’s up to over 300 million, so I like the post-PC era.”
Michael Gold stein, president and CEO of LAN Info tech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said the back and forth between Cook and Dell is good for Resellers.
“It’s great for us as resellers because it gathers more attention. It’s kind of cool,” Gold stein told CRN. He said customers aren’t necessarily abandoning PCs for Apple products, or laptops for tablets. “People are confused,” he said.
“There’s a big ‘let me think about it.’ There’s a place in the world for iPads, but I don’t know if it’s as a desktop replacement, and that’s the demeanor Apple might be afraid of. People might not spend $899 on an iPad Pro, but maybe they will spend $1,200 on a [Microsoft] Surface Book. It’s interesting.”
Dell reasserted several of the points he’s been making in recent weeks, saying: “For the last 11 quarters in a row, we’ve been gaining share in PCs. Last year we outgrew HP and Lenovo. It’s a business with an installed base of 1.8 billion PCs, 600 million of them are more than 4 years old, and as we create new, beautiful, thin, powerful PCs that are better than the thing you bought five years ago, people will replace the old ones. And we are getting more and more share of that opportunity each quarter that goes by.”
Dell offered a similar explanation at the annual Dell World conference last month in Austin, Texas, when he was asked about the future of cloud computing.
“When I hear everything’s going to public cloud, it sounds like ‘the PC is dead’ from a couple of years ago,” he told an audience at the conference. “It’s a lay person’s interpretation of trying to understand the industry in one sentence.”
