Apple pulled ahead of HP in the fourth quarter to become the largest player in the client PC market, a new report suggested Monday. The Cupertino-based company shipped more than 15 million iPads and 5 million Mac computers last quarter, and those figures represented 17% of all PCs shipped around the world during the fourth quarter. The report, which comes from market research firm Canalys, said PC shipments grew 16% annually to reach 120 million during the quarter, and the firm’s categorization of ̶...

Apple is now the largest buyer of semiconductors in the world, according to market research firm Gartner. The Cupertino-based company trailed both Samsung and HP in 2010, however Apple’s spending is estimated to have jumped 34.6% in 2011. The company spent $17.3 billion on semiconductors in 2011, or 5.7% of the total share of chip purchases. Coming in second was Samsung, which spent $16.7 billion or 5.5% of all chip purchases, and HP came in third with $16.6 billion. Leading electronics manufacturers...

Seven people have been charged with trading shares of Dell stock based on inside information. Four new arrests were made by the FBI on Wednesday, Reuters said, while three others have already been charged. In total, the group made more than $62 million in profits off of illegal trades in 2008. The defendants named on Wednesday include former portfolio manager Todd Newman of Diamondback Capital Management in Stamford, Anthony Chiasson of Level Global Investors in New York and Jon Horvath. A fourth person was a...

Dell has had trouble in the mobile and tablet space. The company’s CEO, Michael Dell, has continuously bashed Android, and its Streak phone-tablet line was a commercial failure that was eventually abandoned. The once-dominant PC corporation has examined the company’s shortcomings and now understands that consumers value the “ecosystem” of a tablet as much as the hardware, according to Dell chief commercial officer Steve Felice. “We have been taking our time. The general failure o...

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS has been the platform of choice for the Department of Defense for many years thanks to RIM’s robust security. However, with the rise of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems, the DoD may be moving away from BlackBerry devices. In a recent Security Technical Implementation Guide, the DoD approved the use of Android-powered devices by its staff, but the Dell Venue is currently the only phone that qualifies. The DoD states that a device mus...

Apple is on track to become the No.1 PC vendor in the world next year according to new projections. Market research firm Canalys on Monday announced that it expects Apple to pass current top vendor Hewlett-Packard before the end of the first half in 2012. This estimate includes iPad sales however, while most firms omit tablets from their PC figures. Solid iPad sales propelled Apple into the No.2 spot last quarter according to Canalys, and it will overtake HP some time before July next year if sales continue t...

A number of recent entrants in the tablet space may make quick exits as their tablet offerings go largely unnoticed in a market seen to be dominated by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble moving forward. A new report from DigiTimes on Thursday cites unnamed sources from within component suppliers in stating PC vendors such as HP, Acer, Asustek and Dell may abandon the tablet market next year. These companies have gained very little traction in the tablet space according to the report, as they l...

Dell reported its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, noting that its revenue of $15.4 billion was flat compared to the same period last year. GAAP earnings came in at $0.49 per share, up 17% from the same quarter in 2010. Revenue from Dell’s enterprise solutions and services branch was an all-time high $4.7 billion; sales of servers, storage, networking and services jumped 8% from the same period last year. Dell’s consumer unit reported $2.8 billion in revenue, down 6% from the third quarter of 2...

The devastating flooding in Thailand could hurt HP, Lenovo, Dell and Microsoft during the fourth quarter of this year, IDC said in a recent report. The research firm originally projected shipment growth of 5.1% for the PC industry during the quarter but it now expects PC shipments to fall between 2.2% and 3.4%. Moving into 2012, IDC said shipments could drop as much as 13.4%. “A lot of these plants are still under water, and it’s unclear how much damage they will find when the water recedes,”...

Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc., said on Tuesday that Android tablets have failed to gain significant traction in a market dominated by Apple’s iPad, and that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 platform has a good chance of achieving better sales. Mirroring the sentiments of countless pundits, Dell says the tablet market today is basically an iPad market, and that Apple’s competitors have failed to offer a compelling alternative at this point. ”If you look at the tablet market,...

Dell and HP will reportedly be among the first manufacturers to launch Windows 8 tablets, and the devices could be on the market as soon as the third quarter of next year, DigiTimes said recently. Supposedly, Amazon’s low-priced Kindle Fire has driven several manufacturers to pursue Windows 8 over Android in an effort to avoid stiff competition in the low-cost tablet market. Lenovo and Dell will stick to creating enterprise-focused tablets according to the report. Dell’s devices will continue to r...

Global shipments of PCs grew slightly but less than analysts had predicted during the third quarter of 2011, Gartner said recently, citing preliminary findings of a new research report. 91.8 million PCs were shipped during the quarter, a 3.2% jumped from the same quarter of last year. The figures are lower than Gartner’s original estimate, which suggested PC vendors would ship 5.1% more units during the quarter. Gartner said the lower sales can be attributed to a weak Western European PC market. Read on...

According to WPCentral, Dell will not launch any new Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) smartphones. Dell was planning to release a device called “Wrigley” according to earlier reports, which was supposed to be quite similar to the Venue Pro. WPCentral said it has confirmed with “a higher up” within the company that the Wrigley is no longer in the pipeline. The report goes on to state that Dell is considering new devices for the next version of Windows Phone, ode-named Apollo, but no decisions ...

China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest PC market during the second quarter of 2011 according to a new report from IDC. PC shipments in China totaled 18.5 million units during the second quarter, more than the 17.7 million units shipped in the United States. The research firm is projecting that Chinese PC shipments will total 85.1 million units next year, compared to just 76.6 million units shipped in the U.S. The influx of new tablet devices and advanced smartphones, such as Apple̵...