Among the top six notebook vendors — Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Samsung — Apple ranked last in global market share in the second quarter of 2011, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore.But that’s without the iPad.With it, Apple was the single largest notebook vendor during the period, with a 20 percent market share — greater than the 15 percent held by PC giant Hewlett-Packard.
That’s a mighty big leap. Steve Jobs is the first person to trump the iPad as the harbinger of a “Post-PC” era, so I’m not sure adding the iPad into that mix is a meaningful statistic. But it does go to show that the iPad is an incredibly important product for Apple right now.