Apple iPad still the post-PC flagship

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

"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."