It’s not your imagination: More and more, the products released by PC makers are beginning to look more and more like something cooked up at an Apple lab in Cupertino -- and it may be their only hope of playing catch-up with the iPhone maker.
Cnet News is reporting that even as Apple has morphed from primarily a Mac company to a mobile device giant with the iPhone, iPod touch and now iPad, their competitors in the Windows-Intel PC space are discovering that the only way to keep pace with Cupertino is to fire up the copying machine and “slavishly imitate as fast as you can.”
Take for instance the iPad, which Apple started selling in early April. It’s been famously hard to come by ever since, and analysts predict even greater gold in them thar hills, with sales of tablet devices jumping dramatically in 2011 -- but that growth will come at the expense of the laptop computers.
While Apple wasn’t the first to market with a tablet device, they’ve certainly taken the category by storm with the iPad, which eschews the traditional Mac OS X operating system for an upsized version of iOS, which runs the smaller iPhone and iPod touch devices. PC maker Hewlett-Packard has responded by shifting its tablet strategy from the Windows 7-running Slate to the PalmPad, which leverages their buyout of Palm and its mobile webOS. Sound familiar?
Dell has also gotten in the tablet game with the Streak. Although best known for their Windows-based Intel computers, the smaller-form Streak instead runs Google’s Android with a Qualcomm ARM processor. Part tablet computer, part cell phone, the Streak appears to be deviating at least a little from the Apple playbook, since its screen is about half the size of the iPad.
No one is saying that HP and Dell plan to abandon Microsoft and Intel just yet -- far from it. There will still be plenty of places to sell computers for the foreseeable future, and plenty of customers lining up to buy them. But the mobile space is where the next battle is heating up, and everyone wants a piece of what Apple is now enjoying -- including longtime smartphone maker Research in Motion, who is rumored to have a BlackBerry tablet in the works as well.
It remains to be seen what success the competition will have. After all, Apple has a knack for taking old technology like cell phones and reinventing them in a unique way, where everyone else is just struggling to keep up.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
