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Apple making PC’s? Yes, and apparently very good at it. Research firm Canalys has ranked the Cupertino based company third in worldwide PC shipments. The reason is the holiday season’s hot item, the Apple iPad.

Canalys considers the iPad to be a PC and Apple shipped 11.5 million of them in the fourth quarter of 2010, placing Apple just slightly ahead of Dell with it’s 11.4 million shipped. The iPad’s popularity gives Apple a whopping 241% increase in PC sales from last year of the same period.

Canalys senior analyst Daryl Chiam defends the inclusion of the iPad in their study. “Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync,” says Chiam. “With screen sizes seven inches or above, ample processing power, and a growing number of applications, pads offer a computing experiences comparable to netbooks. They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist. As with smart phones, some users will require a physical keyboard, while others will do without.”

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