One remark [Phil] Schiller made during yesterday’s launch event raised a few eyebrows. In noting that the majority of 12.9-inch iPad Pro customers had actually switched from Windows PCs, he pointed to the huge potential switchers market still out there for Apple. There are, he said, over 600 million PCs more than five years old.
What he said next generated laughter in the room, but may not have gone down quite so well with those owners.
“This is really sad. It really is.”
Now, he may be right. A Windows PC more than five years old is going to be creaking somewhat by now. But it seems to me that there are three types of owners of old PCs, and the remark may well offend all of them
Ben Lovejoy makes a good point.
But also, who owns those 600 million PCs? My guess is that the majority of them are beige boxes in offices and call centers, which are only used to run a few applications. And the people using them have no say in what type of computing device they use. And, most of them probably couldn’t use an iPad anyway, since they’re using apps that aren’t available on the iPad.
Yes, it was a clumsy comment, and one that Schiller shouldn’t have made.