New iPad Release: Apple Redefines Itself as a Post-PC Company

As the new Apple iPad release event began Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the tech giant a post-PC company, shifting emphasis away from its home computers to its signature iPad, iPod and iPhone products.

The fact that the focus of Apple's major launch party from the get-go was its new positioning as leading this revolution of post-PC devices usurping computers as the dominant technologies of our lives.

We're talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center of your digital world, Cook told a rapt audience Wednesday in San Francisco. A world where the devices you use the most need to be more personal and more portable than any PC has ever been.

Cook went on to explain how thoroughly Apple has already managed to make the transition to being a post-PC company. He cited the eye-popping figure that 76 percent of Apple's fourth-quarter 2011 revenues came from post-PC devices:

The momentum has been staggering, he said. We have our feet firmly planted in the post-PC future.

The discussion of a post-PC future for Apple was foreshadowed by an article printed in the New York Times on Monday that portended such a shift at the company.

Times reporter Nick Wingfield's groundbreaking first sentence took many casual tech observers by surprise with its stark simplicity and self-assuredness, but it seems most prescient in light of Apple's focus on the post-PC revolution:

The chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, has a prediction: the day will come when tablet devices like the Apple iPad outsell traditional personal computers, Wingfield writes.

And Cook continued on that theme for much of the beginning of his Wednesday speech, during which he made connections between most major Apple offerings and the post-PC revolution:

Now you can't talk about the post PC world without talking about the app store, he said, for example.

But more important is the impact the iPad has had on the world, he said:

That brings us to iPad. We think the iPad is the poster child of the post PC world, Cook explained Wednesday. We sold more iPads in the last quarter of last year, than any PC maker sold of their PCs.

And, as Wingfield wrote Monday: His forecast has backing from a growing number of analysts and veteran technology industry executives, who contend that the torrid growth rates of the iPad, combined with tablet competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Microsoft, make a changing of the guard a question of when, not if.

The post-PC revolution arrived in San Francisco on Wednesday, and soon it will hit shelves within renewed vigor when the new iPad is introduced to the market. Be prepared.