Chinese firm Proview has admitted it might be tough to get a ban on iPads in China, despite the ruling that the name infringes on their trademark, because the local customs authorities are unlikely to get involved. Proview International Holdings, which claims to have held the trademark on the name "IPAD" since 2000, won its case …

Apple's iPad is available for pre-ordering, but only via Apple's own stores, not its retail partners. Even Apple's approved resellers are not allowed to take deposits or pre-orders from customers keen to try and lay hands on the genius-tablet. We were contacted by irritated Apple dealers, and passed on their questions to Apple …

Online channel sales continued to grow in 2010 pushed by HP, Lenovo and Sony, but Dell is growing fast too. Sales of notebooks, support products and desktops still dominate sales but other fast-growing categories include white goods and smaller form factor products such as cable locks. The numbers come from Icecat.biz which …

Apple released its earnings report for the third quarter of its 2012 fiscal year, and its numbers came in well below most Wall Street moneymen's projections – largely, it seems, on a steep quarter-to-quarter drop in iPhone sales. Shares in after-hours trading took an immediate hit, down from just over $600 per share before the …

DSGi shares fell very slightly this morning after the company said trading had held steady in the three months ended 24 July. The retailer grew sales by three per cent thanks to strong sales of big tellies in the run up to the football World Cup and an exclusive deal on early iPad sales. It said market share grew in the UK and …

Microsoft has scored two own goals by getting into the hardware game with Surface, the software giant's design for a laptop that thinks it's a tablet: long-standing PC manufacturers are alienated, and there is growing disquiet in the channel over Redmond's decision to sell the lap slab direct. The Pegatron-built Surface slate …

With demand for PCs cooling and chip inventories piling high, the prognosticators at Gartner now predict that chip sales will fall slightly this year. In Gartner's earlier projection, extracted from a crystal ball in April, the company said that it hoped chip sales would rise by 5.1 per cent to $314bn. That was after realizing …

Best Buy's boss has downplayed reports that iPads are eating half of all laptop sales. Brian Dunn was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying that internal estimates revealed iPad sales "had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%". In a statement last week Dunn referred to Mark Twain's comment on hearing that his …

In desperate need for something – anything – to stop the advance of the iPad and Android, Microsoft is trying to convince consumers that the PC is as modern a computing device as any tablet. On Monday, Microsoft will hit US TV audiences with a new ad campaign that updates its "I'm a PC" spot from a few years back, which was …

Apple doesn't have enough iPads and iPhone 4s to meet consumer demand, doesn't know when it will, and doesn't know how many more it needs. And, no, it didn't create an artificial shortage of either device to hype up a buzz storm. "We do not purposely create a shortage for buzz," Apple COO Tim Cook to analysts and reporters …