Now that things are turning out really bad for Apple, it appears that its chums in the Tame Apple press are having a crack at trying to rebuild the outfit’s reality distortion field.

This morning we had across our desk a few stories from magazines which should know better claiming that Apple is the world’s largest maker of PCs. That is right, the outfit has less than five percent of the PC market but its still beats Dell, HP and Lenovo. Hooray for Apple, that really teaches the world who is boss. The story is of course total bollocks and is based on a report by the analysis outfit Canalys. To make Apple the world leader it had to add in the iPad and the iPad Mini. On that basis Amazon beats Acer and Asus as leading PC vendors, having shipped 4.6 million Kindles in Q4.

To make matters worse the figures are based on on shipments, not sales. Often with toy computers like cheap tablets and iPhones there are lot which sit in the channel and never see the light of day. Apple, Canalys' said, was the PC leader for the quarter with 27 million shipped units, giving the company a market share of 20 percent for the first time. Then Canalys Research Analyst Pin-Chen Tang came out with some strange comments where he said that the launch of the iPad Mini had been timed well. He talked about its success as proving there is a clear demand for pads with smaller screens at a more affordable price.

Hadn’t that been proven already with the success of the Amazon Fire and the Nexus? Didn’t the iPad Mini stuff up sales of the iPad, which by Canalys’s own research is also part of the same PC market? Neither Gartner nor IDC had Apple ranked among their respective top five worldwide PC vendors for the quarter probably because Apple does not make many PCs. More accurately they ranked Apple third for PC shipments in the United States.

HP, by Canalys' reckoning, ended the quarter with the second-highest number of worldwide PC shipments at 15 million, representing 11 percente of the PC market. Lenovo, meanwhile, shipped just 200,000 fewer PCs than did HP, per Canalys. The question is why this report has been treated seriously by the trade press and why Canalys’s assessment that a tablet is a PC is was not challenged, even by the company itself.

Based on that reasoning you can claim that Jobs Mob rules the world when it comes to making televisions, because every tablet and iPhone can run a TV connection.