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Micron Chief Executive Officer Steve Appleton crashed and died while attempting to fly an experimental plane in Boise, Idaho. Appleton took charge of Micron at age 34 and was the memory chip industry’s longest-serving CEO.

Appleton’s aircraft crashed early Friday morning, shortly after his second takeoff of the day. The Lancair IVP aircraft departed first at 8:46 am, only to land after lifting off only 5-10 feet from the runway.

He flew again in a second try, but had to call in a request to land again, indicating an aircraft problem.

“I’m going to taxi back in and see if I can figure it out,” can be heard on a recording of Boise airport's air-traffic control conversations. “I’d like to turn back in and land,” he said. “Coming back in.”

Then you can hear people at the control tower, “Oh my God,” repeated over and over in shock as the plane crashed between two runways at the airport.

When only 22 years old, Appleton joined Micron, working at first for the factory's night shift.

Canalys announces Apple is the biggest global PC vendor in Q4 2011, beating leader HP-- but only if one counts tablets as PCs.

Other analysts (such as Gartner and IDC) do not add tablet shipments to their overall PC market statistics.

According to Canalys Apple Q4 2011 shipments total 15M tablets and 5M Macs, taking over 17% of total Q4 PC shipments reaching 120M units.

The global PC market (including tablets) shows 16% Y-o-Y growth in Q4-- but excluding tablets WW PC shipments are down by -0.4% Y-o-Y, with declines in W. Europe despite traditional holiday sales.

EMEA notebook sales are up by a slight 1% as vendors and channel partners take the cautious approach to inventory levels. Canalys expects "limited adoption" of ultrabook shipments throughout H1 2012, but momentum should kick in later in 2012 due to price drops and aggressive marketing campaigns.

When it comes to vendors, Lenovo is the only PC maker (other than Apple) increasing in market share-- by 2%, with W. European shipments doubling thanks to the Medion acquisition. Meanwhile Acer, Dell and HP continue losing market share.

Go Canalys Q4 2011 PC Market Tracker

Devices delivering multiple functions and internet connectivity-- or "magnet platforms"-- will lead the mobile market according to In-Stat, growing at a CAGR of 25.7% through 2015.

In comparison, the overall mobile device market will growth at a CAGR of 8.7% for the same period.

"Magnet devices" cover 3 categories-- smartphones, tablets and notebook PCs. All make part of the larger "smart device" category together with smart TVs and STBs. Such devices increasingly share similar (if not identical) silicon components, operating systems and apps.

In-Stat says 4 key factors drive innovation within the mobile market-- richer content, network access, increased bandwidth (to enable access) and new technologies. The technology will improve further, with growing numbers of mobile devices carrying more than 1 GPU (and the number of GPU cores per SoC) during the forecast period.

The analyst also predicts smartphones will increse from under 20% of total handsets (from 2010) to 43% in 2015, while Intel and Imagination will lead in the GPU market after taking over 61.3% of the 2011 mobile GPU market.

Go Smartphones, Tablets, and Notebook PCs to Grow at 25.7% CAGR Through 2015 (In-Stat)

Is Microsoft planning to integrate motion controls into Windows 8? The Daily claims the company is working with Asus to do exactly that, saying it "checked out" a pair of Asus prototypes.

The prototype laptops The Daily reportedly saw run on Windows 8 and carry a Kinect sensor across the top of the screen, with a set of LEDs at the bottom of the display.

At CES 2012 Microsoft announced it was going to make the console motion sensor available for PCs with Kinect for Windows.

Asus would be a good choice to make Kinect-based hardware-- it has experience with motion-controlled devices after releasing the WAVI Xtion (using the same PrimeSense technology inside the Kinect) last year.

Will Windows 8 carry built-in Kinect functionality? We will get to know soon enough, with the Windows 8 preview coming out later this month.

Go Movement in Space (The Daily)

Go Kinect to Make it on PC