Michal Ždanský Financial notice last week's results brought many interesting numbers. In addition to the generally expected record sales of iPhones, two figures stand out in particular - the year-on-year increase in Mac sales by 18 percent and the deterioration of iPad sales by six percent compared to last year.
iPad sales have seen minimal or negative growth for the past few quarters, and bad pundits are already speculating whether the iPad-led post-PC era was just an inflated bubble. Apple has sold almost a quarter of a billion tablets to date, in just four and a half years. The tablet segment, which Apple practically created with the iPad, experienced massive growth in its early years, which has currently hit a ceiling, and it's a good question how the tablet market will continue to evolve.
[do action=”quote”]When you make hardware features irrelevant, it's hard to sell upgrades.[/do]
There are quite a few factors that are responsible for less interest in iPads, some of which are Apple's own (unintentional) fault. iPad sales are often compared to iPhones, partly because both mobile devices share the same operating system, but the two categories have completely different target audiences. And the tablet category will always play second fiddle.
For users, the iPhone will still be the primary device, quite possibly more important than any other device, including laptops. The whole world of consumer electronics revolves around the phone, and people always have it with them. Users spend much less time with the iPad. Therefore, the iPhone will always be ahead of the iPad in the shopping list, and users will also buy its new version more often. The frequency of updates is quite possibly one of the main factors in the decline in sales. The analyst summed it up perfectly Benedict evans: "When you make hardware features irrelevant and sell to people who don't even care about features, then it's hard to sell upgrades."
Simply having an older iPad is still good enough for users to buy the latest model. Even the second-oldest iPad can run iOS 8, it runs the vast majority of applications, including new games, and for tasks that are the most common for users - checking email, surfing the Internet, watching videos, reading or spending time on social networks - it will be for a long time to come serve well. Therefore, it would not be surprising if sales were mainly driven by brand new users, while upgrading users represented only a minority.
There are, of course, more factors that can work against tablets - the growing phablet category and the general trend of phones with a larger screen, which Apple is said to be joining, or the immaturity of the operating system and applications, which makes the iPad still unable to compete functionally with ultrabooks.
Tim Cook's solution, which plans to push iPads more into schools and the corporate sphere, also with the help of IBM, is the right idea, because it will get more new customers, which will partially compensate for the longer average upgrade cycle of the device. And, of course, it will introduce these customers to its ecosystem, where additional revenue will flow from the possible purchase of additional devices based on good experience and future upgrades.
iPads in general have undergone quite a rapid evolution, and nowadays it is not easy to come up with some unique feature that would convince customers to change their habits and switch to a faster upgrade cycle. Current iPads are almost in perfect shape, although of course they can still be more powerful. It will be so interesting to see what Apple comes up with in the fall and whether it can trigger a big wave of purchases that reverses the downward trend.
I can see it in myself. I bought an iPad 2011 in 2 and although I would like to upgrade I keep putting it off because this model still does everything I need it to do at a reasonable speed.
I think that there are not so many types of equipment for which the user is able to pay 15000 every two years. Manufacturers would be happy if everyone bought a mobile phone, tablet, laptop, television and ideally a car every two years, but that's probably not possible. I'm very curious to see how CarPlay will fare in this regard…
Otherwise, I've had an iPad 3 for two and a half years and I don't see a single reason to upgrade, and I'll love Apple if it stays that way for a while longer.
Why I've stuck with the iPad 1 for now. It still works great for everything we use it for. I've always been deterred from upgrading by the memory pricing policy. The foundation is small, extra charges for a larger size are completely meaningless. With Apple's margins, making a premium model out of more memory is something I don't understand.
From my point of view, Apple stopped supporting the iPad more fundamentally, how to use it more (e.g. iBooks Author is a good idea, but incomplete) in various professions and left it all "to avoid" or to developers. Today is probably late, the age of Phablets is coming. But why did Apple keep paying for great proprietary apps on older devices when it could have fostered a competitive advantage instead? Small storage (in 2013,2014, 3) at premium prices - as someone mentioned, it didn't help sales much, as well as the iPad XNUMX fail, which Apple had to upgrade to reasonable HW in half a year because of the retina. Is this to attract customers?
It seems to me that Cook's hand and orientation is only for great sales/profit, but at what cost? That they are losing the market that Apple has worked hard to create? Damage…
as can be seen from the comments, the iPad3 was not a failure, we could still talk about the iPad4 replaced by the Air or about Macbooks faster by 200MHz. iPad3 still works great.
It is simple. Sales can't grow forever, sometimes it has to stop.
We have an iPad 3 and an iPad 4 at home. I can't imagine why we would upgrade. At home, it is mainly used for evening surfing in bed, watching a movie, playing a game... So an upgrade is probably not imminent for some time. It's different with iPhones, there are always some new features that just make you want to upgrade. So we have an iP4S and an iP5 at home, but after the summer it will probably end up with two iP6s :-) It's just that there's no point in upgrading those MBs at all if we don't use them for work... iPads will replace them completely for entertainment :-)
I have an iPad 3. Although nothing forces me to change to a newer one, I would like to do it at least because of the lighter weight of the device and the lightning connector. I even considered the minimum before the release of the iPad Air. But unfortunately, the time when I used to throw money just for fun is over. If they would take the old one against me for an interesting price, then it could be considered. But that doesn't work very well for us yet.
It is mainly about the fact that what the iPad can do, the iPhone can also do. And if I need something more, I pull out the Mac, because I can do it much more comfortably on that :) . So the iPad will eventually become a reader of articles and possibly books, because everything else is more comfortable on a Mac with a physical keyboard. :)
I have an iPad 2 with 64GB and the only problem with it is the retina display. I would also upgrade, but I will sell it for 200-250 euros and the new one with 64GB costs almost 700 euros, so it's not worth it. At a time when a 500GB SSD disk costs around 200 euros, it makes no sense to pay the same for a 48GB iPad. I think that the basic model should have at least 64 GB at a price of 500 euros.
The author could edit the article because (I don't know if on purpose or by mistake) he is mistaking a tablet for an iPad, which is wrong. Yes, an iPad is a tablet, but a tablet is not just an iPad. The point is that iPads are falling, but tablets are increasing in sales. So, the problem is not that interest in tablets is declining, but that interest in iPads is declining. Other conclusions can then be drawn from this than those stated here.
From this we can only conclude that less mobile and stubborn opponents will finally buy a tablet for 2000k, otherwise the problem is still the same.
"Both categories have a completely different target group" and "that's why the iPhone will always be on the shopping list before the iPad" Do these two sentences contradict each other? I think so. The problem with iPad sales is precisely that they are intended for exactly the same group as iPhones and, by extension, smartphones in general, but hardly anyone can expect the owner of an Android phone to buy an iPad…. People who don't have and don't use a smartphone don't even know what a tablet is... A tablet is just an overgrown smartphone, so, in my opinion, only smartphone owners buy it, i.e. iPhone owners.... Both iPad and iPhone have the same customers, few can afford to spend +- 25k every year to upgrade both…. That's all:)