back to article iPad 4 is so OVER: 5 times as many fanbois now using iPad Air - survey

App design and research firm Fiksu has claimed that five times more fanbois are using iPad Airs than the iPad 4 after their release late last week. Fiksu measured the numbers of people who were using apps designed using its platform. It found that 0.88 percent of the people using its apps were accessing them on an iPad Air, …

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  1. Atonnis

    I suppose...

    .....people might've been skipping a generation?

    Or they adjusted the metrics...

    ...or someone is full of shit?

    1. jonathanb Silver badge

      Re: I suppose...

      I'm quite happy with my iPad 2. In a couple of years time I will probably replace it with the iPad 7 or whatever is out then, but the fact I don't need to buy a new one every year is for me a good thing about Apple kit.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I suppose...

        @jonathanb - "I'm quite happy with my iPad 2."

        I used my HP Win 8 convertible in tablet mode for 5 hours on a plane trip last week. Spent most of the time reformatting a 150-slide PowerPoint presentation using the full professional of MS Office 2013, capturing portions of PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro, and running a Windows-only database program. In tablet mode, it's a 13.3 inch tablet, leaving plenty of room to work in office programs. It's got a 4th generation i5 processor, so handles all tasks with ease. And I listened to music on it the whole flight. At the end of 5 hours, I still had over 60% battery (Haswell is all Intel claimed it was going to be in terms of extending battery life).

        About 6 or 7 people came over to my seat to see what device I was using, and said things like "wish my iPad could do all that" or "I'm going to get one of those instead of an iPad next time".

        1. Tiny Iota
          Windows

          Re: I suppose...

          Last flight I took I watched “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” and it seems I still had a better time than you did

        2. `TSeng

          Re: I suppose...

          Let's hope they are ready for the three-times-the-cost investment they'll have to make so they can edit Powerpoint documents...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I suppose...

            There's people who make a lot of money with PP documents - and have no problem spending 1.5/2k for a device allowing them to work on them anywhere anytime they need. Of course if all you do with a device is updating your FB page, playing a game and listening to music, your income won't allow you to buy anything more expensive....

            1. jason 7

              Re: I suppose...

              I have always said if you get rid of Powerpoint in your business, you can get rid of 25% of your clerical workforce with zero productivity impact. In fact chances are productivity will rise.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I suppose...

            @T Seng "Let's hope they are ready for the three-times-the-cost investment they'll have to make so they can edit Powerpoint documents..."

            $829 at BestBuy.

          3. JDX Gold badge

            Re: I suppose...

            >>Let's hope they are ready for the three-times-the-cost investment they'll have to make so they can edit Powerpoint documents...

            Um, the value of work done in 5 hours could easily pay for the difference in cost in a single flight, certainly a return trip. I work freelance and if I can work on a long flight or train ride, that's several hundred pounds earned as well as making the time go by faster.

        3. jzlondon

          Re: I suppose...

          6 or 7 people came over to your seat? Really? What airline were you flying?

          I suspect you may be altering the truth a little.

          Also, what you were using is called a "laptop". It may have a flippy touch screen but at 2kg it's fooling nobody.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I suppose...

            @jzlondon - "6 or 7 people came over to your seat? Really? What airline were you flying?

            I suspect you may be altering the truth a little.

            Also, what you were using is called a "laptop". It may have a flippy touch screen but at 2kg it's fooling nobody."

            It was Southwest Airlines, flying to Vegas - people walk around a lot. And people drink and talk a lot.

            It's a true convertible - you detach the monitor portion completely to be the "tablet". The monitor/tablet weighs about 2lbs - so maybe 1kg.

        4. Moeluk

          Re: I suppose...

          Well i suppose it's like when you split up with a girl, because she absolutely does your nut in...and yet a few months later you have a hankering to go back....having forgotten the nightmare that is dealing with Windows on a daily basis.

          But I do smell the faint whiff of BS in your story.

          1. Frank Bough

            Re: I suppose...

            come on, the astroturf industry needs the work

          2. Euripides Pants
            Facepalm

            Re: I suppose...

            "the faint whiff of BS"

            Faint? It's overpowerin'!

            Oh, I get it - it's so strong it makes you faint...

        5. Philippe

          Re: I suppose...

          This post can only be described as TrollTastic.

          It's a pity you weren't using a Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, and dropped a couple of FUD about HTC whilst you were at it.

          You probably could have got paid in the process.

        6. sad_loser
          Trollface

          Re: I suppose...

          I spy with my little eye, something beginning with shill....

          or have I just been trolled?

        7. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I suppose...

          Rather Sad really. The fact that you had to work while flying is something that I told my bosses a long time ago was just not going to happen unless they pay for me to fly Business class. You make me fly cattle and I don't work and the time flying is 'me' time not yours.

          It does not matter what technology you have with you. Being on the clock 24/7 not sustainable.

        8. jonathanb Silver badge

          Re: I suppose...

          If you want to play around with 150 slide powerpoint presentations, then obviously you would use a laptop, not an iPad. You use the right tool for the job.

          How long does it take to reach out to your bedside table in the morning, pick up your HP slab, and check emails and news websites on it? From putting my hand round the iPad to having El-Reg's homepage open on it takes me probably somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. On a laptop, it would take a lot longer.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I suppose...

            @jonathanb - "How long does it take to reach out to your bedside table in the morning, pick up your HP slab, and check emails and news websites on it? From putting my hand round the iPad to having El-Reg's homepage open on it takes me probably somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. On a laptop, it would take a lot longer."

            With this Haswell i5 processor, this HP does a cold start in 1.5 seconds by my watch. This thing has some serious speed. And the Intel HD 4400 graphics are more than acceptible.

        9. MD Rackham

          Re: I suppose...

          If someone came up to me and said they wished they could spend 5 hours reformatting a PowerPoint presentation, I'd be pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

        10. El_Fev

          Re: I suppose...

          Such an obvious and blatant lie lmao, your saying a bunch of strangers just randomly came up to you to comment on how impressed they were with you working on a tablet HAHAHAHA GTFO

          Yeah right because that always happens on a plane you lying git!

        11. julianh72
          Trollface

          Re: I suppose...

          The last flight I took, my company put me back in cattle class, so my company-supplied laptop stayed in its carry bag, and I got out my N7 (perfect for those tiny fold-down flaps they laughingly intend you to work on and eat your meal from!) and read books and magazines, watched movies, and played games. If my company wants me to work on flights, they can darn well put me up front in Business Class, where there is enough room to work with a "proper" laptop!

          (Oh yes - If I really feel the urge to make last minute edits on a PowerPoint presentation, Word Document, or Excel spreadsheet, I can do that with QuickOffice on the N7.)

        12. JackFrost

          Re: I suppose...

          150 pages of PowerPoint! If you can't see what is wrong with that, you should be fired!

    2. Stuart Elliott

      Re: I suppose...

      Well, I upgraded both mine and my FD's iPad 2 to 64gb Air's mine with cellular, his without, but it was purely down to being because he wanted one, and asked me to get it for him, whereupon he then said "Oh and I suppose you'll want one too ?" - well, it would have been rude not to. :)

    3. RAMChYLD

      Re: I suppose...

      Or two, or three.

      I went straight from the first gen iPad to the 4th gen. I wouldn't have even bothered if it wasn't for certain apps that I depended on ceasing to function on my first gen iPad.

      That said, I'll probably be holding off for another few gens, until apple declares the A6X obsolete and said important apps cease working again.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or maybe the number of people willing to queue out in the open in October to buy one isn't actually that representative of the popularity of a given device?

    Radical I know...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Typical Britich Reserve maybe?

    No Whoopin an a Hollering here in Blighty Chaps. Just slide into the store and exit quietly and unobtrusivley as possible to avoid detection by the Android Stasi.

    Keep Calm and Look Innocent.

    1. hammarbtyp

      Re: Typical Britich Reserve maybe?

      Just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave

  4. Big_Ted
    Paris Hilton

    Or just maybe

    Fewer people knew about their apps last year than this year and its people continueing to use them.....

    Makes more sense to me, plus surely less than 1% is open to stistical variance and so are the figures that accerate ?

  5. Mage Silver badge

    Or ..

    Perhaps their metrics are not terribly representable of the Majority of iPad users?

    1. Marvin the Martian

      Re: Or ..

      The newsflash is that people with new computers/slabs install more things than people with old ones. Yeah, who woulda thought it?

      For me, I installed 50-80 apps on my phone the first week, then deleted all but maybe 10 as well as deleting 10-20 pre-installed ones, and since then only one has been added over say a year at somebody's suggestion.

      If I had a new phone, I'd probably have another wander around the app store and/or check friends' phones for suggestions; until then, not really bothered.

  6. SuccessCase

    "The iPad Air went on sale last Friday and in London at least, the reception was muted."

    Jasper, not sure where you got your understanding of product lifecycle from. The iPad is no longer a new product category and we should expect queues for new versions no more than we expect queues for MacBook Air upgrades. Additionally you are not (excuse the phrase) comparing apples for apples because you have no idea what the initial stock situation was like. Despite frequent claims by The Register to the contrary, any company launching a new product will try to ensure there are sufficient units to match demand (both overstocking and under stocking are damaging to business - but under stocking is more damaging).

    They *would not consider for even one second*, deliberately constraining supply in an attempt to fluff up artificial impression of high demand. Doing so would only ever translate to a higher proportion of lost sales. The simple fact is, even with a well oiled supply chain, timing the building of sufficient stock of a new product is a fraught process. With the iPad Air it appears Apple have executed to plan and the message was already out well in advance that they would have adequate stock (such was not the case for the iPhone5s).

    I'm in the process of finalising testing of app and I needed a 64bit iPad ASAP. But I didn't bother to get up early and queue, or ask any of my colleagues to do the same, because it was clear there would be no rush.

    1. Steve Todd

      I popped by the Regent Street store after work on Friday to take a look first hand at the Air. The queue wasn't out on the street, but it was still more than 1/2 hour of waiting if you wanted one. It looks like they were selling steadily all day.

    2. Big_Ted

      Re The iPad is no longer a new product category............

      Or the iPhone either.

      Oh there are ques for that older product ?

      That crash you just heard was the sound of you argument........

      1. SuccessCase

        Re: Re The iPad is no longer a new product category............

        I just said the iPhone5s was supply constrained (to all accounts due to fingerprint scanner supply shortage).

        But you're right in so far as I have simplified the factors at play and even at the iPad launch the queues were comparatively muted, so it was never in the same league as the iPhone for "launch fever." Different devices engage the audience in different ways and have a different purchase profiles over time.

        Queuing for all devices varies with expectation of availability. Some devices are less prone to "peaks" at launch (the iPad always stirred less launch interest at launch than the iPhone and indeed when very first launched there were many left sitting on the shelves), there is the steadily increasing market for both smartphones and tablets which sees overall launch sales increasing, and there is a counter effect where the proportion of the market stirred to excitement at the point of launch will decrease over time as a product category matures.

        The iPhone 5c for instance, will have a profile closer to that of the iPad. Less immediate interest at launch, but comparatively the relative proportion of sales will increase compared with the 5s over the holiday season sales volume will be more steady), though of course absolute volume of sales for both will increase at this time of year.

        BTW I now have the iPad Air and I am extremely impressed by it. Sure the change is incremental, but not all incremental changes are equal. The reduced weight and thickness play directly to what the iPad is supposed to be. The performance increase doesn't matter too much for many apps, but one place where it has a very real effect is web browsing. Relative to a desktop, tablet web browsing has always had that slight performance drag. "Browsing on the couch" convenience compensated for this, but the slower performance was always a discernible factor. Now however, browsing performance truly matches that of the desktop and it's great.

        I think Apple not getting retina display resolution onto the iPad mini until this year was a big misstep and cost them. To charge a premium, it is essential to have no chinks in your armour. You have to offer premium product all round. The lower resolution display of the mini introduced a question in the mind of the buyer that should never be there for a premium product. This latest round of releases, however, is very different and hits the spot in all categories (especially since even the mini is 64bit so has jumped a generation with regard to performance relative to the bigger iPad). So it will be interesting to see how they fair.

  7. Martin Ryan

    Not so surprising

    What do you do when you buy, or upgrade to, a new iPad? You install your favourite &/or some new apps. Therefore it is obvious app usage will appear to be concentrated on the new iPad model than on the older models. After a few days of elevated app usage, a new iPad user will settle down into their long term trend. No remarkable data in this report.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Not so surprising

      I was thinking the same, though I don't know enough about the Apple App Store. Does downloading an app count as using it? Even if not, isn't it human nature to run an app once its first installed?

  8. Eradicate all BB entrants

    Nothing to do with ....

    ..... any other market factors? Did any of their clients have promotions tied into the release of the new iPad causing extra downloads/app usage? What were their client numbers when the 4 went on sale and the numbers when the Air went on sale? A wholly useless graph without context.

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. ThomH

    The iPad 4 was a soft launch

    The iPad 3 came out last March with a big press event and lots of publicity about its 'retina' screen.

    The iPad 4 came out eight months later in November, having been mentioned almost in passing at the iPhone launch with "oh, and we've added the new connector to the iPad too".

    The iPad Air has had the big keynote treatment again.

    So, yeah, 4 versus Air is technically accurate if you're asking about Apple's year-on-year health, but 3 versus Air would be more realistic, I think. Otherwise this is more like trying to determine how much Apple benefits from its usual method of product introduction.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    News flash - iPads available from non Apple Stores

    despite the spin the reg has been trying to put on sales, plenty of people have been buying them from other retailers especially with voucher offers/discounts available.

    1. Tom 35

      Re: News flash - iPads available from non Apple Stores

      What's your point?

      That's nothing new. There is a Bestbuy across the street from my office. There used to be lineups round the corner for new Apple stuff but not for the last few launches.

      The last time up I saw was for GTA, and there could be a line for Call of Duty later on Today since they have a 12:01 opening for the game. But zip for the ipad air or iphone 5s/c.

      If anything is diverting people from lining up at the Apple store* I expect it's online sales.

      *other then deciding it's not worth lining up.

    2. Philippe

      Re: News flash - iPads available from non Apple Stores

      Absolutely. If you've got the O2 Moments App on your phone, you could get 20 pounds off at Curry and PC world.

      That's a nice discount.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe only new user try Fiksu apps...

    0.88%... whoa, what a percentage! Maybe only people with a new iPad try Fiksu apps, while more seasoned users deleted them already?

  13. Mr Anonymous

    Shock Horror...

    99.12% of apple ipad users haven't bought their ipad in the last 3 days!

    1. Steve Evans

      Re: Shock Horror...

      Without knowing the actual numbers involved, this could all fall down within statistical error.

      In fact given that both the figures quoted are <1%, I think you'd be very brave to try to deduce trends and patterns of these tiny figures.

      Mr Anonymous has perhaps extracted the only meaningful information this provides.

  14. stu 4

    fah

    got the parents a hudl at the weekend (and I also admit to being an appletard generally) though for macs not tablets (I've got an old nexus 7 that still does what's asked of it)

    great little thing - fast, easy to use and setup - stuck in a 32gb micro SD with some movies on it for them, a 3 quid HDMI cable lets them plug it into their TV for iplayer, netflix (sharing my account). logged on as them, and set it all up with their mail, apps (I converted them to android phones from basic phones last year) in a few minutes.

    had a fair number of tescos ads on the homepage, but easy to remove.

    nice bright screen - nice and solid plastic that will withstand being dropped much better than an ipad.

    and all for 120 squid. bargain.

    1. chr0m4t1c

      Re: fah

      Bought my parents lunch on Sunday, 'cos they don't use the internet at all, so all tablets are useless and expensive to them.

      Nice roast with all the trimmings followed by apple pie & custard then home for an afternoon nap.

      And all for £8/head. Bigger bargain.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well I can only talk about my way of don't things but my highest "app" use on any platform is within the first week of purchasing the device/installing the OS. I'll install everything I think I may need for the first twelve months, boot them up, put in my logon details, sync accounts, etc. and then not use them for weeks or months.

    These statistics could just be people like me, they've just got their new hardware and are reinstalling and relogging onto their apps which will show as high traffic whereas iPad4 owners who already have those apps may only need/want to access them once a week or so.

  16. Alan Denman

    The honeymoon period

    It is obviously the fact that the novelty wears thin after a few weeks.

    Reality hit home hard.

  17. Ivan Headache

    No Queues?

    Perhaps, only perhaps, the fact that you no longer have to go to Regent Street to buy a new Apple product has something to do with it.

    From my house I can visit Apple stores in Watford, Shepherd's Bush, Stratford and Regent Street with train/tube journeys of approximately 30-45 minutes. Additionally I can get a bus to Brent Cross.

    The Covent Garden store is there for the tourists (the Russians etc.)

    There are so many stores now that queuing is generally unnecessary (especially in the rain and cold).

    My store of choice used to be Brent Cross but now it's Watford.

    (Oh, and I forgot, it's so easy to buy the things online too).

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