Apple to sell 107m iPads in 2016 Eager to see Apple no longer the world's biggest seller of tablets? The good news: it'll happen. The bad news: not until 2014 at the earliest. So says market watcher DisplaySearch, albeit indirectly. Today, it issued its forecast for the touch-sensitive panel business through 2016. There's more to a tablet than a touch panel …
Smart phones only became viable mp3 players well after Apple introduced the first smart phone that was actually usable. By then the iPod had owned the market and Apple were moving on. I suspect iPad will also own this market for a good 5 years until all the Korean and Taiwanese copycats get their act together.
"assuming the prices don't change and last year's average sales price of $600 per iPad remains constant"
Assuming also no iPad2, or 3 or 4. Apple's designers are bright lads, and I can with confidence predict Apple will maintain their lead for more than 5 years.
The iPad 1.2 is clearly a stop gap designed to throw the ranks of the competition into disarray- and it has done. I fully expect iPad 2 to do far more than have a svelte profile.
Like all Apple boosting stories, it's high on gushing, low on substance.
A second bumper year for iPad.. Perhaps. Personally, I'd say they have peaked already, if not, then this year.. But a third is doubtful. 4th.. Not very likely at all.
Meanwhile all the big and small makers will be chipping away steadily until it goes from Apple selling more tablets than everybody put together, to Apple selling more than any one maker(providing you only count the 9 inch ones in the same price bracket), to "well.. Apple is just one company, you can't really expect it to compete with all the dozens of other brands".. Until finally, we get the market cap argument again, assuming the share price is not down significantly by that time.
The curse of Jobs will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again. A year or two at best.. Five years.. Dream on..
Despite not having a clue how many PCs/laptops/smartphones (because tablets compete with all of those) are sold on a yearly basis, I somehow very much doubt these projections. Seems to me like they are just brainlessly projecting the current trend forward. But as I sit here writing this on my MacBook Air, the thing feeling nearly weightless on my lap, with a great physical keyboard, no need to hold the thing up or prop it up against anything, and comfortably resting my hand while my fingers navigate the brilliant trackpad, I just don't see the ergonomic benefits of a tablet for the kind of couch surfing that most of us do and will continue to do.
Which isn't to say that tablets and especially the iPad won't continue to sell by the bucketload (I will probably buy an iPad 2 soon despite having said MB Air), however I really don't see this as a 250M units product category. Before the MBA (and upcoming similarly slinky Samsung), perhaps. But now I realize that if you just slim them down to the same weight (and with similar processing power they would also have a similar if not lower cost), laptops have certain ergonomic benefits which have served them well over the years and will throw up a serious roadblock for tablet sales when they are offered in a similar weight/size.
Apple will have done for the tablet market what they did for the MP3 market, make it mass market and still sell shed loads themselves?!?!
Not a bad deal if you can get it I say. Apple may be expensive, spin doctors etc... but at least you'll have choice of a nice range of devices where everyone failed before to get the right form factor - anyone still use an MS tablet? Thought not! ;-p
The project failed. each one cost about 5k and the battery lasted about 90 minutes. The os(windows xp sp2) was not good enough for input and the lead developer left. the users ended up putting them on carts with big ass batteries, keyboard and mice. then they bitched about the 800x600 display. :-)
I am going to keep one to have on my shelf with an iPad g1 and show the young lads what a monopoly can deliver in 15 years of innovation. We had tablet extensions on windows 3.1 and it was a failure as well... :-) 1992 to 2007
As I just posted in the article about the Android tablet-with-keyboard, separating tablets from netbooks makes no sense. How do Apple's numbers look if we look at the true picture of portable computing devices?
And it's also not clear why we don't include smartphones, which are handheld touchscreen computers. Nokia beat them hands down, and they're also outnumbered by the various Android manufacturers.
If you're going to pick an arbitrary market, why not just go one further and say "Apple are the number one seller of Ipads"?
"Smart phones only became viable mp3 players well after Apple introduced the first smart phone that was actually usable."
Funny, I was playing mp3s on a bog standard cheap _feature_ phone - which I used, btw - long before Apple came along. And a device that couldn't even multitask or copy/paste doesn't count as a smartphone, let alone a useable one.
And I don't give me that stuff about the Ipod being usable. You can only use if through the appalling Itunes. When I wanted to play videos from another Ipod, I found the filenames all scrambled. With a player like the Sandisk Sansa, you just plug it in, and it Just Works.
I also get a UI, unlike the more expensive Ipod Shuffle.
For years, Nokia's smartphone market share has fallen, yet they've still (a) remained number one, and (b) had an overall increase in sales (the increase despite falling market share is due to the market overall growing in size).
Yet instead of glorious articles about how they're number one, or selling hundreds of millions, instead we just get doom and gloom, often quite offensively so, about how they're therefore a failure etc.
Here we have Apple being number one, sales increasing, yet market share is falling. Sound familiar?
Yet instead, this gets portrayed in a positive fashion. Sorry, you can't have it both ways, so I'm doing it: "Look how bad Apple are doing, their market share is falling, other companies are therefore better, Apple need to stop making bad decisions otherwise they'll end up 'failing'."
Real world, the iPad2 is turning into the hottest selling computer of all time. The 35 million unit estimate is clearly 'way low' as new iPad 2 customers are STILL lining up at Apple Stores all across the country every morning. Seen any lines like that at competitors? No. Secondary Sellers (Best Buy, Target, Walmart) have long waiting lists, and basically no product. This clearly means the estimates for 2016 might happen this year or conservatively, next year. By 2016, we will be on iPad6, and who knows what that will be like.
Combine that with the absolute blowout conditions that currently exist at Verizon for their version of the iPhone, where eight week waiting lists are happening. Android is getting clocked. If Apple brings out iPhone 5 with a somewhat larger screen, competitors may have to bulldoze their factories, like IBM did with the Peanut once upon a time in Florida. Go Apple. And don't 'cha just love imitators?
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