ChangeWave Research today released the results of a February survey of U.S. professionals and early-adopter consumers showing that even before the unveiling of the iPad 2 customers were continuing to turn to the iPad when considering tablet purchases. According to the report, 82% of surveyed customers who were planning to purchase a tablet were looking to acquire an iPad, with competitors such as the Motorola Xoom, Research in Motion BlackBerry PlayBook, and Samsung Galaxy Tab all barely registering in the 3-4% range each.
Apple's iPad also continues to enjoy stellar consumer satisfaction ratings, with 70% of users registering as "very satisfied" and an additional 25% pegging their position as "somewhat satisfied".
In taking a broader look at tablet customers' buying preferences, the survey also found that tablets, dominated by the iPad, continue to eat into planned purchases of devices such as eReaders and portable PCs, with 17% of tablet-owning respondents reporting that they put on hold or canceled the purchase of a Kindle because of their tablet purchase. Netbooks and traditional notebooks also took a hit, with 10-11% of tablet purchasers reporting that they had delayed or canceled planned purchases in each of those categories of devices.
Finally, ChangeWave surveyed customers planning to purchase an iPad in the near future about wireless service, finding that 24% of customers planned to purchase AT&T service, compared to 17% planning to use Verizon service and 27% opting for Wi-Fi only. An additional 30% were undecided. Notably, Verizon's solid appeal was present even before Apple unveiled the new iPad with built-in support for Verizon's network. With the original iPad, customers looking to use Verizon service have been limited to Wi-Fi iPad models paired with MiFi hotspot devices.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...