Apple Projected to Lead Tablet Market Through 2013 as Rivals Stumble

It could also be that Apple gets a stranglehold on the Tablet market like they did MP3 players with the iPod and end up with a 90% share. The remaining 10% being parents/grandparents thinking the cheaper one is just as good and that little Timmy won't notice the difference:rolleyes:. Oh and of course die hard Apple haters.

Wow, nice graphs tend to make an educated guess seem like it was real research, don't they?

iPad is popular and will continue to be for at least a few years into the future.

Thank god we have analysts to tell us this!

Wow! They project over 100 BILLION iPads by 2015? :eek: Gotta go get me a few thousand...

Unless my math is wrong (which since it's late in the day, it could be), shouldn't the Title be in "Thousands of units" not "Millions of units?"

I think Apple would love for 2011 to be around 50,000 - Million units, instead of what is really 50,000 - thousand units.

I wonder what these charts looked like with the ipod first came out. Did they think that, after 6 years, Apple would have only 46% of the market, then, too?

$829 is for the top of the line model. The starting price for iPad's is $500.

As for things that you can do on an iPad vs. a laptop.

Try sitting on the throne while posting on Facebook with a laptop. Try surfing for hours without having to remember to plug in your laptop. Try reading a novel in bed with a laptop. Try watching a Netflix movie in bed with a laptop.

All of those things are dones millions of times by millions of people. No one is saying that a laptop can't do anything an iPad can. The point is whether you really want to do those things on a laptop. It's all about the size and form factor.

I for one never said tablets have no place nor offer unique benefits to users, my argument is that whatever those things are, it's not much.

If someone felt spending at least $500 on a gadget just so they can sit on the toilet to post on FB, I could technically do the same with a smartphone... but I get your argument about the size advantage of a tab over a phone. However I read somewhere that 1 in 3 tablet owners do spend time on the toilet using them, which disgusts me.

Using a tab would be easier in bed than a laptop but I think we're nit picking a tad on that topic. It would be like someone trying to argue how 1 brand of laptop is better than another simply because the onboard NIC of the 1st machine supports packet injection whereas the other does not. Not everyone will stand to benefit from having that sort of feature and those that do will be a very small minority.

The overwhelming aspect of a tablet is that it's easier to carry around and people like the instant on and off nature of using them.

The wannabes will continue to fall all over themselves trying to clone iPad. There's simply too much money to be made. Or so they think.

If and when Amazon releases their own iPad clone, it will crush all other iPad clones. Amazon has hundreds of millions of accounts, plenty of hardware design and manufacturing experience with Kindle, deep experience with enterprise software infrastructure development, vast customer-facing retail experience, and plenty of digital content to sell. Few if any of Apple's current and future rivals have more than one or two of those assets. Amazon has it all.

Amazon currently has their own Kindle Store, which could evolve the way the iTunes Music Store evolved into today's iTunes Store and App Stores. And Amazon has that critical intangible: mindshare. They're a go-to online resource for hundreds of millions of consumers, just like Apple is.

What Amazon lacks is an internal OS and apps group. And if Amazon goes with Android for their iPad clone, they will forever lack those assets. Their iPad clone won't be a "platform," in the sense of a "mobile computing device." It will simply be a sales tool plus a few connected apps (maybe email, browser, twitter client.) And therefore it should be free. That will certainly help to kill off the rest of the iPad clones.

This chart must have been done before HP decided to kill off it's tablet and exit the PC business. As a large, successful, technologically superior company, if HP can't be competitive in the tablet market, it casts doubt on every other major player except Apple. This concern may have limited impact on individual buyers but will have a major effect on corporate sales. As an example, earlier this week United Airlines announced that it is buying 11,000 iPads for its pilots. Other airlines are following suit. Similar purchases are happening in health care and other industries. Once this avalanche starts, Apple's competitors will have an even more difficult time in keeping up. Given that iOS and Android are very different operating systems, no large company is going to by thousands of iPads and then buy additional units that are any but iPads.

My take is that right now the chances between iPad 90% dominance and the iPad merely being the big dog among a bunch of fairly equivalent products is a coin toss ... but as early as the end of this year could certainly firm up projections. If I was forced to place a bet, I would bet on the 90% dominance scenario.

As to the smartphone market, I'll hold off my predictions until 6 months after the October introduction of the iPhone 5 and less expensive new iPhone 4 become available on all of the U.S. networks. At that point, I suspect that the only thing that will hold iPhone sales and market share back will be Apple's manufacturing capabilities, not the presence of Android phones.

I think that is a safe assumption. Even if another tablet takes off, it will take time to put a dent in iPad market share.