iPad's Share of Tablet Market Hits 68% in 2Q 2012
On the heels of Apple's earnings release yesterday in which the company announced a record 17 million iPads sold during the second calendar quarter of 2012, research firm Strategy Analytics has published its estimates of the total global tablet market for the quarter. According to the report, Apple captured 68.3% of the market, up from 62% in the year-ago quarter and the company's highest share in nearly two years.
Apple shipped a robust 17.0 million iPads worldwide and maintained its strong market leadership with 68 percent share during the second quarter of 2012. Apple continued to shrug off the much-hyped threat from Android and the iPad’s global tablet share is at its highest level since Q3 2010. [...]
Despite high expectations for companies like Amazon, Samsung, Acer and Asus, the Android community has yet to make a serious dent in Apple’s dominance of the tablet market. Unspectacular hardware designs, limited uptake of cellular models and a modest number of tablet-optimized services have been among some of the main reasons for Android’s mixed performance so far.
Google's Android platform actually kept pace with the overall market's 66.8% growth, enabling it to hold steady with 29.3% of the market. Apple's 83% growth instead came at the expense of smaller players such as Microsoft, which saw its share of the market fall from 4% to 1.2% as the company has yet to roll it out its major tablet effort with Windows 8.
Apple's continued strength in the tablet market comes even though a number of observers have predicted an erosion of its dominant position amid increasing numbers of low-cost Android tablets. But with Apple riding high on the launch of the new third-generation iPad just prior to the start of the second quarter, Apple is improving its position in the market. With rumors of an "iPad mini" coming later this year, Apple could further solidify its leadership position by competing more closely on price with some of the recent high-profile Android entrants such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's just-introduced Nexus 7.
Popular Stories
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 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 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 ...
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
No retail chain stockpiles millions of iPads. If they are being shipped, they are being sold.
While we were visiting him I told him and my mother-in-law that he should get an iPad 2 with WiFi+3G for $529. We cancelled his over-priced Verizon plan and ordered the iPad for him with next-day shipping. I spent some time and set him up on Facebook, iMessage, iCloud email and such (also restricted a few items like deleting apps to avoid accidents). I also set up some church-related apps so he could read the scriptures or the upcoming sunday school lesson. And made it so he and my mother-in-law could track each other's locations with "Find my Friends".
Now he is messaging the family pretty regularly. He uses the iPad at church. He is checking out pictures his niece, kids and grandkids post to Facebook. He is emailing as well and he has a constant 3G connection built into his iPad with no fussing around. What's more, his data plan only costs $20 per month for 1GB of data (4 times as much as his USB stick). So now he actually uses the data he pays for and he pays less for it.
He's an old guy who's not much on technology so I told him he had 14 days to return the iPad if he did not like it or could not figure it out. My mother-in-law went back to visit him yesterday but said there was no way he was going to return the iPad. I doubt we could pry it out of his hands. That is what is magical about the iPad and why it is selling so well -- it is powerful enough for experienced users but basic enough that anybody can use it.
I’m more interested in:
Actual Sales to Consumers
Minus
Returns/Exchanges
Multiplied by
Hours of actual usage
The iPad may have 2/3 of what goes out of factories and sits on shelves or in storage, but in people’s hands? Actual usage? There is no way 1/3 of tablets I see in the world are non-iPads, even if you count dedicate e-ink readers as tablets (and those are by far the most common non-iPad I see).
In fact I’ve only met three actual Android tablet owners. One had a cheapy small one but wished he could afford an iPad. One had a full size tablet but it broke down, so he showed us a slideshow of how awesome it was... using his iPad. One paid through the nose to get a Xoom from eBay that doesn’t do all that much and so is getting replaced soon... but at least they avoided that Apple logo they hate so much! Money well spent, surely.