Android overtakes iPad in tablet race

What's funny about the iPad mini, at least from my perspective, is that my daughter made that her first savings goal and achieved it with impressive speed. And she uses the device constantly. In fact among carrots and sticks with her, the most effective stick is to put the iPad in timeout.

Her coaches use it to record video of her routines for instant feedback in practice. She checks for her homework on learning point (I do still have unfond memories of learningpoint/blackboard). We are military, and she keeps up with friends from all over the country. Via Wi-Fi she can call her Grammy, mom or me. In some ways it is more functional then my full-size retina iPad. Except I really like having a full-page PDF on the iPad.

“The 7.9-inch iPad mini represented about 60% of total iPad shipments and 49% of iPad-related device revenues in the quarter.”

That's from the quoted report.

Steve Jobs drew his own red-line over 7 inches being too small for tablet, due to the size of hands. I've heard that parroted back at me by apple fans a few times. This is why the ipad-mini is decidedly not a 7" screen, but an 8" (7.9) screen.

Here's Tim Cook still talking about how horrible 7" tablets are in 2012. http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/tim-cook-we-will-never-make...

Apple in general doesn’t report how different models of a product sell. That it also didn’t for the iPad mini doesn’t indicate anything. (The only exception I can think of is the iPod touch were Apple also didn’t report any specific numbers but at least said that most iPods sold were iPod touches. I think it’s quite obvious why Apple felt compelled to be a bit more specific in this case, what with the iPod touch running iOS and being part of the ecosystem, unlike all other iPods. Other than that Apple will report how many portable Macs they sold, how many desktop Macs they sold, how many iPods they sold, how many iPads they sold and how many iPhones they sold.)

That Business Insider article is pure bologna, no doubt written by someone who is quite clueless about how Apple typically reports its numbers. You can go back through apple.com/pr and look at everything they typically release after launches and Apple’s pattern becomes quite clear.

(I also think it’s general consensus that the iPad mini is quite successful. Which is not saying anything about hypotheticals. If you measure Apple against the size of the market they clearly could sell more. Can they, do they have to, do they want to and can Apple’s iPad business still be considered a success if it doesn’t are then, I feel, the most relevant questions.)

> A failure by Apple's standards might be a runaway success by most other's standards, but the mini clearly isn't flying off the shelves

I worked within a flagship Apple Store during the mini launch and the after, and I saw this exact thing happen first hand, especially around Christmas. We called it the year Apple ruined Christmas because the demand far exceeded the stock and many weren't able to give the Christmas gifts they were hoping for.

Although I no longer work directly with the sales, I would guess the mini accounts for about 30-45% of iPad sales?

The lack of retina display really dampened things. The fairly rapid launches of 3 and 4 probably also hurt it. I think a model with retina display, where you have a market with a 12+ month old iPad, will do well.

"If so, this might be a situation where an under-served market allowed an agile opponent to bust into a market firmly held by a single dominant incumbent!"

This is silly. The reason Android sells more tablets, globally, is the same reason Android sells many more phones: Apple doesn't compete in the bottom of the market.

Apple makes tablets that sell for $329 to $929. If you limited yourself to that market you'd find that Apple sells the overwhelming majority of such tablets.

If OTOH you limited your comparison to "tablets under $300" (an actual "hot link" at Amazon) you'll find that zero of these tablets are from Apple and hence Apple's market share for this part of the tablet market is a (perhaps shocking) 0%. You'd find a few windows and linux tablets but mostly 95%+ Android tablets (including forks).

This does not mean Apple has been outfoxed by a more agile opponent. Apple presumably could ship a lower quality tablet at every price point from $50 to $250 with their eyes closed.

I'm sorry, but that BI reference is an absolute joke.

You think Apple underestimated the appeal of 7-inch tablets? Is that so? Do you really believe that people are saying "Man, this 7-inch is so much better than a 7.9-inch" They're probably not. If consumers are buying other tablets it's likely due to price.

In addition, the report itself said that “The 7.9-inch iPad mini represented about 60% of total iPad shipments and 49% of iPad-related device revenues in the quarter.” That should tell you that the mini IS more popular than the larger iPad.

I really have to call you out on the "specs were disappointing and offered questionable value" point you made. I, myself own an iPad mini. In fact, I sold my larger iPad and solely use the mini now. I can't tell you how many friends pick up my mini and say "oh my God, I want this." Not a single one of them have said "How much RAM does this have?" or "What's the resolution of the screen?" Those are both things that I don't believe the general consumer care about. They want it to "just work" and the iPad mini does that very well.

Finally, the report doesn't go into detail as to what they define as an Android tablet. Is it a cheap $79 dollar Walmart tablet (http://www.walmart.com/ip/Nextbook-7-Tablet-with-8GB-Memory-...)? Is it Kindle Fire's, Nooks, and Nexus 7's? It's likely that they're considering all of them and to that I would say that not all tablets are created equal. In fact, just like the smartphone market, there's enough evidence out there that suggests that nearly 50% of "Android smartphones" are actually shitty phones running Android, nearly incapable of accessing apps and can barely access the internet.

The point of all this is to say that that "report" is pretty deceiving and doesn't paint the whole picture. I dunno about you but I almost never see anyone using a tablet other than an iPad. I see more e-ink Kindles than I see true Android tablets.

it makes sense if you think of them as software ecosystems.

Because iOS is just a an OS that runs on a very limited number of tablets because of a decision by iOS's owners. There's absolutely no reason that iOS couldn't be just another tablet OS.

The comparison isn't of the hardware product, it's of the operating systems. Developers want to know what the installed base and rate of change for users of each OS is so they know the target market size to make decisions like which OS to develop an app for first. Consumers want to know what other consumers are doing because they don't want to get stuck with a device (like a Blackberry) that the market is abandoning and no one is making third party apps for.

What's to understand? How many other companies make tablets with iOS?

My anecdote, I know lots of people who own some kind of Android tablet but no iOS device and lots of people who own iOS devices who own at least one Android tablet.

Keep in mind that the high end Nooks and Kindles are Android tablets.

But it is important to mention these things. It's needed as a counter weight to the message that was spread not long ago by people like Gruber, "there is no tablet market, only the ipad market"

Living in USA I assume.

I think you're supposed to have moved on to "But nobody uses their Android tablet, they are all sitting in closets" line.

This is a joke right?

Adobe no longer (over a year now!) supports Flash for Android, so there's no Flash support there either.

easy to take the lead with cheap, shitty tablets? why don't you put out a cheap, shitty product and tell me how that goes.