Behind the iPad’s sluggish sales

By | April 25, 2014

Sameer Singh offers some possible reasons for the fall in iPad sales: 

Pocketable vs. Tablet Computing | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh: “With this background, the sudden decline in iPad sales may have been caused by a combination of the following factors:

  • Most high-end consumers who need iPads already own them (and as some analysts have pointed out, replacement cycles are long) 
  • Large screen smartphones have made media tablets somewhat redundant, i.e. the iPad is no longer a ‘necessary’ purchase for ‘phablet’ owners 
  • The iPad is priced out of the market segment that still finds media tablets ‘necessary’ 
  • Upmarket movement is limited because tablet use cases still haven’t evolved to cannibalize more productivity-related computing tasks (I may have overestimated the pace at which this would occur)”

To which I’d add: 

The iPad is in some ways closer to a PC than a phone in its utility vs luxury ratio. People upgrade their phones because they’re visible accessories, something that says something about the person holding it. Computers have barely hit that bar, and maybe iPads — especially since users usually cloak them in a stand/cover — don’t quite make it either. So unless there’s a really compelling performance/spec reason to upgrade, most don’t bother.

I’ve not seen data on this, but anecdotally most people I know get an iPad and then settle, rather than upgrading when the next one comes out. Of course the lack of telco subsidy for most iPad purchases adds to this. 

It’s not that iPad isn’t a great idea, but it turns out that the smarter move in a way has been to increase the size of the phone (phablet) rather than shrink the size of the computer (the iPad), at least in terms of getting people to upgrade. 

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