Samsung Galaxy Tab has 16% return rate, Apple's iPad just 2%

Hahahahahahahahaha!

Of the 100% of the people that lose their mind.
84% of them lose their receipt.

LOL. Perfect.

I guess some of the 84% were Christmas presents and the giver didn't forward the receipt.

I bet someone here returned theirs all.

So around 14 GTs were returned...

More specifically the lack of a market steward to provide the infrastructure and leadership Apple provides. I still think there is more potential in Playbook than Android. Android may recover if major corporation gets behind it, right now that is not Googgle.

That's because the Galaxy's interface is nothing short of a Greek tragedy....or steamy pile....whichever you prefer. Samsung needs to de-badge that POS before it tarnishes their good LCD name!

Am I the only that thinks 16% is low for the Tab and 2% high for the iPad? My reasoning is 1) people likely know the iPad much better as a product before buying, and 2) iOS for iPad, the SDK and apps were designed with the iPad display size in mind, which is not the case with Froyo.

Enough. Please stop embarrassing them any further.

Hey...in the age of Apple, no iOS = no immediate success. Clearly.

Depending on the margin of error, the iPad return rate could be "0%," or statistically insignificant. Keep in mind this survey only sampled Verizon in-store sales, which I imagine is a very, very small percentage of total iPad sales. Plus they are encumbered by the MiFi personal hotspot device, which may be a turnoff to the less techie-types, thus higher return rates.

I just found this.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/i...-and-counting/ So Jobs announced that the iPhone 4 return rate was 1.7% and the 3GS was 6%. While a phone does have a hefty data plan a cellphone is deemed a necessity these days, while tablet computers are not, though the iPad doesnt come with a data plan, except perhaps in the case you mention.

Nonsense. All manner of consumers are buying the iPad with only a vague notion of what they're getting into. I work in retail and one of the staff members from our electronics department was chatting with me about the iPad and it was painfully obvious said sales associate was rather unclear about what exactly the iPad is.

I don't doubt there are consumers buying the iPad thinking they are getting a full-function computer that just happens to come in touch-screen tablet form.

Apple is years ahead and will remain so as long as there is a dedication to pushing the envelope, so to speak, as if there were real competition.

The iPad comes with a larger screen, beats the competition on price, and has a far better OS. What it does, it does in a polished, enjoyable fashion. It has to be the most evolved, mature new-category product ever. Soon Apple will raise the bar that much more. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

"The survey found that just 2 percent of buyers returned Apple's tablet since it debuted in late October."

Maybe its early, but what am I missing here? Didn't the iPad hit the streets of the US last spring? At least that's when I bought mine.

Dont you mean Geek Tragedy

Actually Ive never used it so I cant comment but its based on Java so Im guessing its clunky and slow

The numbers mentioned here covers Verizon customers only

According to the Digital Daily, the Galaxy Tab had a 16 percent return rate ....


Ok. For a minute there I thought they were talking about rate of return..... Clearly that´s not the case.

You think consumers as a whole are just as knowledge of the iPad as they are the Galaxy Tab, because that is what I implied when I wrote, “people likely know the iPad much better as a product before buying”? If you watch TV you’ll see iPad ads. If you go to an Apple Store you see about 10 iPads out for people to experience. Where is the equivalent number of hands and eyeballs for the Galaxy Tab? I don’t think there is one.

I would be interested to find out, by way of a more extensive survey of several retail channels, just exactly how many Galaxy Tabs found their way into actual customer hands. "Quite small" doesn't tell us much.

Along those lines, more accurate real return rates for both iPad and "Gal-tab" would be interesting to know.

The ads suggest that the iPad can do oh so many things. It never brings up the matter of the iPad not exactly being a netbook in tablet form. Never comes up, nor should it.

And as for hands-on in the store. So people pick it up and play with it for a minute or two. That hardly serves to reveal all.

You are naively assuming that everyone is as computer-savvy as you are, however much that might be. Truth is that most folks barely have a clue about the computer they use. They learn just enough to do what they need to and no more.

The success of the iPad is that it does a number of useful things quite well and so most people don't mind keeping the product even once they realize it's not quite what they think it is. The competition has a long way to go to get their OS right and their products use smaller screens and are rather pricey for what you get. The iPad has an interface that is familiar to many consumers who have bought Touches by the millions.

i've used the iPad and Galaxy for about 5 minutes each in a store. the Galaxy is sold in Costco. based on that alone i'll buy the iPad

I don't buy the argument that people don't like the iPad because it's exactly like what made the tablet market a failure for the past decade.


Anyone who has a chance to test a product, decoded they want to spend $500+ on it and then has buyer's remorse is an idiot or had some other goal in mind and is likely not your average consumer.



CostCo has a lot of foot traffic. That's definitely a lot of exposure. Are there demos pretty nicely down or more inline with Radio Shack and BestBuy.

Even so, most of the (very few) Galaxy Tab buyers are Apple-haters. I'd say those 16% are the normal people who thought it would be just like the iPad but with cameras

Salesperson: "It's just like the iPad."

Customer (a week later): "Uh, no, it's not."

People may be dumb but this proves they're not that dumb.

The iPad knock-offs can't survive only by selling to anti-Apple geeks.

Eventually they may come up with tablets that are real competition, but so far, no. And they will never have an ecosystem to rival iTunes, so it ain't gonna be easy.

Yup. The Galax Tab is the perfect example of tech done for the sake of tech. A jumble of "features", including a version of Android that even Google asked manufacturers not to ship on a tablet, with no clear direction or cohesion.

I'm amazed at the number of techies who think that just because something has feature X (Android!) or isn't from company Y (Apple!) that the populace will line up to buy it.

Well, here's a shocker for the tech industry that through Microsoft has had years of peddling schlock to people and lulling the entire industry into complacency - quality matters!

The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software and most importantly the quality of the experience.

For the first time with the iOS, Apple is able to compete in new, virgin territory where the dominance of Windows is irrelevant. And they are running away with the market.

This should also re-envforce that Microsoft didn't "win" the desktop because of the clones, focusing on the developers or any of the other misappropriated reasons often attributed to them. They won by default due to mis-management at Apple in the early years of the Mac and Windows.

The whole clone market thing always was a red herring and an integrated solution is almost always better. You can see the differences in the experience between Android and the iOS devices. iOS is predictable, easy to use, fun!, very personal and above all consistent.

Android, on the other hand, is a nightmare of inconsistency from hardware, to versions deployed, to software app stores... Geeks and techies may be nonplussed by all that, but the vast majority of the human population (and thus potential customers) are non-technical and view these gadgets as tools.

Until other manufacturers not only realize that but start acting like they understand what that means, Apple has little to worry about.

Apple is successful because they pay attention to excruciating detail but do so in a way that makes it look easy. Well, as someone who works on complex projects and delivers highly polished results, such level of polish is most definitely not easy. In fact, it can often be resented which is why corporate or company culture is probably one of the most essential ingredients on delivering high quality high value products. Such efforts to produce the desire results has to be ingrained from the top down. That's why, based on their corporate history and no sign of real significant change, I don't see Microsoft or Google rising to the challenge.

Microsoft has the pieces to integrate their software and deliver a killer end to end experience - except too many of their divisions have a history of competing against themselves. Crazy! They have shown with the Zune that they can create an integrated platform. The problem is they lack the boldness to do it quickly. They will let WP7 flounder as they continue to believe the conventional wisdom that licensing software to hardware "partners" leads to more choice and greater marketshare. That's wrong on so many levels - I think it will take Apple consuming a significant chunk of the traditional desktop/laptop market to finally get more people comfortable challenging that notion. In the meantime, Apple steamrolls on with iOS - with devices that are in the netbook price point but instead of delivering a substandard traditional PC experience on cramped and underpowered hardware on OS's optimized for neither, iOS delivers an immediate, intimate and functional no-compromise experience right out of the box.

Google has no history for design or polish what-so-ever. Their perpetual beta's are the stuff of jokes because, in the end, you either step up and take ownership of a product or your just playing around. If Google cared one bit about the Android experience, they would have retained a minimum of control over the Adroid experience to ensure a base level of consistency. I really think others have nailed it when they point out that Google believed Android to be a flash in the pan and that Chrome - where total control over the software and user experience existed in the cloud - Googles cloud - would be dominant. Apple's success with the iOS proved that a local operating system is important and that - surprise! - people like having applications and their data local to them. Must have been quite a shock to the geeks at Google who assumed the cloud would take over the world. Bad assumptions like that are what happens when you do too much navel gazing and focus on what you want than what your potential customers/users want.

To me the real wild card is still HP with WebOS. They have all the ingredients. They have signaled they intend to keep the vertical stack and own the whole experience. The real question is do they have the leadership to pull it off? If Hurd was really the genesis behind HP's acquisition of Palm and now he's gone, WebOS may be stillborn without visionary leadership that is also a crucial part of Apple's success.

RIM? The reboot with QNX is going to put them at least two years behind everyone else who is at least two years behind Apple. They may be able to coast on their installed base long enough to get the Playbook and follow on BB models going, but with a new architecture comes the challenges of convincing people to write for a new platform - and if you have to do that, why wouldn't you be looking at the iOS ecosystem that has a proven track record with mature tools and a substantial installed base?

If you are looking five years out, none of the established players seem ready or capable of taking on Apple toe to toe. And most of what I discussed above is software related. I haven't even factored in the huge manufacturing advantages Apple has in securing not only dedicated assembly lines but also dedicated lines of supply for their components - and I expect them to use more of their cash horde to further strengthen their supply chain. Custom components allow Apple to further differentiate themselves in the quality of their products as well as what is critical for mobile devices - size, weight and battery life!

At this point if HP doesn't come through, it's probably going to have to be a new player like Palm was, but they are going to have to be acquired by a big boy that doesn't screw them up by acquiring them in order to get enough resources to compete agains the likes of Apple (Palm's critical failing).

Any way you slice it, all of the above is allot of if's.

There... fixed that for you.

Well it all depends on the demographic that bought the Galaxy Tab, especially now we know it didn't sell in large numbers. The first few batches of Galaxy Tabs probably ended up with big Android fans, and they won't return is because there aren't any better Android alternatives for the Galaxy Tab yet. I also see a lot of them in TV shows, where they are obviously used for product placement. Return rates in these groups will be much lower than they would be if they were all sold to 'the average consumer'. Compare this to the iPad, which is beying bought by everyone, geeks, hot girls, your mom, rich people, businesses that benefit from a tablet, etc.

Probably the Galaxy Tab stopped selling to anyone, before it sold enough units to a large enough demographic representative of people you want to sell to if you want to sell in big numbers. The return rate would probably be a lot higher if they sold more than just a few thousand to their biggest fans.

Another thing is what is left out -- a carrier contract.

AFAIK, any competitive tablets with cell radios will require a carrier contract -- or sell for a higher, unlocked, price.

In the larger scheme of things, breaking the carrier stranglehold is very significant.

Thank you Apple!

Not sure I follow your point. I wouldn't think the "necessity" of a device affects it's return rate - if my phone doesn't work or I don't like it, I can take it back and get a different one. It's no harder or easier to take a phone back than an iPad. I think the iPad return rate of 2% is probably accurate, at least when taking into consideration the margin of error and small sample size (verizon sales only). The G-tab return rate also seems appropriate, IMO. It's not higher because most people know what they're getting themselves into (or at least they are reasonably knowledgeable prior to purchase). I have to guess a 16% return rate for anything is pretty darn high.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. As much as I hate HP for the bad experiences I've had with their laptops and printers and the way they effectively killed all innovation coming from HP a few years ago, I also think their WebOS slate is going to be the tablet to watch. They might screw it up, but if they don't, and they manage to get some developer mindshare, they have all the parts required to make a successful software stack and hardware running it, to turn their WebOS slate into something useful. They have a curated platform, they know how to design and mass-produce the hardware, with Palm they got talent and experience in mobile platforms, and they have a reputation that will get themselves heard in the board rooms of big companies. I sincerely hope they don't mess up the OS or strangle it with subpar hardware, because Apple needs competition to keep improving themselves, and I'm really starting to get thoroughly fed up with Android. I think it is going nowhere, all the fandroids are now rooting for Honeycomb to somehow turn the tablet table, but from what I've seen, for now it's nothing more than an ugly, overdone skin over the current Android versions. Its success or failure will fully depend on how many good tablet-optimized apps will be made for it. We'll see.

As for RIM: I like their tablet and the fact that they are making a new OS for it, but it looks as if they are trying to use the Playbook to trick you into getting a Blackberry. With Blackberry quickly starting to lose momentum, and RIM late to the tablet game, I think they won't reach critical mass with their playbook.

This article is fresh meat.
Still, 16% is a pretty high rate of return. Particularly for a major brand like Samsung.
I wonder what the return rate was on the $150 Maylong tablet? Probably close to 100%.

The Galaxy Tab really never stood a chance of doing well. I had some time to use one and this is my opinion.

First it felt like nothing more then a big Android phone. Froyo is great on an Android phone not so on a Tablet.

Flash of course is always a feature others use to try and set it apart from the iPad. Flash content streaming on the Galaxy was really bad for some reason.

The fact that there was no Wifi only version. You had to lock into a 2 year contract. Even with the iPad I don't think the iPad would do nearly as well with a 3g only version that required everyone to get a contract.

Screen size to me was actually okay I didn't dislike the 7" screen. Screen quality however was average.

I think most people that decided to get one found out it was no different then a bigger versoin of their Android phone and it simply wasn't worth the data commitment.

I am looking forward to the iPad 2 if it has dual cams so I can video chat with family and coworkers. I would like to see a decent Android Tablet come to market but having my Evo experiment not for 7 months I have to say I am feeling very uninspired with what Android as a OS has to offer. I certainly gave it a very fair trial.

A bit peevish! But very funny! "peevishly funny!"

Made me laugh! 

It's a bit more complex than that.

At the time of the introduction of the IBM/PC in 1981, the microcomputers were just starting to get broad acceptance into the enterprise -- largely driven by VisiCalc (1979) on the Apple ][.



When IBM entered the microcomputer market, they held about 97% of the mainframe market. By introducing a microcomputer with an IBM logo, it gave an imprimatur of its use in business. A year later, Lotus 1-2-3 negated the VisiCalc advantage.

By the time the Mac was introduced in 1984, the PC and the clones were already the "standard" of the business world.


If Gary Kildall hadn't blown off IBM, likely, CP/M would have been the OS for the IBM/PC -- and Microsoft would have been left to compete with programming languages such as MS-BASIC.

As it turned out, IBM selected MS for its [quickly arranged rights to resell] DOS.

In 1982, The first clone appeared -- the Compaq.

By, IBM's mismanagement and the acumen of MS -- MS was free to sell DOS to all comers, including the clones.


The battle for the desktop was won/lost in 1981-1983 under the aegis of IBM.


When the Mac was released in 1984 (and subsequent software), it had an instant effect on the marketplace -- with instant successes in Artistic and publishing. However, it is arguable whether the Mac was robust enough to overcome the large install-base and application-base of the PC/DOS market. (including clones).

There were several fledgling graphic shells at the time for DOS-based computers -- VisiOn and Desq, to name 2.

MicroSoft released several versions of its GUI DOS shell, Windows -- eventually gaining broad acceptance with Windows 3.0 in 1990.

Certainly, Sculley's/Apple's failure to adequately protect the IP of Mac OS in dealings with Microsoft, contributed to the development of a successful Windows offering.


However. it is still arguable that the reputation of Apple as a toy (in the 1984-1990 timeframe) could have unseated the entrenched PC as a business tool.

G-Tab != G-Spot

I personally know 3 people who returned iPads and each one got another iPad (3G vs wifi or more storage space). I think this goes on a lot and between that and the margin of error, I suspect the real return rate is a "rounding error."

As for the galaxy, that number can't be right because we all know tech geeks with cargo pants have been waiting for this platform. Maybe they are on vacation or putting out IT fires. I await their buying frenzy.

(Typing this from my "unreturned" iPad.)

the costco i go to has a verizon stand and the galaxy is one of the products there. i tried youtube and couldn't get it to play full screen. the drone said that's the way it works.

I wonder what percentage of those people got a Galaxy Tab for Christmas and returned it for an iPad instead?

Verizon started selling iPads in October.