Apple announces 3M sales of iPad mini, fourth-gen iPad - Page 3

They have never releases an iPhone and iPhone mini at the same time so you can't say that Apple would break up sales for a launch of two new items within the same category. They announced the unit sales of the new iPad products released last Friday. That's all there is and it goes along with their history of announcing a new product's sales. There is precedent for two new iOS-based devices launched at the same time so claiming Apple is being sneaky or lying needs to be backed up with some evidence.

Seriously, why ignore Apple's long standing pattern of only releasing one iPhone and one iPad at a time? Surely you have to see how releasing two new products within a category is different and yet you want to force some fuzzy accounting onto something that has no history unless you look upon it with blinders.

On top of that, there is nothing that points to the iPad mini sales being a flop. Every string you pull implies it's the iPad (4) that is being pulled up by this simply announcement of the new iPad products launched this weekend.

 

I'm not disagreeing with your general thrust here, but there is a further consideration when you are talking about how many went "to each country" (for sales), in that I have yet to hear of anyone outside of the USA that was able to get in on the first wave.  I and several others I know for instance, ordered within the first minute of availability and yet, seemingly automatically, were given a two to three week delivery date.  

 

I'm fairly certain that however many iPad minis were actually made for the release week, all of them were sold within the borders of the USA with very few exceptions.  

 

Either that or they picked one other country (like the UK or Germany as they do sometimes), to share in the release stock.  Most of that long list of countries won't be getting a single iPad mini until late November AFAICS. 

Where did he say 10" is the minimum size for tablets?
Edited by SolipsismX - 11/5/12 at 8:07am

 

Right, he said that 9.7" was the minimum size for usable tablet apps. Never said tablet apps couldn't be made smaller.

ROTFLMAO

 

Despite your 5000+ posts, I can only conclude that you haven't been watching Apple very long. When have they EVER broken out individual product sales? The iPad mini isn't a new product line. It's just another iPad. And within any particular product line (iPods, MacBook Pros, etc) Apple seldom (never, I think) provides a breakdown of individual model sales. Why would one of the world's most secretive companies want the competition to know the breakdown of iPad vs iPad mini sales?

 

Not really. 

 

They've announced the sales of the product they released: the new iPad. What is the value in breaking down sales by screen size? 

 

When they brag about sales of the iPhone, or the iMac, do they state which screen size sold better?

If you're going to claim that they lied about 34 countries for the release weekend you'll have to back that up. But why would they do that? If they had so little stock or knew the demand for the US, or US and UK was enough to sell all the units they had then why would they add 32 to 33 more countries? It makes no sense.

"There are clear limits of how close you can place physical elements on a touch screen, before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps."  - SJ

 

... and the Mini is not a 7" tablet. The Mini was specifically presented as not being a 7" tablet.

 

I think you're being overly defensive here.  I see you accusing others on the same thread of saying that "the iPad mini is a flop," or something similar and them denying it.  Now you are accusing me of the same thing and I can't see anything I've written that implies this at all.  

 

Only an idiot would think that the iPad mini is a "flop" or anything of the sort.  I think you're seeing this desire in me, and in others when it doesn't actually exist.  People are simply arguing that it's unusual for Apple not to break out the numbers of a just released, new product.  It is.  

Well, according to this report on the german web page n-tv.de IDC does so:

In the report they are claiming that Apple has just 50% of the tablet market and 14% of the smart phone market (world wide). 

And they claim these numbers are not devices sold but devices in use.

However they do not link to the IDC report!

Find the report here via Google translate:

http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.n-tv.de%2Fwirtschaft%2FAndroid-rueckt-aufs-Ipad-vor-article7660456.html

 

I have no idea how they get those numbers!

 

They wouldn't have to technically "lie" for what I said to be true.  They simply said that preorders were going to be available in those 34 countries.  They were.  

 

It could also simply be a result of how they have their ordering system set up.  A glitch, as it were, wherein all the US preorders got to the post faster.  

Right, it's presented as a 7.9" tablet, which tends to fall under the 'minimum size' when 10"/9.7" is considered that.

http://bgr.com/2012/09/24/iphone-5-launch-sales-2012/

Well, the question should be, how many of the iPad 4 sale is coming from a returned iPad 3? Given lot's of stores give 30-day return, and given Apple was selling around 5MM iPads a month last quarter, this has to be a concern. 

 

No.

And what other new iPhone was launched at the same time? None!

They have updated MBAs at the same time in the past. Since they have different display sizes find me where Apple broken down sales of 11" and 13" MBAs.

 

SJ might still have thought that the 7.9" compromises a "great" tablet app... but he would probably have stated that he was talking about 7" tablets... not 7.9" which is a totally different ball of wax.

Now you're being dense, the exact quote is "10" screen is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps".

 

Now that those great tablet apps have been created, it turns out they work great on an 8" 4:3 tablet as well.

They've been ramping up production for at least two months, have opened sales for a new product in 3.4x more countries than there next largest open weekend rollout, yet we're to believe they only had 950,000 iPad minis available for sale. Nothing about that says success. Just because you're not using the word flop everything you're saying points to it being a production, marketing, and overall stupidity in how Apple is being managed.

Still well short of 10"

Apple is clearly in some sort of panic mode. Some of their decisions lately seem a bit odd? First they call the iPad 3 the "new" iPad then they go back to numbering it iPad 4 but release it way too soon, all because it is the holiday season and Microsoft and Google are launching new tablets. Then in the midst of this crisis they fire their top iOS guy. Then they early release the iPad mini before they have enough made and no cellular option ready. Meanwhile they have dozens of lawsuits going on around the globe and to top it off, a falling out with their primary supplier. They have a lot of irons in the fire. 

They will say that anything less than their estimate of 3 million Minis is a fail. Not Minis and 4s

The iPhone 5 launched alone. Find a prior major launch with several new items/models for comparison

More creative, hell no

More full of shit, hell yeah

Liar liar pants on fire. If you are going to make a claim that it's an exact quote at least include the exact sentence not one you truncated.

So he thought that they couldn't go less than 10" (note that the iPad started off less than 10") and they found a way to make the device feasible without hurting the user experience much or at all. People can't have an opinion based on current info and then change their mid when new info is presented?

Scenario:

Let's recap what else he stated...


That's for a 7" 16:9 tablet whilst the iPad mini is an 8" 4:3 tablet. That means it has a display area about 40% larger than the tablets he was comparing to. Did Apple make a 7" 16:9 tablet? Do you think Apple will make a 7" 16:9 tablet? If they do you can say Jobs was wrong.

Then he went on to say...


Which one of the 7" tablets shipping at the time were successful? If you said anything other than none of them you're wrong.

Based on? Some unnamed source as reported by some analyst?

Apple certainly didn't say how many units went to the stores, could be more, could be less

Given that 5th ave easily pushes 500k and up units during a launch when there hasn't been a disaster in the area less than a week before I'd say this was not a shabby launch. I suspect that online and in store sales on the Mini will be slow but steady for the rest of the month and a bit more but still steady when holiday shopping ramps up.

They're the world's biggest tech company, so course they have a lot of irons in the fire.

 

And I don't see anything odd about anything you've mentioned. Do you think that the iPad Mini was something they just threw together at the last minute? This thing has been in development for at least as long as the iPhone5

 

And the new management line up makes a lot more sense to me.

I'm not exactly sure what you two are debating anymore ...

I think SJ was right, and the 10" iPad is the optimal tablet experience. Having used a mini, it fails for a number of things that are a breeze to do on the iPad, in particular text editing is excruciating.

The 7" tablet appears to be a compromise. Just like the 13" MacBook Air is a compromise to the 15" MBPro. You get what you pay for. The mini is an entry tablet device into the iPad ecosystem, but is not as good for certain things as the full sized iPad.

I was among the first to cite Jobs quotes on this, and was slammed by all kinds of people saying Jobs just changed his mind "get over it". Well he didn't just change his mind, now that I see what Apple has done. What they did was release a more affordable model, after they proved their point with the iPad and ran away with the market for touch tablet computing. And a model that is better suited for certain tasks like an e-reader. So when people buy it, they accept the compromise for price or size, just like they accept the compromise when they buy an iPod Touch over an iPhone or iPad -- and I fully expect the mini to replace the Touch, maybe even by next year. Because they know it isn't the iPad, which is sitting right there next to it in the store, and they know the value the iPad offers., which is why they are in an Apple Store in the first place ...

I don't think this negates anything Jobs said. Anything smaller than 10" is still less than optimal for the apps written for the iPad, especially productivity apps like Pages, Numbers, Safari, Mail, etc. as well as the gestural interfaces. Of course they are still usable on the mini, just like they are on the iPhone, but the experience is less than optimal on both devices. But there is no denying the mini rules as an e-reader due primarily to weight. Other articles such as the physicians expectations demonstrate its superior attributes in that application, and more than likely apps will be tailored to that form factor size as it begins to take off. In fact I would expect that developers may eventually write the apps to take advantage of the two different sizes with the flip of a virtual switch in settings, to optimize the experience on each tablet.

 

... and yet, still much greater than 7".

The nerds they be a ragin' everywhere this morning. They just can't stand when Apple has a successful launch.

 

I think Apple is in for a monster holiday quarter. iPhone 5, Mini and iPad '4'. Not to mention new Macbooks and iMacs. The only thing that could limit their sales is how fast they can produce devices.

9.7" is short of 10" so I guess Jobs was saying the iPad wasn't a great tablet¡

 

The fact that SJ never ever said that Apple would not build a smaller tablet than the original 9.7" size.

It falls just short of that "great" tablet app experience...

Then you haven't seen this thing called the iPhone. It is just as reactionary as the Mini.

The catch is that Apple doesn't 'react' by doing the same cheap shite. They not race to the bottom, but rather create something of quality even pricing it for that and is sells. Showing the other side that cheap plastic, etc isn't enough.

It does make it much more of a consumption device compared to the iPad. Even with the 11" MBA compared to the 17" MBP the keyboard still has the same size keys.

If you want to claim you didn't expect to see Apple announce launch sales for the Mini I think you're not being honest IMO. 

So what if he did. The man is dead. What he said or did or did not no longer really matters if Tim Cook disagrees and Sir J is willing to back him up.

Read "analyst" estimate that the mini accounted for 2 million of the 3 million. If so, that was an amazing weekend.