Apple's iPad is propping up a collapsing tablet market
Apple's iPad now commands half of the US tablet market, as it saw more than 20% growth in Q1 2023 year-over-year, while all other vendors declined.
Apple's range of iPads
Recently, Canalys claimed that Apple more than doubled its iPad sales in China in Q1 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. Now the same research firm reports that US iPad sales in the same period were dramatically better than for any other tablet.
While noting that US desktop and laptop sales declined 28% in the same period, Canalys says tablet sales avoided a steep drop. "Tablets performed better, with shipments dropping just 7% to 10.8 million units," it says, "largely driven by Apple's strong iPad performance."
In Q1 2022, Apple shipped approximately 4.5 million iPads, while in Q1 2023, it shipped 5.4 million. That's an annual growth of 20.5%, and saw Apple's share of the market rise from 38.6% to 50%.
Source: Canalys
The second most successful tablet firm was Amazon, but its annual growth declined 25.7% as it sold 2.04 million tablets compared to 2.7 million in Q1 2022.
According to Canalys, Samsung is in third place with sales of 1.77 million tablets for a decline of 19.6%.
The smaller player TCL managed to see only a 0.9% decline between the quarters, but Microsoft's tablet sales were down 30%. Together, all other tablet vendors had a 40% decline.
Canalys does not break down its figures into different models of iPad. Between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, Apple released a new 10th-generation iPad, plus a 4th-generation 11-inch iPad Pro, and a 6th-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Read on AppleInsider
Apple's range of iPads
Recently, Canalys claimed that Apple more than doubled its iPad sales in China in Q1 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. Now the same research firm reports that US iPad sales in the same period were dramatically better than for any other tablet.
While noting that US desktop and laptop sales declined 28% in the same period, Canalys says tablet sales avoided a steep drop. "Tablets performed better, with shipments dropping just 7% to 10.8 million units," it says, "largely driven by Apple's strong iPad performance."
In Q1 2022, Apple shipped approximately 4.5 million iPads, while in Q1 2023, it shipped 5.4 million. That's an annual growth of 20.5%, and saw Apple's share of the market rise from 38.6% to 50%.
Source: Canalys
The second most successful tablet firm was Amazon, but its annual growth declined 25.7% as it sold 2.04 million tablets compared to 2.7 million in Q1 2022.
According to Canalys, Samsung is in third place with sales of 1.77 million tablets for a decline of 19.6%.
The smaller player TCL managed to see only a 0.9% decline between the quarters, but Microsoft's tablet sales were down 30%. Together, all other tablet vendors had a 40% decline.
Canalys does not break down its figures into different models of iPad. Between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, Apple released a new 10th-generation iPad, plus a 4th-generation 11-inch iPad Pro, and a 6th-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Apple likes to charge premium pricing and the now iOS developers think everyone wants to pay them annually for their work. I have less and less reason to purchase an iPad anymore. I'm struggling to find reasons to continue to invest in iPad OS. A Mx based 12" Macbook would potentially obliterate any need I have for an iPad.
It's been a nice run but Tablets "feel" like a market that has passed its zenith.
Web development? Nope. App development? Not really. Network engineering? Nope. Control of industrial machinery? Not really. Building non-iPad software? Nope. Essentially anything outside of Apple's iPad ecosystem is a no-no. Yes great you can use FCP on it now. No one in their right mind actually would however, when a Mac can do it with 10% of the effort required to navigate the iPad UI. When using an iPad I feel like I have to put in the same effort to get the UI to do what I want as I do in Windows, whereas everything is effortless on the Mac.
Aside from that, the multitasking UI is still unbelievably clunky. It needs real, overlapping windows rather than full-screen everything and constant clumsy gestures to navigate around.
P.S. I also have an 11 Pro iPhone. It also shows no signs of going away anytime soon. It also will be four years old this fall, and shows no signs of going away, barring an accident, and it to will make it to six or seven years of service, cost too much same answer hell no.
Private party resell value still very good, younger relatives asking me. ‘When are you going to upgrade?” Can I have your iPhone or iPad. Money well spent.
I have an iPad Pro 12.9 and it has pretty much replaced the MacBook Pro as a mobile device - the MBP is essentially a desktop that could be used as a laptop if need be, connected to an Apple Studio and a set of HomePods for audio.
The list of things you can do with a Mac that cannot be done with an iPad Pro gets shorter every month.
For the overwhelming majority of people, a good iPad is all they need.
I have an M1 iMac, but for email, browsing, photos, TV, production of our local area 50 page magazine, finances, recipes, family history, task manager, reading PDFs, “sheet music” for my choir, wine tasting notes, spreadsheets for utilities and personal expenditure and file storage it’s my main device by a mile. My iMac is certainly better for some of those tasks, but the speed of my 2018 iPad Pro still surprises me and it’s so convenient to lay back on the sofa and do it and I can slip it in a shoulder bag!
That said I think a big overhaul of iPadOS is due that will change the abilities of the Pro if not all iPads going forward. I mean they will need it for xrOS anyway and the iPad is the prefect mass platform for the sandboxed but general purpose computing platform that replaces MacOS eventually. Hopefully 2023 will be year of the "App specific compiler extension" then the gloves really come off.
But from a user and programming standpoint, touch and desktop programs work differently, Microsoft seems to be doing the meat cleaver approach with the Surface, and Apple seems to be more careful, probably because they actually have a successful tablet market to sell to. I think a larger screen iPad would force Apple to coalesce the two form factors into one OS?
I have seen a lot of Apple fans grow disillusioned with the company here on this forum. Doesn't make them trolls though.
I use iPadOS daily for work - sometimes literally all day - and its multitasking features are dramatically better than macOS. I'm not talking about Stage Manager, which won't run on my 6 year old iPad Pro and looks like an attempt to mollify the "we want to overlap" crowd while satisfying no one -- but the standard split view / slideover / PiP thing. It's seamless and fluid even on an older ipad. Apps can be quickly swapped out, merged, blown back up to full screen, or rotated in slideover., and are quickly accessible via the slide-up dock or the slideover multitasking view. Dozens of overlapping windows would just create an unusable mess on a small screen with large UI elements (which are a necessity on a tablet because of the touch interface). And firm limits on the size and position of apps means a consistent, predictable interface with a minimum of manual management required.
There are of course plenty of things that are better done on a Mac, but TBH at least in my field those are mostly things that either require more screen real estate that you can expect on a tablet, require too much of the hardware, or things the app developers left out of their iPad versions, more because it costs time and money and the features are esoteric or seldom used, and less because of OS limitations. Apple could ship an iPadOS version of Xcode, or put a Developer menu in Safari for iPad; Adobe could implement all the missing features of Photoshop and Illustrator and make a tablet InDesign; they just haven't chosen to, so I'm stuck spending 10% of my work day on a very nice Mac using very sophisticated apps in a very clunky, old fashioned desktop multitasking paradigm
That may be your opinion, but it is not fact. All that slide over, split view, PiP stuff is far from fluid, and that is my point. It's clunky and Apple's alternative paradigm for their stubbornness in not allowing overlapping windows. Click an App on MacOS, and the window is there to position as you please. A new Pages window opens by default to the left of the display giving you room for Safari on the right. It takes 3-4 seconds to adjust their size if needed. iPad is a fudge of swipes drags and prods on invisible handles where multitasking has been shoehorned in. The sluggish-feeling animations don't help - Apple did speed them up back in iOS 8 I think it was, but they still make it feel slow. MS manages to make multiple windows work on the Surface, and by most reviews it apparently works pretty well.
The M2 iPad has literally the same CPU as the M2 Macs. There should be nothing that "asks too much" of the hardware; and indeed many people complain that you just can't make use of that hardware on an iPad because of the phone-esque OS.
Even though the iPad’s user experience with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad is arguably superior to the same functionality on the Mac, I just don’t see a happy path to getting touch on macOS, much less on all Mac apps. Microsoft’s been trying to shoehorn touch into Windows for two decades and it’s still an abhorrent monstrosity. The Surface is fine with a keyboard and pointing device but quite horrible as a touch-first tablet.
I know some folks cling to the past and pine for the comfort of the C:\ prompt, Emacs, WordStar, and writing code in assembly language. The computing landscape has changed and has gotten so much larger and vastly more complex. The iPad is helping to lead the charge towards reducing the complexity of computing and simplifying human-machine interaction. There’s no turning back at this point in time and Apple knows it. This doesn’t mean that the Mac doesn’t have a time and place where it’s the best tool for the job, just like we still need to use assembly language, C/C++, and other powerful but unforgiving languages at a time when we have Swift and C# available to use.