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Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market
TyFoN writes "Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. ...the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'"
The reported numbers are all shipping share, not market share. The number of Android tablets being sold is pretty dramatically less....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are built on cheap hardware and run a version of Android developed for phones, Honeycomb tablets have so far priced themselves out of the market. Here's hoping Google and the manufacturers will pick up on that.
Strategy Analytics is talking about units shipped. Unit shipments aren't the same as actual sales to customers. Microsoft used that same word-twisting when they tried to convince everyone that Vista was doing well. As John Gruber pointed out yesterday, what Strategy Analytics is calling market share is actually "shipment share." That's not market share in the way most people think of it. If you go by actual sales, the iPad has sold almost 30 million total, while Android tablets have only sold about 1.35 million.
I'm surprised Apple's earnings report didn't make it to Slashdot's front page. Sales of the iPad have tripled since last year, at 9.25 million, and iPhone sales more than doubled. iPad sales have been so successful that retailers reserved inventory space for them at the expense of PCs. PC shipments declined by about 6%, and the PC industry overall declined by 4.2%. I think that's the biggest untold story of all in this--after decades of growth, the PC is in a downward trend because of the iPad.
Because it's percentage-based and can therefore fluctuate based on total size, market share is not as important a figure as it's often made out to be. It can be used to paint a negative picture where there isn't one. It can also be twisted by citing units shipped rather than sold. The iPad is doing better than ever and doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon. I realize that Slashdot is historically pro-Linux and will present Linux-based products as always "catching up" or being on the cusp of taking over, but there's just no evidence of that happening at this point in time.
Usually "shipped" means "sent to retailers", which doesn't necessarily mean sold. However, it tends to be an accurate enough approximation of units sold, since retailers wouldn't stock up on millions of devices they never would sell. Should that happen, the units shipped would quickly drop to almost nil after the first few months, which isn't the case here.
Still, I have to agree in that I have never seen anything but iPads around. Then again, I can't seem to glimpse anything but iPods and iPhones either, so maybe I'm just surrounded by a statistical anomaly.
IIRC, the Nook doesn't run Honeycomb. My bet is that the vast majority of Android tablets now out there are Nooks, of which only a few have been hacked to be stock Android tablets. The most recent sales figures I can find for the nook imply that 3M were sold as of last March, so the sales of that one tablet dwarf the numbers estimated above
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It may be less, but I doubt it's "dramatically" less.
Stated "shipping share" is an order of magnitude more than the number sold - read the article, it uses Google's own activation numbers and device counts to arrive at that position.
Now granted perhaps a lot of Android tablet owners are collecting them for posterity and never removing them from the box. But somehow I do not think that is the case.
Tablet makers aren't feverishly pushing them out just to lose all their money as they rot on the shelves.
That certainly is not what they HOPE to do. But the market can have other ideas.
Blackberry is shipping a lot of Playbooks but those aren't selling either. Obviously they did not put them out to "rot on shelves" either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Considering there are $99 Android 2.1 tablets that you can get in stores like Walgreens or CVS, is it any wonder they're "gaining marketshare"?
They're on the low end of the spectrum, but they do browse the web and can play Angry Birds.
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That extra competition will do nothing for Android pricing. Right now Android tablets are already facing full competition pressure from the iPad. Android prices aren't high because makers are ignoring the iPad and only pricing against each other. Android prices are high because Apple is buying components they took options on years ago in lots of ten million. Android makers are buying components based on current availability in lots of hundred thousands or even ten thousands.
There are lots of them - and have been for good long time. I have one of these, that I got when a local hospital was selling off the old generation of computers and upgrading to these. These things are freaking amazing - usable in full sunlgiht, nearly indestructible, great battery life (plus hot-swappable batteries), but they do cost $2000+, which is why you never see them, except in hospitals or government contracted job-sites, or on sci-fi tv shows.
Fujitsu, Acer, HP, Dell, or Lenovo all have Windows tablet offerings. They just tend to be full-fledged computers, rather than toys, and so carry a higher price. Windows 7 with gestures / flicks works quite well as a tablet OS, but it is helpful to have the active digitizer with stylus, regardless of whether you also have a iPad style touchscreen.
You should refrain from purchasing any product whatsoever that is made by a company that is suing one of its competitors.