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Report Claims Microsoft Beat Apple in Online Tablet Sales for October (winbeta.org)
Eloking writes: Apple's iPad tablet ushered in the modern tablet era when it was introduced in 2010, and it's dominated tablet sales ever since. iPad sales have stagnated recently, but nevertheless Apple has maintained its lead in overall tablet market share. WinBeta received an early version of an upcoming report, '1010data Facts for Ecom Insights, January 2014 – October 2015' by the 101data Ecom Insights Panel, however, that indicates all of that might be changing as Microsoft assumes the mantle of best-selling tablet maker in terms of online sales in October.
At one point, everyone who wanted an iPad and is able to afford one will already have done so. After that, these people will only buy a new one to upgrade once in a while.
Of course on slashdot it is a failure and no one is buying them. But in the real world they ate the number 2 generator of revenue for Microsoft and can run office and be managed via active directory for IT departments making them popular. The screen is Apple quality hardware
http://saveie6.com/
"In terms of online sales [in the month of October]" hardly is MS beating Apple, even if true.
Also, MS has a totally fresh tablet lineup. Most products have an uptick of sales when they refresh their lines.
Oh, also, did I mention it's an early version of the report?
A lot of reading between the lines here.
The Surface line is priced and seems intended for the laptop market (going back to the original Tablet PCs). Apple doesn't want its iPads to be laptops, so they are not 100% the same.
On the other hand, being more expensive than Apple and adding nothing new is not going to win them marketshare. Android competes on price and dominates in that category (though there are some cheaper Windows tablets, now).
Gee, with company procurement going totally digital, I bet that a single order from a large multinational would do that.
What about in-store sales? Did MS approach 10% of Apple's table volume?
Tablets only will eventually die off IMHO.
Cell phones have already start cannibalizing the 6"-8" tablet market.
Laptops and 8"+ will merge into a hybrid tablet/laptop device. The ones where the screen is removable and becomes a standalone tablet (they already exist). Hence the abomination that is the iPad pro that comes with iPen and iKeyboard, essentially making it a (very restricted) laptop.
If this is the case, which I won't concede, exactly how many of the Microsoft tablets are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, only "sold" in order to make the numbers look good?
I recall reading about when Pepsi overtook Coke. Everyone rejoiced. However, in actual fact, Coke still outsold Pepsi by a wide margin; the overtaking was in grocery store sales which they had managed to do by making the six-pack into an 8-pack for the same price and then measuring by total volume.
And here we have a report that says MS outsold Apple in *online sales*. Hmmm. I suspect that Apple sells the majority, if not the vast majority, of their sales through retail chains. So when I read:
"The report did not take in account customers who purchased their tablets in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Apple’s retail stores or Best Buy."
Then basically I think this is even less of a mini-victory than Fortune posits. Pepsi anyone?
The fact that Apple own an extensive, walk-in retail network and have their products on sale everywhere Microsoft has theirs, rather suggests that this might be cherrypicking.
The iPad is not fabulous value for money. But if Microsoft aren't kicking their arses in supermarkets and the high street, then they aren't kicking their arses at all.
I have a Surface pro... and I can not get myself to buy another. The huge problems with the Surface pro and how microsoft has told me "sucks to be you, reinstall the OS" means I have zero interest in walking down their road again. Not as long as they use low grade dog food chips like Marvell for their wireless networking.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That people finally realized that ipads were just over sized iphones and were nothing more than toys, not good enough for actual business usage at all. At least with a windows tablet, you get the ENTIRE back catalog of applications that were ever made for Windows, which are more likely to work with businesses apps that were made 20 years ago.
that doesn't say much about tablet sales. I haven't seen a tablet in the hands of a human in months.
Not just tablets, but in InfoTech across the board. 5 years ago little new features were enough to spark mass consumer interest in upgrading, but nowadays it's a lot of the same shit, just marginally better. Most people don't buy a new TV every 2-3 years. The market is so ridiculously saturated.
Marketing
Only the iPad has an iPod in it. The others don't, so they are different class of devices.
shutup
Rerun of the movie first shown in 1977 can be seen at 11.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Pretty much all devices can do everything. The question is really how good can one device be at one thing. Tablets are good for reading and that's pretty much it. I mostly use mine to read scientific article and annotate them. This is my killer usage of tablet. And I got the one with the most usable "pencil" in the market at the time. Samsung's note tablets were are the best at the time.
I haven't tried Apple's version. But MS shot at it with the surface pro was a pretty good shot at it I found.
I'd say that today, the best tablet with pencil is probably Microsoft's. Many usable "tablet style" software and once you plug their keyboard on it; it is also a reasonable replacement for a laptop.
I am not surprised they are gaining market shares. They made the laptop/tablet hybrid many people wanted.
The Microsoft Surface is the official tablet of the NFL. You can see it used by officials and coaches in every televised game.... Yet the announcers don't know any better and call them "iPads".
Large multi-billion-dollar behemoth had a month where their sales were higher than another
large multi-billion-dollar behemoth.
Both are closed-source, think "intellectual property" is worth scorched-earth wars,
fight many innovative firms like Samsung, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
and have cult-followings.
This is first-world "news". The rest of the universe looks at these two ugly pimples as
good examples of how not to be.
The real question is profit margin and overall profit. I have a idea who is winning that rate, but it is only a guess
Two things killing Apple iPad sales. One is the lack of reasons to upgrade from one iPad model to the newest one. Second, the iPad is not so great after all, depending mostly on good apps to keep interest in the platform. Its a wonderful time consuming device for kids, and a OK second or third device for adults. But IOS is not a robust OS by any stretch and certainly its becoming a platform that users seem to adopted early on but have decided its not a primary device.
Apple either needs to make the iPad do more, or accept what others said before the iPad. Tablets are not that great.
One month does not make a trend. If Microsoft can string multiple sequential months together, than this will be news. Until then, it only means that in this particular month, more Microsoft tablets were sold. Interesting, but nothing more than that.
Go somewhere you can compare the Apple pen to Samsung's pen. The Samsung one is far, far ahead in terms of latency and accuracy.
Did you mean the Microsoft stylus? Because everywhere I've read a review comparing the Apple Pencil to other current styluses, the Pencil was said to be far better... even over the Samsung.
I'll get the Pencil in a few days so I'll be able to see for myself, but everyone I've talked to who has used one said zero lag (latency) and pretty much perfect accuracy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Once bitten twice shy. Now a days most IT shops want to use only the set of Microsoft products that inter-operate with other systems, even if the walled garden built by Microsoft is quite good and cost effective.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And Microsoft will continue to dominate through the Christmas holiday. How do I know? I went into the Apple Store to buy an iPad Pro. ::Pulls out wallet:: "Please add a Pencil to the order." ::Puts wallet away:: ::Leaves store:: ::Typing this on my Surface Pro 4 and loving it!::
Sales person: "Yes sir! We have them in stock!"
Me:
Genius: "We'll ship a Pencil to you in 5-6 weeks"
Me:
(Sometime later)
Me:
Yeah, about lambasting things that its competitors are doing, there was a pretty crazy instance.
It was during the switch to Intel CPUs. They were selling for a while both their older Power PC based line and their new Intel inside line, so they had, at the same time on their website for several months, both pages dedicated to proving how much faster the Power PCs were compared to the Pentium, and another set of pages at a different part of the site showing how much FASTER the Pentium was compared to the Power PC. They were even using the same benchmarks sometimes (with some fudging about of course, like enabling/disabling AltiVec to suit the desired result etc).
It was so ridiculous, but it was even more ridiculous that nobody was really calling them on it. They claimed both sides of the coin with a straight face and it seems that most were drinking the kool-aid.
To top it off, at that time (before the Intel Core 2), it is most likely that AMD had the fastest CPU, so both campaigns were BS...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Here are a couple of reasons why: Adobe Creative Suite and Corel Painter.
Cheap spyware tablets to get windows spyware involved with your daily regimen...
OR
overpriced walled garden ecosystem tablets to make you feel like any crowd at Starbucks will be driven to a fit of jealousy?
Android wins.
I work in IT for a company that's a Microsoft house, and only 4% of our entire company staff uses the Surface with no plans to implement more in the future. 15% uses Apple Apple computers, 46% uses iPhones, 53% use Android devices, and less than 1% uses a Windows mobile phone. This is out of 4000+ employees.
Next year: Amazon confirms - Nobody buys Apple TVs or Google Chromecasts!
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Good. And I hope Microsoft continues to grow. Does this mean the iPad is conquered? No, of course not. But it is a step in the process of Microsoft gaining ground. But anyone who goes out into the market by trying to make a better product than Apple who succeeds deserves to win, and I hope Apple reacts back and makes an even better product.
This is much better for consumers than a poorly-executed Samsung spec dump/retread. Microsoft put a lot of time into building a well-executed family of innovative devices and they deserve their success.
People forget that large corporations purchase tablets for manufacturing/shipping divisions. I've seen iPads used for this with custom cases that have built-in barcode scanners, but we're moving to Surface Pro 3 tablets now for greater software flexibility (Office/Outlook, AS400, etc...).
Like skin tight jeans, beards and huge cover-half-your-face glasses, the iPads dominance in tablets will pass.
With it's atrocious interface and sky high price, the iPad is akin to the early days of paying for a bottle of water...
Let the real tablets take their place at the table: Google, Samsung and Microsoft
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
So, now we have some duelling Projections.
This report says that iPad Pro will sell more in the first 3 months than all of the Surface sales combined.
So now what?
Unless I'm mistaken, isn't the Surface more comparable to an actual computer (in that it's able to install actual Windows software), whereas the iPad is more comparable to an oversized smart phone (in that you're restricted only to software in the app store)?
Microsoft got a huge boost in October from the launch of the Surface Pro 4. Meanwhile, Apple fans looking for the next new thing had to wait until November for the iPad Pro launch. Expect the November numbers to show a big lead for Apple, even with the Surface 3 getting an assist from the Black Friday sale price, the first time any significant discount was offered on that tablet.
The real question is what things will look like going forward. Will the Surface line be sufficiently popular to take a noticeable bite out of Apple? And on the sheer volume side, will Amazon's $50 tablet (discounted to $35 for Black Friday) run up big sales numbers?