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9.7-Inch iPad Pro Is Apple's Last Chance To Save the iPad Line (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an article written by Yoni Heisler on BGR: The iPad occupies a unique place in the annals of tech history. Upon its release in 2010, Apple's first stab at a tablet quickly set sales records. Not only did early iPad sales outpace early iPhone sales, but the iPad quickly became one of the fastest selling consumer electronics products of all time. The iPad's once-auspicious journey, however, would eventually take an unexpected detour. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, soaring sales began to taper off, even as Apple began to introduce newer and more advanced models. Today, iPad sales are still slumping. During Apple's most recent earnings report, the company revealed that year over year iPad sales fell by 25% while iPad related revenue dropped by 20%. Hardly an aberration, iPad sales have been dropping for well over two years at this point. And whereas Tim Cook once took to earnings conference calls to praise the iPad, he now finds himself forced to defend the iPad against a barrage of analyst questions. Yesterday, Apple released a new 9.7-inch iPad Pro and it stands to reason that this is Apple's last chance to truly inject a bit of life into a faltering product line.
If your product does not offer any improvements over the one the consumers already have, and if it has to compete with an ever more crowded market space sales of course will dwindle. Apple might consider increasing the live cycles of their products. After all, there is no point in offering a product with better performance if hardly anybody wants it. I myself am an Android user. Changing from Motorola Droid to Galaxy S2 and than to HTC M9 were always great improvements. But now with the M10 on the horizon I cannot imagine why I should want one.
The only way I'm buying a new iPad is if my current iPad breaks. But my current iPad works just fine and has so for 5 years, so why would I buy a new one?
The ipad doesn't offer a superior experience anymore. it offers a much higher price that people are now unwilling to pay for a device that will likely only be relevant for a year. If they want to stay in the market, they need to cut the price significantly and actually start competing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Naturally, sales have declined. Those of us who really wanted one already bought one. I don't need another one. I especially don't care that the newer ones have faster processors and higher resolution because mostly I use it to read email and surf the web. So I plan on using the one I have until it fails. Oh, and I'm planning on replacing the batteries soon, despite Apple's efforts to make that difficult. Maybe that's what they should have planned on: selling us all iPads with replaceable batteries, and then selling us all new batteries in a few years.
I'm sure I'll be in the market for a new tablet one day, but I think Tim Cook and I have very different ideas about the practical lifespan of these devices.
Revenue on ipads is 7 billion and that's just last quarter. So yeah it's down from 8 billion. boo hoo. It's only several times Tesla's revenue. The difference being it's profitable and Tesla isn't.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm an Apple fanboy - full disclosure. I love my MB Air and my iPad Air but there's no way an iPad the size of anything smaller than the Pro has a chance of being a "laptop killer." But the Pro's are too damn expensive. If Apple was serious about the iPad being the thing that would phase out laptops or be the next generation of whatever then they need to drop the price by _a lot_. I have no idea if that's realistically possible without being a loss-leader, but it's pretty much the only way they'd even come close.
Bark less. Wag more.
The problem is expectations, not the product.
Almost everyone who wants an iPad now has now, the product has moved into a longer term replacement cycle, rather than a first purchase cycle.
I purchased the iPad in 2010, then the iPad 2 next year, then the 3 the year after that. After that, I did buy a 4, and passed the 3 down to my kids.
We kept the combination of the 3 and 4 for awhile, only replacing them last year with a pair of iPad Air 2 units with 128GB each. Expensive, but they'll be good for a LONG time now... My hope is to get 4 years out of them before they need replacing, time will tell how that works out.
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Keep in mind the iPhone is next in line for this. The iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/ 6s Plus are both "fine". We have a pair of 6 Plus models that we have no intention of replacing with a 6s, or even a 7 for that matter. Probably will wait past the 7s as well and see what the 8 offers.
These devices have been going through massive improvements year over year, but at some point they get "good enough" for everything you want to do with a phone.
They can't make them bigger while keeping them phones, so the size limit has been reached. The CPU is plenty fast for anything we do on them.
Watch the next 2 years, the iPhone will see the same slowdown in sales.
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It has been a huge mistake on Apple's part to so completely depend on these two products for sales. They have (or had) a window to move the Mac line along and provide another option besides Windows, but they will never be anything but a small corner of the market with their current Mac product line. Shame, because I've love some competition there.
A styrofoam cup is as good a beer vessel as a ceramic stein or a pub glass but which one feels nicer in your hand and do you enjoy more. Since enjoyment is what you seek, sometime luxury goods are not about optimizing cheapness. I was passing through the electronics store the other day and fiddled with the pads they had on display. The ipad was clearly the smoothest and most beautiful interface. it just lept out of the line of generic looking rectangles. touch it and the response just seemed lively.
If I were buying a dozen then price would matter. but i'm buying one. Why would I not want the funnest one for an extra couple hundred? It's a nice thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think that the answer is "market saturation". There's only so much call for tablets, period. They're a semi-durable good, so if you introduce it fast enough, it's entirely possible to get one into the hands of 'everybody' wanting and able to afford it relatively quickly. Now that 'everybody' has one, you're reduced to selling replacements, which means that, roughly speaking 20% of current owners will buy a new one each year, with another 5% or so of 'new participants', while you loose 5% or so due to competitors, changing interests, even things like deaths.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not much into Apple stuff, closed systems and all that. But I made an exception with the iPad when it debuted. The reason being that there were no alternatives. The iPad was a product without competition, a new thing in the computer ecosystem, but with the background of thousands of iPhone apps.
What really took me by surprise was the time that it took for other companies to duplicate the tablet concept. Even if they were already making smartphones. I mean, you may need genius to have the idea and believe in it and make the first table. But once somebody had success with it, you just have to make a bigger phone, by Jove! My memory may fail me, but I think it was at least two years between the first iPad and the first solid competition, I think a Samsung with a stylus.
Just saying that, up to now, Apple has had a visionary at its helm, that could discover, or create, new markets. Also it had really sloppy competition, at least from the point of view of a customer. I think both things are gone now, so it's not a wonder that sales are winding down. Don't expect things to change in the near term. A bigger screen is certainly not going to cut it.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
These "death of the ipad" articles are bloody loopy.
Sales are dropping, but that CERTAINLY doesn't mean it's not an incredibly popular device.
Here's some hypothetical reasons I think sales could be dropping.
Android tablets starting to genuinely compete.
Some business sales going to the Surface, since it transcends that whole, Windows laptop / tablet world
but the number 1 reason I suspect sales are dropping,... so many god damned people own an ipad now and anything above an ipad3 is a perfectly suitable little device for checking mail, facebook, netflix, photo viewing. People are not feeling the bug to upgrade.
Will they still upgrade? Damn straight. Will it be as often? No.
Personally, considering how many god damn ipads are out there, I think a 25% drop in sales is not the end of the world. The ipad has replaced many a desktop, now it too has reached a 'good enough' level of performance (like the desktop) so sales will taper to a more natural replacement and upgrade cycle.
It's a non story.
Crap like this is the reason Steve Jobs used to snub his investors, as well as all those so-called "analysts" who get paid to talk shite about stuff they proclaim themselves to be "experts" of.
It's a strange business, "market analyst" (sometimes known as "tech writer"). Too often, it's that guy who dropped out of CS and transferred to the humanities department. They convince their editors that they're computer geniuses, because they can write a macro in Word. But ultimately, they're paid to talk or write shit that sounds just reasonable enough that people say, "oh yeah, that must be true". Even if it isn't. and it don't even matter if it isn't. Today's shocking article is completely forgotten the next day, as long as it got the clicks.
So here we have this "last chance to save the iPad" click-bait. WHAT "last chance", Dingleberry? Like the investors are going to fire Cook and close down iPad production forever? because the iPad has reached a bit of market saturation and isn't shitting Tiffany diamonds like it once was? Shee ittt. It's a damn good product, better built than any Android alternative I've seen out there, and is even giving Microsoft's Surface a run for its money (damn, Satya, make the keyboard cheaper, huh?) and profit margins remain high. Every year, more students and parents and old people will buy one, probably at the expense of some shitty HP laptop at Best Buy.
This article is monkey-shite click-bait. Here's the real story: some fuckwad editor at BGR ordered Yoni Heisler to write some rain-on-the-parade Apple article just in time for the press-announcement, knowing it will generate a bunch of clicks. And the net gets its undies bunched over how it must be true, 'cause somebody wrote an article! On the Internet! Well, douche my asshole with ginger juice! Next thing you know, they'll be talking about it on Fox and Friends, and if they're talking about it, it's all over the the iPad! Shee-da-Dip-da-Dee... itt. All this does is show how stupid so-called analysts are, as well as the media and the investors who listen to them, going all chicken-little when some gold-mine product starts to level-off a bit. These are the same asshats who wrote the iMac will never sell, and wrote nobody would ever want to buy a phone with a touch screen and no buttons that surfs the internet.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I'm leaning towards a situation where the MacBook has no display and is essentially a dock for an iPad. When docked the iPad merely acts as a screen for Mac OS X running on the laptop's CPU. When disconnected the iPad acts as an iPad running iOS. With Safari, iTunes, Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc being document compatible, using iCloud and doing a handoff between Mac OS X and iOS. No need to force the Mac to be iOS'ish or the iPad to be Mac'ish, let them be themselves while working on a common document, showing a webpage, viewing/playing media, etc.
Lets cut to the chase - the market for tablets will always be smaller than phones. For many people, the phone will do enough, and for others they will have a laptop that the tablet can not completely replace.
But that's not really a problem - tablets are viable as long as they are profitable. They don't have to break sales records. And as they are essentially phones with larger screens and batteries, as long as you are producing phones as well, the marginal cost of developing tablets as well is relatively small.
Ultimately though, we're just doing the wrong thing comparing tablet sales with phone sales, just because they are considered "gadgets". The key difference is the way we purchase them.
So many phones are purchased on contract, with subsidized prices. People aren't faced with a high ticket price, and the contracts are encouraging us to change our phones every 12 - 24 months.
With tablets, we are generally paying that high ticket price, and the performance of the devices and complexity of apps are not increasing quickly enough to drive fast upgrades.
Tablets have a naturally lower sales rate than the devices we are comparing them to, and not making unrealistic sales expectations is not the death knell.
The biggest threat to the iPad may be the success - or lack of - the iPhone 7. Due to the nature of the ecosystems, we're far more likely to own a tablet with an OS that matches our phone, As long as we keep consuming iPhones, the iPad will still take it's share of the tablet market. If people move away from iPhones - maybe because of a possible headphone jack removal - then the tablet sales will likely drift away too.
Sure, the line won't grow by too much, but the number of people with a use case for iPads (and similar form factors) is still large enough to keep the iPad line alive just fine: schools, highly-mobile users (pilots, road-warriors, train/bus commuters, etc), industrial/manufacturing users, sales-critters using it to sell stuff like cars, small businesses who use them for POS terminals, and average folks who want to fart around on Facebook/Youtube/email, but don't want a full-blown computer-with-keyboard to do it.
Seriously - who was shorting AAPL when they wrote this story? Or was the author just thinking that 'OMG unless it grows by 500% it's gonna die! Aieeeeee!'.
Most likely explanation IMHO is a demand for attention and relevance on the author's part, methinks.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
As does pretty much everything else they do.
I have a recent iPad, upgraded to the current iOS. A huge number of the installed applications are now broken. They worked fine; Apple "upgraded" iOS; now they crash or variously misbehave. iOS's seriously crippled user and data models aren't exactly helping either.
OS X has broken quite a few things with upgrades as well (and of course, they leave broken stuff behind them all the time.)
Apple also sets up entire paradigms and then breaks them. For instance, initially, Aperture supported cameras. Then one "upgrade", they moved new camera support to the (new) OS, thus leaving users of the current version of Aperture without support for newly added cameras, even though they notionally supported the OS level they were using. The way out of that for me was to move to Adobe's Lightroom, but after paying for Aperture and two subsequent upgrades, I'm not about to forgive Apple. I don't matter to Apple as a paying customer? Okay, then I won't be a paying customer. The used market is fine with me — my cash can go elsewhere than directly into Apple's pockets.
The iPad... I've stopped using my iPad completely — almost all of the apps I found useful (and some that were simply fun) are now broken, and I've stopped upgrading OS X. I've no interest whatsoever in breaking software I've paid good money for. Nothing Apple has offered thus far in newer versions of OS X is even slightly tempting.
In fact, the only thing I can think of at the moment that would get me to upgrade OS X further is OS-level speech recognition without requiring going online. A reliable implementation of that would be a total game changer. Amazon's Echo has made very clear what the advantages of STT are; it has also made very clear what the disadvantages of requiring the cloud and locking down the ecosystem are. Mycroft looks like it may break out of these problems. If so... bye bye Echo.
Pretty sure Apple has convinced me permanently that iPads, iPhones and iWatches are not sane purchases for me to make. I'll allow for the vague possibility that they could come up with something to convince me otherwise — like OS-level STT — but I'm not holding my breath.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.