Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
Same. We have a "New" iPad, a.k.a. iPad 3. Still chugging. I'd like it a little lighter, but there's no feature of any newer iPad that would make me buy a new one now while this one works.
Phones need better cameras. You add more and more junk to it. You need a newer phone. with the iPad, our usage has been pretty much web browsing and the occasional game. Nothing too taxing.
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.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
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...
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?