<em>Worldwide unit shipments for the top 5 tablet plus 2-in-1 device vendors over last five quarters</em>
New data from IDC tracking worldwide tablet shipments shows that Apple has maintained its lead during the third quarter despite “a decline in overall iPad shipment volume in 3Q14.” Specifically, Apple grabbed 22.8% of the market with 12.3 million shipments during the quarter compared to 14.1 million units and 29.2% share in the year ago quarter. That compares to Samsung at 18.3% of the market and 9.9 million units shipped up from 19.3% and 9.3 million units shipped in the third quarter last year:
Apple, during its earnings call, noted that the iPad’s lifecycle is extending. Combined with consumer anticipation and the release of the latest iPhones, IDC saw a decline in overall iPad shipment volume in 3Q14. Although Apple has recently updated and expanded its iPad lineup to its widest offering ever, IDC still expects 2014 to be the year of the iPhone… Samsung has slowly begun to focus on markets like North America and Middle East and Africa (MEA), where low-cost Asian vendors haven’t been able to gain a foothold just yet. Although Samsung’s share declined slightly compared to last year, it was able to experience 5.6% growth and was able to maintain its number 2 rank among the top 5.
While pointing out that tablet shipments have grown 11.5% year over year worldwide, IDC also reports that it “saw Verizon continuing to sell connected tablets at a fast pace, a strategy that we believe other carriers will replicate in following quarters.” If you’re wondering why RCA has entered the top 5 this time around, IDC attributes it to “one large deal linked to back-to-school and channel fill ahead of Black Friday.” The RCA shipments and Verizon sales, according to the report, account for a higher 18.5% growth for tablets in the US.
While Apple and Samsung remained in the number 1 and 2 spots, the companies are followed by ASUS (down one point to 6.5% market share), Lenovo (up slightly to 5.7% share), and RCA up 194% since last year to 4.9% of the market. The “Others” category, however, makes up 41.8% of the market in IDC’s research with 22.5 million units shipped.
It’s not clear how many cheapo, white box tablets make up the others category, but IDC notes that the data in its report includes “both slate tablets and 2-in-1 devices.” You can imagine Apple’s share of tablets people actually use is much higher than 23% it grabbed in IDC’s report. IDC says “Vendor shipments are branded shipments and exclude OEM sales for all vendors.”
Worth noting is that leading into Q4 Apple has two new iPad models, the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, that will likely give the company a big boost in sales for the important holiday quarter. Both tablets officially went on sale last week in the US and several countries abroad.
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And everyone bitches at me when I post negative comments on the iPad articles about how they are lame upgrades and how Apple needs to actually *do* something with the iPad, and how they basically haven’t changed *anything* about it since Steve died.
It’s not like they don’t have tens of thousands of customers like me that switched all of their work over to the iPad when it came out and are waiting for a more productive *work* device. It’s not like we all haven’t been asking for improvements and sending them ideas about what we want for three or four years.
The iPad mini *could* be a more productive device than a laptop. It *could* make the MacBook Air obsolete.
If only Apple would actually try to do this.
You are writing nonsense. The iPad is highly productive, apps are quite cheap for anyone that wants to buy. The iPad Air 2 is the best tablet on the market right now with the fastest CPU and GPU.
You’re a moron and deserve all the vitriol you get for spouting absolute rubbish on here and you’ve not proven otherwise with this post. You’ve cherry picked and misconstrued the numbers to suit your misinformed analysis and argument.
Your the one calling people names and making personal remarks, and *I* am “spouting rubbish” ? Yeah, right.
Then you accuse me of cherry picking numbers, (when my argument has little or nothing to do with math), and that my analysis is “misinformed” (without saying why or how), but yet *I* am apparently the “moron.”
Hmmm … All I get from that is “I don’t like you.” Maybe you should have just said that.
it seems like a perfectly reasonable argument to me, when I say over and over again that they aren’t really *doing* anything new or interesting with the iPad for years, or making it into a device that can really be used for productive computing tasks, and then the sales start to fall year over year of that same product.
Correlation is not causation of course, but all the same, this particular correlation *does* actually support my argument. How about offering some contrary evidence or argument instead of just attacking me personally as you are wont to do?
Just stop and go away. Your contributions to this site have spiraled down a funnel of garbage.
You are spot on. Don’t worry about the haters, I have been reading and commenting on tech blogs for over 15 years, and as I have mentioned before, and this is (for some reason), pretty unique, 9to5mac has THE most biased editorial and readers of any site I have ever visited, and that includes Macworld, Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo, Macrumours, AndroidandMe, AndroidCentral, AndroidPolice and many many others. The Apple fans are totally and utterly blindfolded and unable to stand back and take an honest objective view. I have owned all the iPads, and when I went to check out the iPad Air 2 the day it was first available in the UK, not ONE person was looking at it in any of the (UK) Apple dealers. It may be thinner and lighter, and faster (very fast in fact!), but nothing to help with productivity as you say. Slippery case and still no way to lock a keyboard to it so you can sit in bed and type. (I bought a touch screen Chromebook to do that, totally fantastic.) The iPad is still a content consumption and gaming/entertainment device. For productivity, the Nvidia Shield Tablet (2) with stylus or any Galaxy Note blows it out of the water.
If Apple add stylus input to OS X and put a Lenovo Yoga style fold back or twist around touch screen retina display on the MacBook Air, they will have a killer device that will get people excited again.
I hope Apple really pushes it with the next iPad release. They’ve got 2GB of ram and maybe they can start doing updates to iOS 8 to make it more stable and make it more of an all-in-one device.
*shipments not sales
10% or 20% of the whole market share as per number of units means nothing when Android competitors are selling ultracheap crap tablets and smartphones… Apple still has 70-80% of the whole smartphones and tablets market profits .. and that is the only thing that really matters, money.
All competitors combined can’t even get half of the market and that 1/3rd must be divided then between hundreds, thousands of large,small,medium and tiny manufacturers of all sorts.. so each of them is getting a tiny percentage of their whole piece of pie…
Marketshare of physical items can’t fall unless people are destroying the items. Just because a person buys a tablet running iOS, that doesn’t mean that the iPad marketshare has fallen. I have an iPad Mini and a Nexus 7, does that mean the iPad marketshare has fallen and Android’s marketshare has risen?
If you have 50 iPads and I have 50 Android tablets, we have a 50/50 share of the tablet market of 100 items. If I buy another ten, then there are 110 tablets. The market share would then be about 45% iPad, 55% Android.
When “Others” become bigger than other groups, the logic thing to do will be break it into smaller group.
They are so “professional”
I second the shipments not sales comment, if shipments were relevant than MS Surface is taking the world by storm.
The Surface is an awesome tablet seriously. Don’t base your opinions upon lack of applications for it – if you use that reasoning then you are also admitting that the Mac is also garbage because of it’s chronic lack of software (something which is never mentioned in the glossy brochures by the way).
Apple should drop the price of their low end Tablets to $199.
People want tablets but many prefer to buy cheaper tablets than Apple offers. I have an iPad and I use an iPad. However, I do not NEED an iPad. FYI, I also own and use three Macs and an iPhone.
I think someone is going to have to invent a killer tablet app to really increase the value to users so they can justify the expense. To date, I have not seen such an App. Apple may have to invent it.
Another one of these highly suspicious studies. I travel a lot. I see a lot of tablets everywhere. Even though I know this is just a subjective observation, I just don’t see any other tablets than iPads, a handful of Samsung tablets and MS Surfaces (but only in enterprise). Where are all these no-name tablets? If they outnumber iPads 2:1, they should be visible somewhere, shouldn’t they?
I can guarantee that if this report said that the Apple’s market share was improving you would say that the study was right. Fact is, we are all a fickle bunch. We want to believe that what we have is the best to justify our purchase. Any negativity is met with derision – any positivity is met with approval. That’s not just aimed at you by the way – it’s aimed at the vast majority of people (myself included).