Every year during the holiday season Apple products top the wish lists of many consumers and end up being one of the top gifted items when it’s all said and done. Now, Yahoo-run analytics firm Flurry Insights has shared the gift giving trends for this holiday season, again showing that Apple devices were among the most popular items received this year.
Of all new devices activated during Christmas week Apple accounted for 49.1 percent of them. That’s down slightly from the 51.3 percent it was responsible for last year. Samsung devices accounted for 19.8 percent of new device activations, up from 17.7 percent in 2014. Samsung’s rise in sales, Flurry says, was driven by the Galaxy Grand Prime, Core Prime, and S6.
As far as device trends in general, phablets saw a huge surge in popularity this year. In 2014, phablets accounted for just 13 percent of Christmas week activations. This year, they accounted for 27 percent of activations, representing a 2x increase in sales. Small phones, with a screen size of 3.5-inches or less, accounted for just 1 percent of activations. Small tablets, such as the iPad mini, accounted for 9 percent of activations, down from 11 percent in 2014, showing that many are opting for phablets over small tablets. iPad Pro accounted for less than 1 percent of device activations.
Christmas Day was also a huge day for app downloads. Flurry says that compared to the average daily installs for the first three weeks of December, Christmas Day saw a 2.2x increase in app downloads across the board. When you consider all the new devices activated, it makes sense for there to be such a huge increase in app sales that day as well.
Apple always sees a surge in sales during the holiday season and this year appears to be no different, even with it being an iterative year in terms of iPhone upgrades for the company with the launch of the 6s and 6s Plus. Likewise, these trends also show how Apple somewhat cannibalizes sales of its own products, like the iPhone 6 Plus/6s Plus taking some sales of the iPad mini.
Let us know in the comments if you were gifted any Apple products this year!
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iPad Pro – and loving it. As a long-time comic book fan, this is the ultimate device for reading comics. Sure, it’s a pricy addition to my Apple arsenal of devices, but it’s exactly what I hoped it would be. Most interesting is that I am using the iPad Pro as my main portable device – and leaving my MacBook Air at home – as it is brilliant for consuming media (comics, books, movies, Netflix, etc.), but also perfectly fine at creating media. As an author, I use it to write when I’m away from home and simply sync the manuscript with iCloud on the road so that my laptop has the latest version when I’m back.
And you can even make your own comic strips!
I use my iPad (Air not Pro) for writing, essays, short stories, plays, and such nearly every day. I agree, the iPad plus iCloud synching works wonderfully. One question: I tried some BlueTooth keyboards but finally I just stopped carrying them and use the on screen keyboard. Do you use an external keyboard?
We did Apple Watches for the whole family this year.
iPad Pro isn’t there for me. It can’t edit that well, and its really a bigger iPad Air 2. I still rather have my Mac with me. Maybe gen 2 will be better.
That data doesn’t seem reliable in any way.
Nokia?
And outdoing LG and Xiaomi?
Are these activations in the U.S., the world, South Dakota? I’m I missing somewhere in the article where it says what geographic region this data is supposed to cover?
Apple would need to activate about 90% devices in order to boost its share price. Anything less than that is termed a failure by Wall Street. Wall Street was all excited about Fitbit kicking Apple’s behind in terms of sales. I would understand that considering the average Fitbit is a about one-third the cost of an Applewatch. No matter, Apple didn’t sell the most in market share, so that shows Fitbit is beating the heck out of AppleWatch.
Do you have a reference? Not being snarky, I just hadn’t seen those sales figures, or any holiday sales figures, yet.
Wall Street prices Apple’s stock at $600 billion, the most of any listed company. So let’s not go too far on the whole Wall Street doesn’t get Apple and Wall Street is unfair to Apple. Wall Street loves Apple more than any other company.
Wall Street’s overarching concern is that iPhone sales will peak and possibly decrease due to saturation of the smartphone market and competition from good enough cheaper smartphones. This is plausible. The fact that it hasn’t come close to happening year after year doesn’t mean that “this” year can’t be the year. Every other Apple product is individually too small to matter compared to the iPhone sales.