“Global tablet PC shipments, affected by the weakening worldwide economy after August and high inventory levels from some tablet PC brand vendors, reached 18.7 million units in the third quarter, an increase of only 27.5% sequentially, far less than the strong sequential growth of 60.9% they achieved in the second quarter,” according to Digitimes Research senior analyst James Wong.
“Impacted by the weakening global economy, Apple’s iPad shipments in the third quarter did not meet its forecast and only reached 13 million units with a sequential growth of 36.8%,” Wong reports. “Meanwhile, due to their inability to attract consumers, most non-iPad tablet PCs suffered from high inventory issues in the third quarter.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll know in a few hours. Even so, 13 million units would be, by far, an all-time iPad sales record. And the chance that Digitimes’ James Wong knows Apple’s internal forecast for iPad unit sales are slightly worse than the chance that later today we’ll dump our Macs for Dells trying to run Windows 7.
Apple’s quarterly iPad unit sales to date:
Q310: 3.27 million
Q410: 4.19 million
Q111: 7.33 million
Q211: 4.69 million
Q311: 9.25 million