“When Apple announced its most recent quarterly earnings, the worst news out of Cupertino was that sales of iPads weren’t greater than in the year-ago quarter, a fact that a few pundits have now jumped on to declare that ‘Apple’s iPad Businesses Is Collapsing.’ That’s wrong,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“Rather than collapsing, Apple’s iPad business is refusing to collapse, even in the face of broad availability of much cheaper Android devices first launched years ago. Apple isn’t in panic mode or it would be scrambling to introduce cheaper tablets, rather than fancier ones with higher price points supported by demand so great that it increased iPad ASPs over the previous year,” Dilger writes. “It would be hard to imagine a definition for ‘dominating’ a market segment that is more powerful than Apple’s top selling, price insensitive iPad standing on the face of a variety of alternatives that sell for a fraction of the cost.”
“By anyone’s estimates, while Apple’s revenues from tablets came in solidly flat with a minor increase in ASPs, Samsung’s smartphone and tablet ASPs were plummeting along with its revenues, taking down profits along with it. That sounds like the definition of ‘collapse,'” Dilger writes. “The simple fact that Apple sold over $7.5 billion worth of tablets in one of its historically slowest quarters within a ‘tablet market’ where every other vendor has been completely unable to even approach Apple’s tablet volumes at any price — even those like Amazon, Samsung, Google and Microsoft who are willing to lose millions of dollars just to buy fractional increases in market share — should embarrass the pants off of clickbait pundits and market researchers who continue to peddle a ridiculous story that Apple is in some sort of tablet trouble.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple sold 20.486 million personal computing devices (iPad + Mac) in the 91 days that comprised Q214 (December 29, 2013-March 29, 2014). That’s not counting iPhone or iPod touch (which most certainly are personal computers in your pocket) which, on their own, exceeded 45 million units.
Bottom line: In 91 days, representing their historically slowest quarter, Apple sold over 65 million personal computing devices.