“iPad sales are down, technically. Apple still sold 20 million of them last quarter, but Wall Street says a company like Apple is never supposed to sell less of anything,” Mark Wilson writes for Fast Company Design. “While iPad purchases are down, iPad usage is still superb. People are reading books, watching Netflix, and surfing the web on their tablets, which, sales figures aside, should be the most important indicator of whether a product is really a ‘hit.'”
“But the question looms—if people are using their iPads, why aren’t they replacing them as quickly as iPhones? The answer lies in the iPad’s design. You can call an iPad a big iPhone, but a big iPhone can last a customer a really long time,” Wilson writes. “Several years into owning the product, I’ve always got a few hours of charge in this thing, even when I haven’t charged it in a week or more… Plus, they’re just built like tanks. So two, three, four years into owning an iPad, it’s probably still in pretty good shape. Why replace it?”
“Tablets are a solved design problem,” Wilson writes. “Sales are a testament to the design’s longevity—a longevity that sits in some unknown expanse between the disposable iPhone and the immortal television, refrigerator, or trusty old pair of jeans. Apple will still sell tens of millions of iPads in 2015… Good design means something is used, not replaced.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote on Tuesday:
The #1 reason why iPad sales have plateaued is because Apple builds iPads so damn well. Apple iPads last for years and years. We’ve handed down gen-1 iPads to pre-schoolers, years ago, and they’re still working just fine! Thrown around, walked on, dripped on, you name it – the iPad just keeps on ticking. The upgrade cycle for iPads is simply not going to match the cycle for subsidized phones on two-year contracts.
Related article:
No, Apple’s iPad hasn’t gone from massive to ‘meh’ in 5 short years – January 27, 2015