When the iPad first appeared on the scene, Steve Jobs defined it as a third device between a cell phone and a PC, believing that there must be space in between. That judgment proved to be extremely accurate, and the iPad was a huge hit right out of the gate, selling much faster than the early iPhone and reshaping the tablet device category.
The iPad has grown considerably over the years, with annual sales of more than 50 million units, driving a boom in the tablet market. Surprisingly, however, the iPad is in deep trouble and is experiencing bottlenecks in growth, and in the face of overall market growth, the iPad is experiencing "reverse growth".
Apple's recent financial results show that iPad sales fell in the second quarter for the second year in a row, and its share of the market has fallen even further. According to IDC's recently released quarterly tablet sales, Apple's share fell to 26.9 percent in the quarter, although it still maintains the number one position, but compared to the previous two years, the number was 60.2 percent, 33 percent, the rate of decline is undoubtedly alarming.
While the overall tablet market grew 11 percent to 49.3 million units in the quarter, a steady uptick, the iPad is clearly in big trouble. The problem is surely multi-factorial, and if you look at the external competition as well as its own development, there are two things that can't be ignored: the proliferation of lower-priced rivals, and a clear lack of innovation on the part of the iPad.
"Crazy" low-cost rivals
When the iPad became popular, there was a flood of rivals, including Samsung, Lenovo, HTC, and Amazon, which released a number of differentiated products, innovating in terms of size, form, and functionality, in an effort to differentiate themselves from the iPad.
In fact, they did a good job.
In fact, they've done a pretty good job, with Amazon accounting for more than half of tablet sales in the US at one point, Samsung's share rising to 17.2 percent from 7.4 percent 2 years ago, and Lenovo's sales up 64.7 percent to 2.4 million units in the second quarter.
But the second- through fifth-place finishers didn't see much growth in terms of sales figures because they were already selling so few units. Combined, they sold 14.2 million units in the second quarter, up only 800,000 units from last year and almost stagnant. And the top five sales combined were down year-over-year in the second quarter.
So since overall sales are growing steadily, and the top five brands sales overall decline, where is the problem? The answer is "white labels," or others in the chart below, and while others includes brands like Amazon and HP, given that the fifth-place finisher only sold 1 million units, the others can be pretty much ignored:
"White Labels The growth in sales of "white labels" has been horrific, with "white labels" capturing 26 percent share in 2012, 39 percent in 2013, and a whopping 44.4 percent share in the second quarter of 2014, the quarter in the chart, according to IDC last year. It's almost interchangeable with the iPad of two years ago, with the modest share in the middle being the sum of the remaining brands, which accounted for about 30 percent of the total.
These "white labels" are unsurprisingly from Shenzhen, where some are not labeled, some are brands you've never heard of, and where you can see a large number of them in Huaqiangbei or Zhongguancun outlets, selling at well below market prices. It is this most neglected group of devices, but the market pattern has the greatest impact, which is behind a giant stirring, that is, Intel.
Intel from last year onwards in Shenzhen, pulling together small manufacturers, the main push of low-priced flat panel, their market strategy, as well as the action is very flexible and fast, Intel almost one-stop contracted product development to market sales program, which device manufacturers Blue Devil only two and a half months on the launch of a product. In this year, their turnkey model upgrade, the whole process time compressed to one month.
"The most important thing about the turnkey model is that it allows vendors to save investment, from software, hardware, quality control, etc., Intel has a lot of investment. bay Trail has entered the turnkey process, the expectation is that the product can be out in a month." Intel mobile communications business unit ecological head Zhang Xiaobo said in an interview with Ai Faner.
They shipped 5 million units in the first quarter, and are expected to double that in the second quarter, with the target for the year set at 40 million units. With about 80 percent of the tablets with Intel chips being shipped overseas, mainly at the low end, it's no wonder that a colleague of Huffington Post writer Timothy Stenovec went to a Verizon store to buy a phone, and ended up getting an Android tablet for free.
If Intel does reach its goal of 40 million units sold, it will account for a fifth of the overall market, which is a terrifying number, given that the iPad sells about 60 million units a year.
Insufficient iPad innovation
The most common response to the argument that iPad sales are declining is that the iPad is so good that it doesn't need to be updated. But there's a glaring loophole in that answer: Why are users so diligent about updating their smartphones and laptops when they're so good?
In the end, it's the richness of the application that can't keep up. People use iPad to read, watch videos, and occasionally play games, unlike cell phones and laptops, which are frantically updating their configurations, and then quickly keeping up with the software features, which are always competing with each other, and the need for hardware upgrades has existed for a long time.
Looking back at the history of iPad updates, the last few years of upgrades have been lackluster. iPad 2 was the biggest update, and since then, iPad 3 and iPad 4 have just added Retina screens, iPad Air has gotten thinner, and iPad mini has changed screen sizes, but at the app level, you can't see the highlights.
While cross-functional smartphones are getting stronger and larger, and once-abandoned laptops are getting lighter and thinner, with much improved battery life, the rapid improvement of both has further compressed the viability of tablets.
Reader f thinks this is the result of mis-selling, as the iPad 2 has been on sale for a long time, resulting in app developers having to consider the iPad 2's adaptations, making many apps fail to deliver high performance, which in turn inhibits the pressure on users to switch. I purchased my iPad 3 years ago on the first day of the iPad 2 launch, and I'm still using it without stress, so I'm embarrassed to change it.
f Probably getting to the heart of the matter, that is, the demand for performance in apps is not exploding, users are not using higher-end apps, and old machines can stay young forever. If users are stuck watching videos, reading, and light gaming forever, then unless the device breaks, users are pressured to replace it.
That's probably the biggest problem with Apple's development of the iPad, that it hasn't tapped the full potential of the device. For example, it can't even do something as simple as posting a WordPress article on the go, because it can't import photos from the camera's SD card (which requires an additional accessory) and make quick edits, and if it could do that, I'd be able to ditch my laptop and use the iPad + Bluetooth keyboard set on the go.
The problem, as noted in a USA Today article, is that many of the hottest technologies - graphics rendering, medical imaging, 3D printing, big data, cloud computing, virtual reality, robotics - are all connected to PCs, not iPads.
Of course, iPad developers are still popping up with great ideas for expanding the device. For example, the recently introduced iPad accessory Structure Sensor, which captures 3D models of your surroundings and obtains infrared images that can be used by 3D software and 3D printed, as well as augmented reality games, turns the iPad into a 3D scanner, but the iPad's innovative extensions like this are far and few between, and center around lightweight content. Unfortunately, iPad's innovative extensions are few and far between, and are more centered around lightweight content.
We haven't been able to find out yet whether the new iPad will have any revolutionary features, with the latest big news being that Apple is partnering with IBM to sell more iPads through the latter's channels, but Cook also stayed the course at the earnings conference, saying, "I think tablets are still in the early stages of their development, and we're making some big innovations to them. innovation." He also told the Huffington Post, "In the next year, it's no surprise that iPad will start the growth engine again because it will have some significant feature updates in the second half of the year."
We'll see.
(By Chaowen Wang)