Since December I’ve been doing research for one of my consulting clients on the market for applications for tablet computers such as the iPad. It’s been fascinating work, since it’s there is still so much potential for mobile applications in general, and tablet applications in particular.
Anyways, I’d like to share, with their approval, some of the key facts about the iPad’s performance so far.
Since its April 2010 release, the iPad has sold over fifteen million units globally, including 4.2 million units in Q3 2010. In doing so it has beaten even the most optimist analyst forecasts of about seven million units shipped by year’s end. It’s not a stretch to say that it has was 2010’s biggest consumer electronics success story.
According to consumer research firm MyType, early iPad owners “tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance,” whilst an early analysis by Yahoo of traffic arriving to their suite of sites from the iPad indicated that iPad owners were disproportionately male, disproportionately aged between 30 and 54, and more interested in finance, sports, and photography than the typical Yahoo user. Needless to say, this is a coveted audience, which is why there were almost 38,000 iPad-specific apps in Apple’s app store by October 2010 at an average cost of about $5, although some analysts believe that iPad owners are willing to pay far more for iPad apps than for iPhone apps, and that developers should be able to raise their prices without sales suffering too much.
However, this is just the beginning, since it looks like the iPad sales are due to explode over the next year – some analysts are predicting that Apple will sell over forty million iPads next year. If iPad sales do reach that level, that then opens up many new possibilities for app producers.
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