Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market

TyFoN writes "Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. ...the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'"

A silly submission

[bonch]

Strategy Analytics is talking about units shipped. Unit shipments aren't the same as actual sales to customers. Microsoft used that same word-twisting when they tried to convince everyone that Vista was doing well. As John Gruber pointed out yesterday [daringfireball.net], what Strategy Analytics is calling market share is actually "shipment share." That's not market share in the way most people think of it. If you go by actual sales, the iPad has sold almost 30 million total, while Android tablets have only sold about 1.35 million.

I'm surprised Apple's earnings report didn't make it to Slashdot's front page. Sales of the iPad have tripled [cnbc.com] since last year, at 9.25 million, and iPhone sales more than doubled. iPad sales have been so successful that retailers reserved inventory space for them at the expense of PCs. PC shipments declined by about 6% [slashdot.org], and the PC industry overall declined by 4.2%. I think that's the biggest untold story of all in this--after decades of growth, the PC is in a downward trend because of the iPad.

Because it's percentage-based and can therefore fluctuate based on total size, market share is not as important a figure as it's often made out to be. It can be used to paint a negative picture where there isn't one. It can also be twisted by citing units shipped rather than sold. The iPad is doing better than ever and doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon. I realize that Slashdot is historically pro-Linux and will present Linux-based products as always "catching up" or being on the cusp of taking over, but there's just no evidence of that happening at this point in time.

Does this include the Nook?

[edremy]

IIRC, the Nook doesn't run Honeycomb. My bet is that the vast majority of Android tablets now out there are Nooks, of which only a few have been hacked to be stock Android tablets. The most recent sales figures I can find for the nook imply that 3M were sold as of last March, so the sales of that one tablet dwarf the numbers estimated above

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