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Report Claims Microsoft Beat Apple in Online Tablet Sales for October (winbeta.org) 239

Posted by samzenpus from the running-the-numbers dept.
Eloking writes: Apple's iPad tablet ushered in the modern tablet era when it was introduced in 2010, and it's dominated tablet sales ever since. iPad sales have stagnated recently, but nevertheless Apple has maintained its lead in overall tablet market share. WinBeta received an early version of an upcoming report, '1010data Facts for Ecom Insights, January 2014 – October 2015' by the 101data Ecom Insights Panel, however, that indicates all of that might be changing as Microsoft assumes the mantle of best-selling tablet maker in terms of online sales in October.
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Report Claims Microsoft Beat Apple in Online Tablet Sales for October More

Report Claims Microsoft Beat Apple in Online Tablet Sales for October

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  • They can't lead in market numbers forever (Score:5, Insightful)

    by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @02:54PM (#51068225)

    At one point, everyone who wanted an iPad and is able to afford one will already have done so. After that, these people will only buy a new one to upgrade once in a while.

    • True... and the main iPad didn't get an update this year... frankly it didn't really need one just yet...

      A year ago we replaced an iPad 3 and a iPad 4 with a pair of iPad Air 2s. That was a decent upgrade. My plan/hope is that these new units last us 5 years.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        Actually, Apple iPad did get an update... the latest iPad directly supports the new Apple stylus that they just came out with. but to my knowledge the update was not commercially available until November. It would be interesting, I think, to compare MS surface sales to Apple for November.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Dude "Built-in 27.3-watt-hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery" http://www.apple.com/au/ipad-a... [apple.com], the only way they will last five years is if you do not use them, the more you use them the quicker they will die. "Apple warrants the included hardware product and accessories against defects in materials and workmanship for one year from the date of original retail purchase. Apple does not warrant against normal wear and tear, nor damage caused by accident or abuse", this from their warranty page. So ye

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by samkass ( 174571 )

          You'll have to define "fail". I have iPad 2's from four years ago which still have many hours of battery life and have seen relatively heavy use. Perhaps not the 10 it had originally, but then neither does a Microsoft tablet. I think Apple considers a battery eligible for replacement if its capacity falls below 80% during warrantee or Apple Care period. Otherwise you have to pay $99 to have it swapped out.

          • Re:They can't lead in market numbers forever (Score:5, Informative)

            by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @07:45PM (#51069715)

            $99 to replace the battery in a 128GB iPad Air 2 in 3 years strikes me as a pretty reasonable price. It is about 12% of the cost of the device and it would restore it to like new condition.

            If the other option is spending $700 on a new one, $99 for a battery seems quite reasonable.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            This from Apple "Your battery is designed to retain up to 80 per cent of its original capacity at 1,000 complete charge cycles. The one-year warranty includes service coverage for a defective battery". So 1000 full discharges and recharges, one year only covers defective and not designed failure. The more you use it, the quicker you lose it (mind you somehow you think it is evil to allow a user replaceable battery in the design). You must also pay for shipping if necessary, during which all your data will

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )
          On that metric, they will "fail" (but let's be careful about how we define that word) even if you do or don't use them - lithium rechargeable chemistry batteries all have a shelf life. Depending on how you define service life, they're rated from one to two years typically. Yes, they'll almost always still hold some charge after that, of course. This is why you never want to buy "new old stock" batteries for a laptop or cellphone - lithium batteries made ten years ago for your ancient ThinkPad will most like

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            I don't play semantics I just go with reasonable rules https://www.accc.gov.au/busine... [accc.gov.au]. Failure would be no longer fit for the purpose for which is was intended ie supplying a reasonable charge to allow reasonable use of the device. I know some countries are tougher on this, than those that blatantly favour corporate profits but I think they need to be even tougher and not be sucked down by corrupted foreign government influence.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by larwe ( 858929 )
              Sure, I wasn't arguing with you on the question "is a tablet with zero battery life still useful as a tablet", I was stating that even if he put the tablet in a safe and only used it once a year, the battery will *still* die, because its lifespan is capped, regardless of how much or little he's using it. You can shorten the lifespan of a Li-poly battery significantly. You can't lengthen it significantly :)

  • Surface is great (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @02:59PM (#51068255) Journal

    Of course on slashdot it is a failure and no one is buying them. But in the real world they ate the number 2 generator of revenue for Microsoft and can run office and be managed via active directory for IT departments making them popular. The screen is Apple quality hardware

    • Re: Surface is great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @03:47PM (#51068485) Homepage

      The Surface and Windows Phones will sell very well to corporates with heavy investment in Microsoft tech because it integrates very well and the Surface can run all their proprietary software. Apple and Linux fanboys are completely incapable of understanding that the corporate world is never going to fully embrace something that doesn't allow them to take advantage of their huge investment in Windows.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by amiga3D ( 567632 )

        I really don't care. Why would I care if you or anyone else pisses their money away? I own a galaxy tab 2 that I picked up used and it works okay so I'm not buying into Apple's high priced tablet world but I have looked at them and they are better than anything Samsung makes and Samsung makes nicer hardware than the Surface tablets. I can see that if you are slaved to the windows world then sure, Surface is your thing. I own an Apple Mac Mini that I use for video work but I'm using Linux for general com

        • I have a used T430 with linux mint. It's awesome. Just had to share.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by amiga3D ( 567632 )

            Linux runs good on lower grade hardware. On my T420 it hauls ass. I built a dual AMD 64 bit system back years ago when that was the hot thing. I put Mepis Linux on it and it was amazing. I had a friend come over and he was absolutely blown away. I've installed it on a lot of friends computers over the years and I only had 2 that went back to windows.

      • The Surface and Windows Phones will sell very well to corporates with heavy investment in Microsoft tech because it integrates very well and the Surface can run all their proprietary software. Apple and Linux fanboys are completely incapable of understanding that the corporate world is never going to fully embrace something that doesn't allow them to take advantage of their huge investment in Windows.

        With Windows Phone, there is the added advantage that if given to employees, it's likely to be used just for work purposes, since it misses much of the cool stuff that iPhones and Androids have that could tempt employees to repurpose them.

        That, and the fact that they would integrate so much better w/ Windows 10

    • I'm hoping to get one at one point. It can be a tablet, and also masquerade as a laptop when needed. And I can install legacy Wintel apps

      But it's tough to justify it given that w/ the same budgets, I could get a far superior spec'ed laptop from any of the other vendors - Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo et al

  • *online* sales? who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @03:15PM (#51068329) Homepage

    I recall reading about when Pepsi overtook Coke. Everyone rejoiced. However, in actual fact, Coke still outsold Pepsi by a wide margin; the overtaking was in grocery store sales which they had managed to do by making the six-pack into an 8-pack for the same price and then measuring by total volume.

    And here we have a report that says MS outsold Apple in *online sales*. Hmmm. I suspect that Apple sells the majority, if not the vast majority, of their sales through retail chains. So when I read:

    "The report did not take in account customers who purchased their tablets in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Apple’s retail stores or Best Buy."

    Then basically I think this is even less of a mini-victory than Fortune posits. Pepsi anyone?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      The kicker is that the numbers seem to be for sales dollars, not units sold, so including the more expensive products like covertibles, reduces sales Of iPads and Linux tablets compared to Surface Pros and Surface Books. Also, tablets are ranked by brand, so all the Linux-based tablets get split up into smaller percentages (along with a few non-MS brand MS Windows-based tablets).

  • The funny part. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @03:27PM (#51068379) Homepage

    I have a Surface pro... and I can not get myself to buy another. The huge problems with the Surface pro and how microsoft has told me "sucks to be you, reinstall the OS" means I have zero interest in walking down their road again. Not as long as they use low grade dog food chips like Marvell for their wireless networking.

    • I had a problem with the wireless once. Turns out it was a windows problem and the refresh fixed it just fine. Otherwise zero hardware issues on my end. My partner had a problem with the pen on her Surface and after talking to tech support for a few minutes they sent her a new pen. (There was a facepalmingly funny moment where the tech support person asked her to hold a button combination on the surface which does a hard reset not realising she was running the chat session on it. Kudos that after booting up

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        And that $1000 price tag is why the surface pro is not really a tablet from a sales point of view. It'll sell to corporate execs who want a light laptop - and for whom it matters that they have an obviously pricey toy to show off. Plus, these things will primarily be used as laptops to run desktop software. But that's the Mac Air market, not the iPad market - much less the Kindle Fire / $99 Android market.

        Microsoft can only hope that once they sell enough of these, devs will start writing tablet software

        • The surface is just 699 and now has a quad core atom. It can run office and act as a tablet and no crappy scaled down mac office suit with a crappy ios. It is a real OS that can be used for both work and play. No laptop under 1000 is going to be good anyway in a sea of cheap plastic and garbage quality 1k screens.

        • I think the problem is that there really "isn't" an ipad market. ipad is just a media consumption device that is a great form factor and easy to use, beyond that it is a really awful device. Ultrabooks, hybrids like the surface and other tablet devices that allow you to be "productive" and provide a nice easy form factor to consume media have improved so much that buying an ipad doesn't really make sense anymore. I have watched where I work go from everyone having an ipad as an extra portable to device wher

  • Extra, extra! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Plumpaquatsch ( 2701653 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @03:51PM (#51068515) Journal
    Controversial new study by before unknown Market Research Institute proves Apple is doomed! Institute makes name for itself! Factuality is irrelevant!

    Rerun of the movie first shown in 1977 can be seen at 11.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Apple is the new BSD, forever dying. Netcraft confirms it.

      • Apple is the new BSD, forever dying. Netcraft confirms it.

        Don't you mean "Never before heard of competitor of Netcraft, forgotten next month, confirms it?"

  • Pretty much all devices can do everything. The question is really how good can one device be at one thing. Tablets are good for reading and that's pretty much it. I mostly use mine to read scientific article and annotate them. This is my killer usage of tablet. And I got the one with the most usable "pencil" in the market at the time. Samsung's note tablets were are the best at the time.

    I haven't tried Apple's version. But MS shot at it with the surface pro was a pretty good shot at it I found.

    I'd say that

    • The question is really how good can one device be at one thing.

      No the question is what can it do for me and is there something better that fits the scenario. The Surface Pro series is not the best tablet on the market, it's not the best laptop either. It is however the damn best device for a note taking hybrid tablet that can act as a fully function laptop when you need to device.

  • Brand awareness (Score:2, Interesting)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 )
    The Microsoft Surface is the official tablet of the NFL. You can see it used by officials and coaches in every televised game.... Yet the announcers don't know any better and call them "iPads".

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      This isn't brand awareness as much as mouth drooling fucking stupidity. I've seen all sorts of things call iPads, and yes that includes things that say "Surface" on them in clear text. That shouldn't be a praise for apple, that should be an out right failing grade for our species. Mind you it is 2015 and people still call the computer chassis the "hard drive" so I don't see us breaking out of this trend anytime soon.

  • One month.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dcnjoe60 ( 682885 ) on Sunday December 06, 2015 @05:57PM (#51069133)

    One month does not make a trend. If Microsoft can string multiple sequential months together, than this will be news. Until then, it only means that in this particular month, more Microsoft tablets were sold. Interesting, but nothing more than that.

  • Microsoft productivity pads are probably cannibalizing sales from the business executive laptops. Most of the shops that could support iOS devices have gone to Apple. But the shops that do not or could not support iOS were stuck carrying the business executive laptops. The Sony Vaio clones and Apple airbook clones. Those shops would switch to surface pad pro.

    Once bitten twice shy. Now a days most IT shops want to use only the set of Microsoft products that inter-operate with other systems, even if the wal

  • Apple stabbed with its own Pencil (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lyle Thompson ( 2965671 ) <lylefile&gmail,com> on Sunday December 06, 2015 @08:46PM (#51069949)

    And Microsoft will continue to dominate through the Christmas holiday. How do I know? I went into the Apple Store to buy an iPad Pro.
            Sales person: "Yes sir! We have them in stock!"
            Me: ::Pulls out wallet:: "Please add a Pencil to the order."
            Genius: "We'll ship a Pencil to you in 5-6 weeks"
            Me: ::Puts wallet away:: ::Leaves store::
    (Sometime later)
            Me: ::Typing this on my Surface Pro 4 and loving it!::

  • I guess I know the tiny flaw in the survey (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Plumpaquatsch ( 2701653 ) on Monday December 07, 2015 @02:53AM (#51071323) Journal
    It's an old one: they asked all the (online in this case) retailers for numbers, and added up all numbers reported. Only one major retailer didn't answer (and never does): Apple. Guess who sells most Apple gear?

    Next year: Amazon confirms - Nobody buys Apple TVs or Google Chromecasts!

  • All Things Must Pass... (Score:3)

    by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Monday December 07, 2015 @11:40AM (#51072967)
    Like skin tight jeans, beards and huge cover-half-your-face glasses, the iPads dominance in tablets will pass.
    With it's atrocious interface and sky high price, the iPad is akin to the early days of paying for a bottle of water...

    Let the real tablets take their place at the table: Google, Samsung and Microsoft

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