The iPad’s dominance of tablet usage, even 1.5 years later, is astounding

Is anyone really surprised that the iPad is crushing all these things-that-are-obviously-trying-to-be-just-like-the-iPad? Customers aren't actually as stupid as birds: You can put a newborn cuckoo in a bird's nest and the bird will feed it -- it doesn't actually know what its own offspring are supposed to look like -- but you can't just build a thing with a screen that looks superficially like an iPad and expect folks to mindlessly buy it. Especially when you're selling to the early-adopter crowd that buys devices from two-year-old categories.<p>But, really, the lesson of articles like this one is that tech business analysts are prisoners of their own categories. The iPod Touch is not a "tablet" because it is too small; obviously all those smartphones are not "tablets" because they can make phone calls, which clearly makes them completely different, because... hey, when analysts were growing up the telephone was <i>a completely different thing</i> than the computer, instead of just one application that runs on your computer and that gets less use with each passing year.<p>And the Kindle is somehow not a tablet, because... uh, it doesn't have pretty colors? And the B&#38;N Nook is not a tablet, because... uh, I guess you can't view animations on it? (Okay, seriously, it's probably the absence of touch that defines a non-"tablet". But does anyone want to bet that the new touch-enabled Kindle will get to be called a "tablet"? I somehow doubt it. It's just not iPad enough.)<p>Obviously, netbooks -- the hot category of yesteryear -- are not "tablets" and therefore don't appear on these charts, even though the most obvious reason I can see to buy an iPad alternative is to <i>get a keyboard</i> and/or the ability to run PC apps. And, of course, the eleven-inch Macbook Air isn't a tablet either.<p>If you allow the iPad to define a category and then draw the boundaries so narrowly that only the iPad fits, surprise! It dominates the category!<p>What would be more interesting to look at is the iPad's share of "things with similar screen size and weight", or "things that can play portable games", or "things that can read Kindle books", or "things with half-decent web browsers and 3G support".

Despite all the hooplah and endless praise, analysts <i>still</i> manage to under-credit Apple for the iPad. They do it by describing the iPad as a "tablet" PC, as if it somehow lives in the same category as all the tablet PCs that came before it.<p>In a physical sense, sure, it does and it is. But to consumers, it's not a tablet; it's an iPad. That's a crucial distinction. Consumers just weren't buying tablet PCs before the iPad came out. They didn't grok the tablet category, full stop. They didn't see a need for a PC-like device that wasn't a PC. Apple changed all of that. It breathed new life into a stillborn category by tearing down that category and reinventing it. That's a monumental accomplishment.<p>So, while it may be technically correct to lump all of the pre- and post-iPad tablets into one category, such analysis misses the spirit of the matter. And that's what Apple understands that its competitors do not. Apple doesn't market its products as part of existing categories; it markets them as categories unto themselves. An iPhone isn't a "smartphone;" it's an iPhone. An iPod isn't an "mp3 player;" it's an iPod. And so on and so forth. As for Apple's competitors? They see themselves in the "mp3 player" category, or the "smartphone" category, or the "tablet" category. They've lost the battle by misunderstanding the battlefield.

People don't want a tablet, they want an iPad. It's that simple.<p>Does anybody seriously believe that the average consumer walks into Best Buy (or any other store) and say "Hello, I'm shopping for a tablet, what selection do you offer?". And then proceed to compare side by side an iPad and a Xoom (or any non-iPad) to, ultimately, decide on the iPad? As of today, this is the fantasy world those non-iPad tablet makers are living in, thinking they can compete on specs (but apparently not on looks or price).<p>OTOH, this will change with the Kindle Fire that will swoop the entry level tier.

With the recommended configuration, the Honeycomb browser on my Android tablet (Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet) identifies itself as Chrome running on Windows XP. I don't know if this is the case for other Android tablets but, if so, that would certainly skew these traffic stats.

Really interested in seeing what iOS 5 does to these numbers. When it's updated, I'm planning on the iPad being my grandma's next computer.

I'd hardly take the analytics numbers from mobile web browsers on an Apple-focused blog as substantial evidence in any way, shape, or form.<p>Here's the numbers I come up with. According to Google, 1.8% of current Android devices that are activated and have accessed the Android Market in the last 2 weeks are running Honeycomb (their tablet OS). In July they were up to 130 million total activations, with 550,000 new ones every day. Assuming that number hasn't grown at all (which is being extremely conservative considering that number shot up from 400,000 only 2 months prior), that would put the number of active Android devices around 180,000,000. That puts the current number of Android tablets that are sold and active on the Android Market at over 3 million. Apple's numbers look to be about 30 million iPads.<p>Assuming that Apple and Google are the only players in this market (hint: they're not), then that puts Android at around 10% of the tablet market. Still dominated by the iPad, yes, but at least these numbers have weight to them. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next 8-12 months. The iPhone having real competition served to improve the entire smartphone market all around. Hopefully we've only begun to see what tablets can do.

This is what I don't understand. Based on published sales figures the iPad is ~85% of tablets, which I simply don't believe. There can be no explanation for this other than the non-iPad manufacturers are basically lying, which typically means "in channel == sold". It may also mean they don't count returns.<p>The iPad having 97% of tablet Web traffic is intuitively a far more accurate number. Just think about how many tablets you see in the wild and how many of them are iPads.<p>As for why: I think the answer comes down to the ecosystem being <i>far</i> more important on tablets than on phones. Any smartphone can send and receive calls, send and receive text messages, send and receive emails and use some variety of maps. IMHO that covers the vast majority of most people's usage.<p>But on tablets? Games matter. Apps matter. Far more than on phones (IMHO), hence Apple's unrelenting dominance of the space (so far) and also why people expecting a repeat of Android's rapid growth in the phone space just don't seem to understand the difference. But I guess that's the danger of analogies.<p>Android's Kindle Fire is (IMHO) the first serious iPad competitor to emerge and the first non-iPad that will get remotely serious (&#62;1M units) marketshare.

I hate Apple with all my heart but I still do not know of another option if I want a good tablet at that size.

I think the problem is that people are looking at this backwards.<p>The vast majority of people buy the iPad not because they want a tablet, they buy it because <i>they want a really big iPhone</i>. HP, RIM and most of the others seemed to not understand this and attempted to build a really big iPhone... without the iPhone ecosystem. Surprise, surprise they failed miserably.<p>Apple did a very smart thing, they took a product that was selling like hotcakes, and they introduced a product that was identical save for the form factor. Every iPhone user (which is a whole lot of people) was suddenly an expert iPad user! They felt at home, they felt safe, they got what they wanted: a really big iPhone.

The dominance of the iPad has always been about the walled garden and iTunes.<p>Amazon will clean up in the lower end of this market because they also get the importance of content and to some degree walled garden.<p>To stretch an analogy somewhat:<p><pre><code> We geeks are the cowboys who want to roam in wolf-infested hills, looking for gold. Normal people want to play in a beautiful, safe garden filled with lovely shiny toys. </code></pre> Who can blame people, after years of viruses, malware, stupid UIs and techno-babble, to want to sit on a sofa and noodle on the internet while watching TV.

I think it's because it has the best web browsing experience, but i may be wrong.