IPad May Not Have Sold Well During the Holidays After All
Despite claims that the Kindle Fire is not an iPad competitor, Amazon’s tablet looks like it might be cutting into Apple’s sales in a significant way. According to an analyst at Morgan Keenan, the Kindle Fire cost Apple one to two million iPad sales, a number that is not entirely insignificant.
Tablet traffic data from mobile ad company Chitika Insights also suggests that Apple took a hit. After looking at data collected from hundreds of millions of impressions from its network both before Christmas and after Christmas, the company has estimations on how many tablets were received during the holiday.
While the iPad did have a strong lead over its competition, it did not have a significant spike in traffic after Christmas morning. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, had a 122 percent increase in ad traffic between the 24th and the 25th.
RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook also experienced a 50 percent jump, suggesting the Kindle Fire and the PlayBook were the most gifted tablets of the season. It seems Santa left quite a few Kindle Fires under the Christmas tree this year.
Will 2012 mark the beginning of the end of Apple’s reigning tablet? Maybe not. There’s no way of knowing how differences in operating systems affected the data that was gathered. It’s no secret that Android apps generate twice the ad impressions of iOS and make most of their money through ad revenue.
The iPad 2 is nine months old, and comparing an older tablet to the hype of a newly released tablet doesn’t add up. Additionally, most of us are generally aware of Apple’s product cycles. There’s been no shortage of rumors and information on the iPad 3, and it stands to reason that many people are waiting for the new tablet instead of purchasing an older version. Until the iPad 3 is released, it may be premature to predict the Kindle Fire’s ultimate impact on Apple’s sales.