Get this: Digitimes reckons Apple is having 2.3 to 2.5 million iPads manufactured per month. Apple recently announced it had sold 3 million iPads in 80 days. DailyTech speculates that Apple could sell 16 – 18 million iPads by the end of this year.
The Jobs-led ability to espy and exploit a new IT form factor is devastating, and no other supplier even comes close to challenging Apple yet. All the major IT hardware system suppliers have been wrong-footed by this. Not one of them earnestly listening to their customers detected a market need for such a product, not one. They have been shown to be dullards, bereft of inspiration.
Apple is expanding its geographic coverage in terms of iPad sales and the per-month sales totals look set to rise. It is a phenomenon. Can Microsoft, HP, Dell, Acer, whoever catch up? They are chasing a moving target as whatever they bring out will face iPad gen 2 next year.
This is like Apple inventing the Mac with no PC competition at all, none, just a field littered with third-rate withdrawn crappy devices like the earlier Windows tablet effort. Apple is streaking ahead of a competing pack that has not even left the starting blocks yet.
Consumers want easy-to-use, neat-looking tablets. It’s becoming a no-brainer. We are eventually going to see a whole slew of competing devices come onto the market. The prospects for flash memory demand must be humungous. The prospects for increased data transmission by WiFi and mobile phone networks equally humungous.
My intuition says netbook sales could start to be adversely affected by iPad-led tablet sales. That will constrain Apple’s nascent tablet competitors, the ones with netbooks, as they try to develop differentiate marketing positions for tablets and netbooks. We’ll see.
