Well, I guess Apple achieved that crazy-sounding 40 million total for 2011; the last quarter sold an incredible 15.43 million iPads, added to the earlier quarters of 4.69, 9.25 and 11.12!
Apple clearly still offer the best tablet computer, even with the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire late last year – no news yet on sales of that product, but it’s massively more successful than any other iPad “competitor”!
Touchfire is an interesting, and already funded, Kickstarter project
I have one on order, so we will see how good it is – I see it being useful for significant typing, where right now I get out the Apple bluetooth keyboard. Visit Kickstarter to order yours …
There’s been a number of articles about the possibility of Apple’s new iOS 5 Photo Stream service spreading the “wrong” photos around, and the option to avoid this is generally “reset the Photo Stream“.
An alternate I proved today – set your i device to airplane mode (or otherwise disable uploading); now go through and delete the photos you don’t want to have shared; a dialog will warn about deleting in two places, and you’re OK with that. Now when you connect to WiFi only the remaining pictures will upload.
This worked great on my iPad today, pre-sorting photos imported from camera before uploading only what I wanted to keep.
If you do want to save the deleted photos, you could probably use something like Photogene to make copies elsewhere than in the main photo album, so that they are not uploaded (I haven’t tried this).
Last week, on vacation, I discovered that my iPad 2 was not recording sound; I tried recording some sounds and just got static; I then tried the Skype Test Call service and that also was silent.
Tonight I booked and visited the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. The “genius” tried to record using the iPad 2 camera/video App, and confirmed no sound. Then, astonishingly, I was offered a replacement iPad 2 – and they apologized that it was not possible to transfer all my settings over.
So within maybe 20 minutes, I was heading home with a replacement unit, as good as new.
I can’t think of any other business where that would happen. Maybe “send it in for service” but never a perfect “here’s a new one”. Exceptional!
Last quarter, Apple sold just less than 10 million iPads, leaving me still doubting they could sell 40 million for the year as predicted back in January. Of course that same prediction was for a higher resolution iPad 2 display, which didn’t happen.
But now, the latest quarterly figures from Apple announce sales of more than 11 million iPads!
Since Apple quarters don’t line up with annual quarters, it’s tricky to get an exact prediction, but we have:
Second Quarter: 4.69 million iPads (this was the quarter where iPad -> iPad 2 occurred)
Third Quarter: 9.25 million iPads
Fourth Quarter: 11.12 million iPads
These figures cover December 25, 2010 to September 24, 2011 – Apple surely still have huge sales for the rest of this year! That period last year saw sales of over 7 million iPads, but I’d expect to see at least the last quarters 11 million repeated, and perhaps closer to 15 million.
So maybe they don’t hit 40 million iPad sales this year – but likely they will exceed 35 million …
Zite highlights Steve Jobs tributes on his “magic” iPad tonight …
I think the newly announced Amazon Kindle Fire will have an impact on the tablet market, but I’m not sure it will seriously impact the iPad …
While the Kindle Fire has many less features, it seems that Amazon has an excellent design AND implementation – in direct contrast to all previously released “iPad competitors” that appear to want to fail by unreleasing unready products.
At the below $200 price point, there will be many new owners of tablets this year – but there will still be many that want the larger more featured iPad. The losers here will surely be all those other Samsung/Motorola/Blackberry/etc tablets – they had to compete with a fabulous $500 device, now they also have to compete with a $200 price point.
I can’t imagine anyone now being happy with an unsupported $100 HP tablet when for $200 you can get the support and backing of Amazon …
