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The iPad, once a foundational and impressive chunk of Apple's overall revenue, has been stuck in a rut for over three years. Sales have slumped for xiii straight quarters, despite Apple tree'southward various attempts to exhale new life into the tablet market place by releasing products like the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Pro. The company is finally reporting a significant surge in sales, courtesy of the new iPad variant released this year. Its secret? A $329 price tag.

The latest iPad (sometimes referred to as the iPad 2022) isn't a huge speed jump over the iPad Air 2, and it'due south a bit thicker and heavier equally well. It'due south besides taken some criticism for its display choices; the panel lacks an anti-reflectivity coating or fully laminated display (whether these criteria are critical is, of course, a personal opinion). But the buying public, evidently, has been more than swayed by a cheaper iPad, fifty-fifty if that iPad isn't necessarily on the cutting edge of engineering science — and Apple is taking a significant hit to its profit margins to move this hardware.

SixColors.com has put together an excellent visual map of Apple's overall earnings and product sales (hat tip to Daring Fireball for cluing united states of america into the link). You can striking SixColors for the full study; 2 iPad-related slides are shown below:

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iPad sales growth by quarter. Graph by SixColors

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iPad revenue growth by quarter. Graph by SixColors

iPad sales growth was 15 pct in Q3 2022 of Apple's fiscal twelvemonth (Apple's fiscal twelvemonth is offset from the calendar twelvemonth), simply its revenue was simply up two percent. That likely explains the decision non to laminate the display or include an anti-reflective coating — Apple isn't making very much coin off these tablets, and you tin can see that reflected in its tiny revenue proceeds even though sales shot upward dramatically.

Have Tablets Fallen Into the PC Trap?

When tablets get-go hitting the market, it seemed every bit if Apple had tapped into an inexhaustible gold mine. The popularity of tablets is directly tied to the abrupt reject of PC sales — back in 2022, when phones were less capable than they are now, they weren't seen as undermining the PC market in the aforementioned fashion. Fifty-fifty today, at that place are considerable differences between running iOS or Android versus the multi-tasking adequacy of a Windows system.

Phones accept become ubiquitous, but people withal tend to replace them every two years. Tablets, on the other hand, have been a near-graveyard on the Android side of things, and a steadily declining market for Apple tree. Nosotros suspect the decline is largely due to the same factors that accept impacted the PC market. Modern tablets haven't avant-garde that much compared with previous models, and users are replacing them over longer periods of time.

It'southward not hard to see an statement for the above. If you bought a tablet because it was larger, and then yous could scout movies or practice some relaxed web surfing, chances are that tablet still doing those tasks just fine 3 years subsequently. The iPad Air 2 had some specs this newer iPad however doesn't match: 2GB of RAM, a tri-cadre CPU clocked at 1.5GHz, and up to 128GB of storage. If you lot bought into the iPad ecosystem in 2022, chances are y'all aren't feeling the need to upgrade yet. Meanwhile, phone screens accept gotten large enough that multiple models could be plausibly classified as small-scale tablets as opposed to large cell phones.

It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues and how Apple handles it in the future. Launching a $329 tablet positions the company to fend off some Chromebook competition (though not all of it, since Chromebooks sell for under $200), but it too means Apple is taking a margin hit, something the visitor has by and large refused to do in the proper name of gaining market place share.