The growth of iPad in recent years is not unpleasant. The annual sales volume has already exceeded 50 million units, which has promoted the prosperity of the tablet computer market. Surprisingly, however, the iPad is caught in a sales dilemma and has encountered a growth bottleneck. In the case of overall market growth, the iPad has actually appeared "reverse growth".
As can be seen from Apple's recent financial report, iPad sales in the second quarter have declined for two consecutive years, and its share has plummeted. According to the tablet PC sales recently released by IDC, Apple's share in this quarter dropped to 26.9%. Although it still maintained the first position, compared with the previous two years, this figure was 60.2% and 33% respectively, which is undoubtedly amazing.
The overall tablet PC market grew by 1 1% this quarter, reaching 49.3 million units, which is in a steady upward trend. Obviously, the iPad has a big problem? There must be multiple factors in the problem. If it is divided into external competition and self-development, two points cannot be ignored. One is the emergence of a large number of low-priced competitors, and the other is that iPad innovation is obviously insufficient.
"Crazy" low-priced competitors
At the beginning of the popularity of iPad, a large number of competitors emerged, including Samsung, Lenovo, HTC and Amazon. They released many differentiated products, making innovations in size, product form and function, trying to be different from iPad.
In fact, they did very well. Amazon once occupied half of the flat-panel sales in the United States, and Samsung's share also rose from 7.4% two years ago to 17.2%. Lenovo's sales in the second quarter increased by 64.7% to 2.4 million units.
However, from the sales data, there is no obvious improvement from the second place to the fifth place, because their sales are very small. In the second quarter, the total sales volume of the four companies was 6,543,800+042,000 vehicles, only 800,000 vehicles more than last year, which was almost at a standstill. Adding up the top five sales, the data in the second quarter decreased year-on-year.
Then, since the overall sales volume is growing steadily, and the sales volume of the five major brands is declining as a whole, what is the problem? The answer is "white card", which is the other people in the picture below. Although others includes brands such as Amazon and Hewlett-Packard, since the fifth place only sells 1 10,000 units, other brands are almost negligible:
The sales growth of "white card" is terrible. According to IDC's statistics last year, "white cards" accounted for 26% in 20 12, 39% in 20 13, and 44.4% in the second quarter of 20 14. It almost switched places with iPad two years ago, which is the sum of other brands in the middle, accounting for about 30% of the total.
Not surprisingly, these "white cards" come from Shenzhen, some have no brands, and some brands you have never heard of. In Huaqiang North or Zhongguancun stores, you can see a large number of such equipment, and the price is much lower than the market price. It is this most neglected equipment group that has the greatest impact on the market structure. There is a giant behind this, and that is Intel.
Since last year, Intel has been wooing small manufacturers in Shenzhen, mainly pushing low-priced tablets. Their marketing strategies and actions are very flexible and fast. Intel almost contracted the product development to the marketing plan, and the equipment manufacturer Blue Devils launched a product in two and a half months. This year, their turnkey mode was upgraded, and the whole process time was shortened to one month.
"The most important thing of turnkey mode is to save the investment of manufacturers. Intel has invested heavily in software, hardware and quality control. Bay Trail has entered the turnkey process and is expected to produce products within one month. " Zhang Xiaobo, head of ecology of Intel Mobile Communications Division, said in an interview with Ai Faner.
They shipped 5 million units in the first quarter, which is expected to double in the second quarter, and the annual target is set at 40 million units. About 80% of tablets using Intel chips are sold overseas, mainly in the low-end market. No wonder a colleague of Timothy Stenovec, the author of the Huffington Post, went to the Verizon store to buy a mobile phone and got a android tablets for free.
If Intel really reaches the sales target of 40 million units, it will occupy one-fifth of the whole market, which is an extremely horrible figure, and the annual sales of iPad is only about 60 million units.
IPad is not innovative enough.
In view of the decline in iPad sales, the most talked about by readers is whether the quality of the iPad is good or not, and there is no need to update it. But there is an obvious loophole in this answer: why are smartphones and notebooks of good quality, but users are diligent in updating them?
In the final analysis, the richness of applications can't keep up. People use the iPad to read books, watch videos and occasionally play games, unlike mobile phones and laptops, which update their configurations crazily, and then the software functions quickly catch up. The two are always in competition, and the need for hardware upgrade has existed for a long time.
Looking back at the history of iPad updates, the updates in recent years are really lacking. IPad 2 is the biggest update. Since then, iPad 3 and iPad 4 have only added Retina screens, iPad Air has become thinner, and iPad mini has changed the screen size. At the application level, there are almost no bright spots.
Smartphones with cross-functional functions are becoming more and more powerful, and notebooks that have been "abandoned" are becoming thinner and thinner, and their endurance is greatly improved. The rapid improvement of the two further compressed the living space of the tablet.
Reader f thinks this is the result of misplaced sales. Because iPad 2 has been sold for a long time, application developers have to consider the adaptation of iPad 2, which makes many applications unable to achieve high performance, thus inhibiting the pressure of users to change machines. This statement is correct. I bought the iPad 2 on the first day I landed in China three years ago. So far, I have not used pressure, and I am embarrassed to change.
What F may say is the core of the problem, that is, the demand for performance of applications has not exploded, users have not used more advanced applications, and old machines can remain young forever. If users stay in watching videos, reading books and playing light games forever, they have no motivation to change unless the equipment is damaged.
This may be Apple's biggest problem in developing the iPad, which failed to fully tap the potential of this device. For the simplest example, it can't even do the simple task of publishing WordPress articles, because it can't import photos from the SD card of the camera (you need to buy additional accessories) and edit them quickly. If I can, I can completely abandon my notebook and go out with the combination of iPad+ and Bluetooth keyboard cover.
An article by USA-Today also mentioned this problem. Among the most popular technologies, graphics rendering, medical images, 3D printing, big data, cloud computing, virtual reality and robots are all connected to a PC instead of an iPad.
Of course, iPad developers will still come up with good ideas from time to time and constantly enhance its extended functions. For example, the recently released iPad accessory Structure Sensor can capture the 3D model of the surrounding environment and obtain infrared images. The obtained model can be used for 3D printing by 3D software, and augmented reality games can be played. It turned the iPad into a 3D scanner. Unfortunately, there are few innovative extension functions like iPad, and more focus on lightweight content.
Now we don't know whether the new iPad will have revolutionary functions. The latest big news is that Apple cooperated with IBM to sell more iPads through the latter channel. However, Cook also left a hand at the earnings conference. He said: "I think the tablet computer is still in the early stage of development, and we are making some major innovations for it." He also told the Huffington Post: "Next year, the iPad will start the growth engine again, which is not surprising, because it will have some important functional updates in the second half of the year."
Then we'll see.
(Author: Wang Chaowen)