Apple sold a million pieces of iPad2 during the first weekend of arrival as per a Reuters report. The new tablets flew off the shelves, ten times as faster as the original iPad which took 28 days to sell its first million. Few stores ran out of stock within 10 minutes of launch. Consumers in Manhattan and San Francisco braved rain and winter winds making a beeline for the product with nearly a 1000 people queuing overnight to become the first users. The new generation Tab has several advanced features is twice as fast, but lighter and slimmer and importantly with the same price.
Sold at Apple, AT&T and Verizon Wireless outlets as well as Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy Stores, besides Apple online stores, it became impossible to find iPad stocks by the end of the weekend. Consumers will now have to wait till supplies are bolstered by Apple next week, justifying the long lines and Apple’s 61% market share of the Tablet market.
When Steve Jobs defied market rumors and pancreatic cancer to return briefly to unveil the iPad2 a week ago to a select San Francisco audience, he had already dented the confidence of upcoming market players. Apple was? launching the second generation variant of an immensely popular and proven product with an aggressive $499 pricing, just when its competitors were getting ready for their first generation offerings.
Gartner analyst Van Baker rightly summed up its success with the words “The hardware is as good as anything on the market, the price is still very aggressive, and the software just buries the competition,” What chance would the yet to be tested Motorola Mobility’s Xoom, or RIM’s Blackberry Playbook, HP Touchpad, LG G Slate, ACER Iconia Tab or HTC flyer have with a higher pricing between $600 to $800 against the formidable iPad2. Virtually none claimed analysts, saying that Apple’s latest launch would have sent others scurrying back to the drawing board to rework their product design and prices.
That leaves the only competitor to have successfully entered the Tab market the Samsung Galaxy Tab worth a consideration. It’s very popular
7” model is priced higher at $599 at Amazon online or at Verizon but is available also at $399 on a 2 year contract with Sprint and T-Mobile. Launched during end November 2010 it has sold well over a million pieces mainly in Europe and the emerging markets. Samsung has also unveiled the 10” Galaxy Tab at the Barcelona fair in January but its pricing will be hard hit when it comes to the market in April. If the product price exceeds the iPad2 it could bomb in the price sensitive emerging markets that it operates in. Apple’s plans to ship its new tablet to over 25 destinations worldwide would surely be giving Samsung and other players the jitters.
Sandip SenI love to write on anything and everything under the sun from Project Management to Poetry, Economics to Travel and Technology. But most of all I love to write about our planet earth, about which you can read more in my blog Ecology to Economics.
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