This is Part 1 of three in a series of posts about the state of tablets, digital magazines, and digital publishing trends.
The iPad’s recent third anniversary served as a reminder of how far the tablet market has come in such a short amount of time. It’s easy to forget how quickly we’ve gone from doubting this new technology—at first dismissing it in favor of existing smartphones and laptops—to not only embracing it, but hanging on every word about the latest release news and constantly dreaming up new ways to use it.
Generally, we know that the tablet market is steadily moving upward in sales and adoption, but where does it really stand? We scoured the most recent research and studies to pull together a recap of tablet trends and stats to give you a better idea.
Tablet Purchasing Trends
- Tablet sales grew by 142.4% in the past year.
- Tablet shipments will outpace those of portable PCs this year, according to a recent forecast from IDC.
- Tablets are expected to surpass total PC shipments by 2015.
- IDC projects that tablet worldwide shipments will rise 58.7% to 229.3 million units in 2013, while notebook computers will fall 6.7% to 187.4 million.
Tablet User Demographics
- U.S. tablet ownership is split evenly between men and women.
- 55% of tablet owners have a household income of $75,000 or more.
- iPad owners skew male (52.9%), slightly younger (44.5% under the age of 35) and wealthier (46.3% residing in households with income of $100k or greater) compared to an average tablet user.
- Amazon’s Kindle Fire owners skew female, with women representing 56.6% of its audience base.
- Android and Kindle Fire users have lower household incomes than iPad owners.
Tablet Market Share
Source: IDC
- The worldwide average selling price for a tablet is expected to fall 10.8% this year (2013) to $381, as lower-cost Android devices continue to expand the market.
- While Apple continues to dominate the market in tablet sales, its first-quarter market share decreased to about 40% from just under 60% last year.
- Samsung’s market share grew from 11.3% to 17.9% in Q1 of 2013. The company is posting an impressive 282% year-over-year growth rate.
- Asus, the manufacturer of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in third place, with 5.5% of the market.
- Amazon has a 3.7% market share.
- Shipments of its Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets helped Microsoft enter the top five for the first time, with a 1.8% market share.
Posted by: Gina Barrett