Apple increased its dominant share of the nascent “media tablet” market increased during the June quarter, according to new research from IDC. The company said that Apple’s share of this
All told, IDC said that 13.6million “media tablets” were shipped in the June quarter. Though Apple claimed sales of 9.25 million iPads during the quarter, IDC’s figures (which are determined differently than manufacturers’) accounted for 9.3 million iPad 2 units shipped.
Research In Motion reportedly entered the market with 4.9% market share when it shipped the BlackBerry PlayBook, and this was a big part of why Android lost share. Unmentioned in the report, which was released before RIM’s latest quarterly results on Thursday, was the fact that RIM’s PlayBook shipments plummeted during the three months ending in August to just 200,000 units.
Looking partially forward to the second half of the year (we’re two and a half months into that second half of the year as it is), the company believes that Apple will continue to maintain its dominance.
HP’s TouchPad, which is being dumped on the market for US$99, will be a disruptive force during the rest of the year, as well. After extraordinarily slow sales, HP killed the TouchPad in August, selling the rest of its inventory at the above-mentioned price, and announcing it would produce additional units to meet manufacturing obligations, too.
IDC believes that before all is said and done, HP will spew one million TouchPads into the market by the end of 2011. “As a result,” the company wrote, “webOS’s worldwide market share is forecast to reach 4.7% in 3Q11. However, with no clear plan to license or sell the OS to other vendors, IDC expects the webOS market share to shrink back to zero by 1Q12.”
Speaking of 2012, IDC believes this is when cheap Android devices will finally start taking a bite out of the iPad’s dominance.
“Apple’s iOS share will continue to lead by more than 40 percentage points over Google’s Android for the remainder of the year, but we expect Apple’s share to fall closer to 50% by the end of the forecast period as manufacturers bring new tablets to market,” Jennifer Song, IDC research analyst for Worldwide Trackers, said.
Other analysts have been predicting similar results for this market in either late 2011 or early 2012, despite the lack of any real evidence that anyone actually wants an Android tablet (or any other non-iPad tablet).
On the other hand, UK newspaper The Guardian said on Thursday what this reporter has been saying since early in 2011, writing, “Apple’s dominance means that the tablet market is beginning to look much more like the MP3 player market.”