Apple’s iPad will hold 61% of the entire tablet market by 2012

[dgstorm]

Tablets have become the popular obsession in today’s world and the sale numbers have grown rapidly. Some new sales projections coming from Gartner show the extent of the trend. They have predicted that in 2012 tablet sales will come close to 118.9 million units and out of that amount, Apple’s iPad will grab 73 million of them. Judging by terms of total sales and compared to 2011 the figures jump 98%.

Remember when the next generation iPad was launched? Tim Cook made a speech and spent some time discussing the post PC-era and how the iPad influenced that. In just two short years since the release of the first tablet Apple created an original market for the devices, which now play a major part in the computing business.

"Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

Apple’s closest competitor, Google’s Android tablets will go up to 32% which amounts to 61 million sold units. They are not quite there yet it seems. Microsoft Windows 8-based tables are projected to sell 5 million while 2.6 million go to Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBooks.

By 2016 numbers are going to get even more massive. Gartner envisions that Apple will be selling 170 million tablets in just a single year, while Android is still going to follow with 138 million. Microsoft closes the top 3 with 43.6 million tablets sold by 2016.

By Radu

Source: Apple's iPad projected to control 61% of tablet market in 2012

 

[kierandill]

To me, they've buried the lead here, which is that even with the (New)iPad(3) being released in the first quarter, Apple loses market share.