Gartner: 195M Tablets Sold in 2013, iPad Falls on Second Place

[RaduTyrsina]

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The inevitable has happened - according to market research firm Gartner, sales of Android tablets have reached the top position in worldwide tablet sales, after registering a whopping 127 percent growth. End users bought nearly 121 million Android tablets in 2013, which represents a 61.9 percent of the total tablet market. iPad sales dropped from a 52.8-percent share of the market in 2012 to 36 percent. Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said the following:

In 2013, tablets became a mainstream phenomenon, with a vast choice of Android-based tablets being within the budget of mainstream consumers while still offering adequate specifications. As the Android tablet market becomes highly commoditized, in 2014, it will be critical for vendors to focus on device experience and meaningful technology and ecosystem value — beyond just hardware and cost — to ensure brand loyalty and improved margins. Apple's tablets remain strong in the higher end of the market and, Apple's approach will continue to force vendors to compete with full ecosystem offerings, even in the smaller-screen market as the iPad mini sees a greater share.

Last year, Apple led the tablet category with nearly 53% of sales on 61 million units, compared to Android at nearly 46% with 53 million tablets sold. Now, Apple's share of worldwide tablet sales dropped by 16.8 percentage points, despite having shipped more iPads than in the previous year. As expected, Gartner confirms that the growth of the tablet market was propelled by the low-end smaller screen tablet market, and buyers who made their first tablet acquisition.

When it comes to Windows tablets, Microsoft took a modest 2.1% share, with total sales of slightly more than 4 million units. When it comes to worldwide tablet sales to end users by vendor, Apple is one the first place, with more than 70 million iPads. It’s interesting to observe that this number is lower than what Apple has reported for 2013 - 74.2 million iPads. On the second place we find Samsung with more than 37 million shipped tablets and a market share of 19%.

Source: Gartner

 

[Ser Aphim]

For the first time (I think) android outselled iOS.

Congrats android! Savor it while you can.

 

[s2mikey]

Not that surprising, really. The other choices have been getting better and that's ultimately good or us. Still, when it comes to tablets, I can't see me having anything other than an iPad. But that's just me.

 

[AQ_OC]

Yeah, Apple gets overrun by the hordes of Android tablets on the market. No single vendor can compete, but add up all the forked versions of Android and cheap hardware and this is going to happen sooner or later. Just keep in mind that most of that Android experience totally sucks as many of the devices adding to the overall count are subpar.

 

[s2mikey]

Yeah, Apple gets overrun by the hordes of Android tablets on the market. No single vendor can compete, but add up all the forked versions of Android and cheap hardware and this is going to happen sooner or later. Just keep in mind that most of that Android experience totally sucks as many of the devices adding to the overall count are subpar.

While I mostly agree with you, it is Apples choice to not allow anyone else to develop hardware to run their OS. If they did, they'd have a bigger share of the pie. Not that they need it anyways. As for the android experiences, yeah, it's NOT as good. Their phones seem to be much better than any of the tablets for whatever reason.

 

[col.bris]

Considering a bulk of the tablets listed are tinker toys that sell for under 100 it makes sense franky as usual this type of reporting is so distorted one wonders why investors run away from gartner in droves Read the article in full and you will see what I mean. Why not include iPod touch sales then it would be fare. At least the iPad touch is a solid device not like the cheap Android clones

 

[Ser Aphim]

Considering a bulk of the tablets listed are tinker toys that sell for under 100 it makes sense franky as usual this type of reporting is so distorted one wonders why investors run away from gartner in droves Read the article in full and you will see what I mean. Why not include iPod touch sales then it would be fare. At least the iPad touch is a solid device not like the cheap Android clones

I agree with this.