John Gruber wrote an interesting article on how the NPD Group1 goes out of their way to make the PC tablet industry sound like it's doing just fine - so long as you turn a blind eye to the pummeling the iPad is inflicting on the rest of the industry. The numbers are from January through to October, 2011.
"According to NPD's Consumer Tracking Service, 76 percent of consumers who purchased a non-Apple tablet didn't even consider the iPad..."
So 3/4 of the people who didn't buy an iPad, didn't consider buying an iPad. Shocking, right?
Using a fairly safe estimate of 10,000,000 iPads sold, John is able to guess that nearly 90% of tablet sales were iPads.
So 10% of the tablets sold went to 5 other companies.2
Or as Jason Snell tweeted:
If I'm reading it right, it suggests 92% of tablet buyers considered iPad and 89% bought iPad. That's... not a good sign for competitors.
Time to figure out a way to buy some Apple stock.
- A market research group that companies would use to justify or gauge a particular focus for their future products or services. ↩
- One of those companies was HP, who had a $99 fire-sale on their tablet attempt. ↩