When the iPad was first unveiled, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson explained his company’s decision to offer a month-by-month, committment-free data plan for the tablet by saying that he saw the iPad as a “Wi-Fi driven product.” That prediction seems to be accurate: while Apple sold seven million iPads last quarter, AT&T only activated 442,000 3G accounts for it.
Never the less, the latest rumor suggests that Apple is planning on making a big push for 3G in the iPad 2, with a good sixty percent of the first production run devoted to manufacturing 3G models.
According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, at least 62 percent of the five million second-gen iPads Apple is preparing for sale will be 3G units, with 36 percent devoted to GSM/UMTS networks like AT&T, while the other 16 percent will go to CDMA/EVDO networks (e.g. Verizon).
It seems, overall, that Apple probably sells more WiFi-only iPads than 3G ones, at least going by AT&T activation numbers, but maybe early adopters are more likely to buy 3G iPads than WiFi ones. Either way, Apple’s focus on producing 3G iPad 2s implies that when the tablet does debut, there will not be a three week gap between the release of the WiFi version and GSM version, as occurred with the iPad’s debut last April. Apple is aiming for a simultaneous launch.
