Wednesday’s Apple announcement, widely expected to include an updated version of the Cupertino, Calif. company’s wildly-popular iPad tablet, will be “crucial” for the tech giant to maintain its lead against rival products, one analyst said Tuesday.
“We believe Apple must make a convincing case for why the iPad 2 is better than the plethora of competitors coming to market, while at the same time persuading iPad 1 buyers to upgrade to iPad 2,” Ticonderoga Securities’ analyst Brian White told investors in a note. Why the importance? The tablet provided 17.2 percent of the company’s revenue during the first quarter of 2011 – and the figure is rising.
According to White, the iPad “will contribute nearly one-third of Apple’s $36.8 billion in incremental revenue that we are modeling” for fiscal 2011. If you remove the iPad revenue, Apple’s fiscal 2011 revenue would grow 41 percent compared to 56 percent, the analyst adds.
In addition, analysts will watch the Wednesday event to discover how the Apple product announcement is received without the perfunctory appearance of CEO Steve Jobs, out on medical leave. The question will be how Chief Operating Office Tim Cook conducts himself in the role – and whether he will wear black jeans and turtle-neck.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
18 responses to “Analyst: iPad 2 ‘Crucial’ for Apple to Maintain Tablet Lead”
Just can’t see why anyone apart from the most obsessive early-adopter will want to upgrade an iPad 1 that’s less than a year old.
These headlines are freakin’ unbelievable. Apple has a 90% tablet market share and Android tablets have maybe 6%. Suddenly Apple’s position is in dire straits and is now having to depend on the latest iPad to maybe only have a 50% market share in 2011. The tablet market didn’t even exist for Apple before April of last year and yet this analyst is saying suddenly Apple is in danger of losing it all without hardly any competitor products on the market. What makes these all-knowing analysts think that consumers even want Android tablets? Are they basing it on Android smartphone sales that are subsidized and have BOGO offers?
Not having the best-selling tablet might be crucial for holding back Apple’s revenue growth but that still doesn’t make Android tablets a serious threat to Apple’s tablet market share. All Apple needs to do is to put out an iPad with a few incremental upgrades and it will sell like crazy. Most consumers are buying iPads for the ecosystem, not just the hardware. Apple is about on top of the game as any tech company is and they’d be hard-pressed to do a lot better. This stupid analyst probably never even saw the iPad changing consumer computing until Apple started selling them by the millions.
Because it’s expected to be twice as fast and hundred dollars less? Some of us do serious work on our iPads and could really use the performance boost.
I will Not be getting the iPad 2. I’ll wait for the 3rd generation. Or maybe go for the HP Touchpad.
Such nonsense.
“….We believe Apple must make a convincing case for why the iPad 2 is better than the plethora of competitors coming to market, while at the same time persuading iPad 1 buyers to upgrade to iPad 2….” ????!!!!!
No, we believe Apple’s competitors must make a convincing case why any of their derivative copies of the iPad is better than the first iPad and now iPad 2.
iPad 1 buyers will need no persuading to upgrade to iPad 2.
LOL, no kidding. The burden of proof is on Apple’s competitors, not Apple. These analysts need to realize the real power of iDevices lies in iOS not necessarily the hardware which is why I can’t wait till they show off iOS 5.
I agree. There are many blogs posts saying iPad 2 will be a modest upgrade but if it has a dual-core Cortex A9 CPU, 512MB RAM, a beefier GPU, FaceTime camera, that’s quite a performance upgrade, double if not more. I’ll take it.
NOT DO BUY AN iPAD 2.0
To see why:
http://besttechtoday.blogspot….
What a load of manure. The least you could have done was make it clear that you were pointing at the analyst and laughing yourself silly over the absolutely idiotic statements he made in his “analysis”. It’s the same doom and gloom FUD I’ve seen for the last 20 years.
Interesting and informative post
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