Apple plans to ship 4 million of its freshly-announced 9.7-inch iPad Pro, suggesting that sales of the company’s brand new tablet are projected to be promising — although this is unlikely to be the device which turns around Apple’s slowing iPad business.
Interestingly, the newly-announced price cut for the iPad Air 2 (which will drop to $399 to coincide with the new iPad Pro) will mean that it is expected to represent the largest portion of Pads shipped in the first half of 2016. The cheaper iPad Air 2 is, in turn, likely to have a negative effect on demand for the iPad mini 4.
Working out what percentage of total iPad shipments the iPad Pro’s 4 million represents isn’t easy, since Apple rarely breaks down its figures by product line. In the second quarter of 2015, Apple sold 12.62 million iPads in total. If the new iPad Pro ships (and then manages to sell) 4 million units on its own, those would represent some impressive numbers — at least by current iPad standards.
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Source: Digitimes Research
Luke Dormehl is a UK-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems, And Create More and The Apple Revolution, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme, and other publications. He’d like you a lot if you followed him on Twitter.
