iPad shipments shot up 14% year over year during the first three months of 2025, according to a market analysis firm. That marks the fourth quarter in a row with an increase in iPad demand.
Replacing tablets bought years ago during the pandemic is only one of the reasons for the continuing strong growth.
Double-digit iPad shipment growth in Q1 2025
Apple shipped 13.7 million tablets during the first quarter of 2025, up from 12.0 million in the same period the previous year — a 14.4% increase, and enough for Apple to control 37% of the global market. Cupertino doesn’t reveal how many units it ships, so those figures are estimates by analysts with Canalys.
But Apple does announce how much revenue it took in from tablet sales, and last quarter it was $6.4 billion, a 15.2% annual increase.
“The primary driver of U.S. tablet shipments was demand from a consumer refresh of pandemic-era tablets that are now hitting four to five years in their lifecycle,” said Kieren Jessop, research manager at Canalys.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a huge rush in iPad sales, with millions of consumers asked to work or attend school from home. But, as Canalys notes, many of those tablets are now 5 years old and ready to be replaced.
Still, that didn’t help Samsung. Even as Apple’s tablet shipments grew in Q1 2025, its chief rival’s dropped 5.2%.
2023’s iPad drought is long past
Another reason behind strong iPad sales is that Apple keeps bringing out new models. The M3 iPad Air and iPad 11 both launched in the first quarter of this year, for example. And the M4 iPad Pro reached customers in the middle of last year, along with the previous iPad Air version. That’s in contrast to 2023, when not a single new tablet came out of Cupertino.
The difference is clear in Apple shipments over the past few years. Data from Canalys shows that iPad shipments experienced annual declines every quarter of 2023, while the launch of the M4 iPad Pro in 2024 began four straight quarters of annual increases.
