Apple to sell over 30 million iPads this year

According to a recent report from Gartner, there will be a 98% increase in the sales from 2011 which was 60 million. So by the end of 2012, worldwide media tablets will close in on approximately 120 million sales.

Apple has to be credited as the producer of the dominant media tablet Operating System, the iOS which has brought about a 61.4% of the worldwide media tablet sales to end users for 2012. Gartner mentioned that despite of the arrival of Microsoft based devices and the Amazon kindle Fire; Apple will definitely be continuing to be the market leader through the forecast period.

Irrespective of the increasing threat of a clone army from the likes of Google, the evidences of disappointing sales figures, and even accusations from customers who say they have been paying for the 4G service, but have received only the 3G service by now, the third generation of the Apple iPad has definitely proved out to be very successful with approximately more than 3 million sales already in just 3 weeks after launching.

Carolina Milanesi, research VP at Gartner said in a company release that, despite the PC vendors and phone manufacturers wishing to get a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, Gartner has already experienced very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad. As the vendors have been struggling to tackle with the head on competition on the price, hardware and the inventories were built and only 60 million pieces actually reaching the hands of the consumers throughout the world. The situation has not improved since then and with the arrival of the new iPad the benchmark for the project to beat has been reset.

By the end of 2011, there has been 40 million iPads sales across the globe and this figure is expected to have increase a near about of 73 million this year. Following the stats from Gartner, by the end of 2013, approx. 100 million people will have purchased an Apple iPad with the figures touching 170 million by 2016.

Android, being the next most happening competitor is estimated to reach only 37 million tablet users by late 2012, while Microsoft expects to sell more than 4.8 million Windows 8 tablets.

Milanesi added that it appears that this year competitors have wanted to see what Apple might come up with, as there are only a few announcements of the new media tablets at either the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) or Mobile World Congress (MWC). Plenty of vendors will have to wait for the Windows 8 to be ready and will try to enter the market equipped with a dual-platform approach, hoping that the Windows brand would help them in both the enterprise and consumer markets.

The IT department will be seeing the Windows 8 as an opportunity to deploy tablets on an OS that they are familiar with and one that is offered by the many enterprise-class suppliers. This could mean that the people would get to see the Windows 8 as a strong IT-supplied offering more than just an OS with a strong consumer appeal.

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