Does Apple think it's 'sad' that there are so many old iPads out there too?
Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, seems to have upset a lot of people by suggesting that it was "really sad" that there are 600 million PCs out there still in use .Well, I wonder what he thinks of all those old iPads out there?
Just before the event where the iPhone SE and new iPad Pro was unveiled, Carolina Milanesi, chief of research and head of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech US Business, tweeted some interesting charts giving us a breakdown of the iPad market share in three different markets.
Conclusion: there are a lot of old iPads out there.
Let's just focus on the data for the US for now. It shows that 11 percent of the iPads that are in use are the original, first-generation iPad, which was released April 2010, while a further 25 percent are iPad 2 tablets, first released March 2011. Now, it's true that the iPad 2 wasn't discontinued until March 2014, but the fact that Apple dragged its lifespan out that long still doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty old device, based on old hardware, and one that has been struggling to run some of the latest incarnations of iOS.
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If regular consumers are perfectly happy with their aging iPads, and are clearly not interested in upgrading them, then how is this any different to aging PCs that are still in use?
Now, it might have been a joke, but you know what they say about people in glass houses. Just as PC OEMs are finding it hard to convince people to upgrade old hardware, Apple is finding it equally hard to get people to upgrade their old iPads because their existing devices are "good enough."
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