It’s common knowledge that the Apple’s iPad dominated tablet sales since they launched the first iPad back in 2010. Although Apple still maintains its lead in overall tablet market share, their sales have recently stagnated and are beginning to drop when compared to their direct competitor Microsoft.
At least that’s what the data which WinBeta has early access to from the upcoming report from 1010data Ecom Insights Panel says. The report states that Microsoft has been leading online sales in terms of tablet devices.
Before discussing the data received by WinBeta, it’s best to give a little information about what 1010data Ecom Insights Panel is and where the data came from.
“1010data’s Ecom Insights panel consists of millions of online shoppers in the U.S. who allow 1010data to anonymously track their online behavior for market research purposes, including e-commerce activity.
1010data applies advanced, proprietary statistical modeling, machine learning, and data science techniques to ensure that its panel is representative of the Internet Browsing Population in the U.S. and suitable to extrapolate observations to the broader population.
Retailers measured include the top 100 online mass retailers in the United States that – according to 1010data’s estimates – make up over 95% of hard line goods ordered online Total Spent.”
The report analyzes online hardware sales performed by the majority of online retailers, and according to the metric presented below, October seems to be the best month for Microsoft as they reached 45% of sales while Apple dropped to 17%.
It’s not quite a surprise that Microsoft saw a boom in sales in October after both Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 were presented to the public during their hardware event on October 6.
The next chart shows the average tablet online selling prices over the last 12 months.
Overall, online tablet sales have got some spikes which were influenced by the release of some key products from both Microsoft and Apple like you can see in the metric below.
In terms of market share over the last 12 months Apple is still the leader followed by Microsoft.
It seems that Microsoft is making some waves in the tablet market, which gives Apple a reason to start sweating. Looking at some of these numbers it’s fair to say that Apple probably introduced their iPad Pro in response to the Microsoft Surface and I can not wait to see what each company will keep on developing to win and stay in the lead of this competitive market.
Source: WinBeta
João is a games journalist, Senior Editor at XDA Developers. They contributed 156 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: previously reported for Neowin before joining XDA Developers in 2021, where he leads coverage of Windows, Microsoft, and hardware.