More From Quartz on iPhone and iPad Aggregate Sales Since Launch

Dan Frommer:

Now five years old, Apple’s iPad tablet is still the company’s fastest-selling product line of all time. But not for long. As iPad demand has slowed, its cumulative sales curve is likely to fall behind the iPhone’s within the next six months.

The iPad, launched in early 2010, set records as the fastest Apple product to hit 10 million shipments (during its first year); 100 million (third year); and 250 million (fifth year). But its trajectory has flattened. Shipments last quarter, which Apple revealed yesterday, fell 23% year-over-year to 12.6 million.

I think the iPad is sort of like a young phenom in sports. It came on so fast, so strong, that many keen observers — including me — expected it to eclipse the iPhone.

That isn’t panning out. But I think we, collectively, are now judging the iPad’s actual sales and success not for what they are but for what we expected they were going to be. It’s a good, popular, much-used family of products that continues to sell really well. Not iPhone-well, but well. Being only the second-fastest-selling product in Apple history, instead of the first, is nothing to sneeze at.

★ Wednesday, 29 April 2015