iPad 2 Expanding Beyond Apple Fanboy Territory
Initial sales estimates from Wall Street analysts are in, and it looks like the Apple iPad 2 sold out within a few hours Friday evening. A story on Fortune's Web site has the details.
What's more interesting to the Microsoft partner community is the way the device is breaking out of the Apple ecosystem and getting into the PC user base.
A team from Piper Jaffray interviewed 236 people in waiting lines in New York and Minneapolis. That team had done something similar for the original iPad launch, so they had some interesting comparison figures (the Fortune story has a full graphic with their results).
Of the would-be iPad 2 buyers, 70 percent hadn't owned the first iPad, meaning the next generation of the tablet is successfully breaking out into a new market, not just prompting upgrades.
Asked whether they had Macs or PCs, buyers of the first iPad were overwhelmingly Mac users, with 74 percent saying they had Macs versus 26 percent saying they had PCs. On Friday in the iPad 2 line, that number had changed dramatically: Mac held a statistically insignificant lead -- 51 percent said Mac, 49 percent said PC.
This isn't a cause for panic for Windows-focused Microsoft partners, however. Asked on Friday if they would continue to use their computer in addition to the iPad, 97 percent said yes. That was up a (statistically insignificant) point from the 96 percent at the original iPad launch who planned to keep using their computers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 14, 2011