Over and over I hear from tablet makers that there’s not really a tablet market yet… there’s an iPad market. While it seems like every day a new Android tablet is announced, nobody is selling as many tablet as Apple yet — and Apple’s numbers just keep growing.
The company released its quarterly earnings report today — and announced that Apple sold 15.43 million iPads in the most recent quarter. That’s a 111 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.
Apple also sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.4 million iPods, and 5.2 million Macs. While the iPod number actually represents a 21 percent decline from a year ago, the rest of the numbers are way up and Apple had its most profitable quarter ever.
If there’s one company that industry watchers expected to have an impact on iPad sales, it’s Amazon. The Amazon Kindle Fire hit the streets in November, and while the $199 tablet doesn’t have all of the iPad’s features, it does sell for less than half the price. Amazon also has popular digital music, movie, book, and app stores which give the Kindle Fire a bit of an edge over many other Android tablets.
While there are indications that Amazon has sold “millions” of tablets, the company hasn’t released exact sales figures — and Apple CEO Tim Cook says he hasn’t seen any indication that the launch of the Kindle Fire helped or hurt iPad sales at all.
Still a lot of rich people in the world, it seems…. and here I thought there was a global recession.