Last month’s earnings call had a interesting bit of news about iPad Mini sales being cannibalised by iPad sales from Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. When questioned about Apple’s newer products cannibalising the older products Tim Cook said that they are happy about it because if not for Apple someone else would cater that category of customers. Over the last few years numbers proved that MacBook sales have been seriously declining and iPad sales were rapidly growing, the same phenomena was witnessed last month when the sales of LCD panels for iPad has been estimated. The number of panels of size 7.9 inches rose over 5 million whereas the number of panels of size 9.7 inches declined to 1.3 million from 7.4 million.
Soon after iPad mini was launched Analysts set a forecast of 60 million iPads and 40 million iPads minis to be sold in the year 2013 but after the recent news analysts reset their expectations to predicting 55M iPad minis (7.9-inch) and 33M iPads (9.7-inch) in 2013, a overall cut of iPad sales by 12% for the year. As of now the full sized still is a very attractive option because of the retina display but rumours suggest that iPad mini will also sport a retina display soon that might drive iPad mini sales even further.
The consumer patter shows that their preference is more inclined towards smaller sized Apple products surprisingly. There are more sales of iPad mini when compared to iPad and consumers seem to prefer iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 over iPhone 5 as per a survey. The scenario seems to be quite different in the case of Android devices where the screen size of phones are rapidly increasing and devices with screen size of 5″ are becoming a norm lately.