According to recent survey by Piper Jaffray, almost 75 percent of early iPad Air purchasers in the US already owned an iPad compared to 58 percent last year. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that the US market is becoming saturated. It seems that the early demand among new buyers is not as high as it was last year.
Of the iPad Air buyers who already own an iPad (75%), only 18% expected to keep using the old device and essentially all of those users were owners of an iPad Mini. We noted a similar trend in our iPad Mini survey in that 76% of iPad Mini buyers expected to use the Mini along with their prior full-sized iPad. We believe this makes sense as the majority of consumers that already own an iPad seemed to be replacing it with the Air entirely, but viewed the Mini as a companion device to the larger iPad. In other words, if a consumer owns more than one iPad, it is more likely to be an iPad Air and an iPad Mini than multiple full-sized iPads.
Munster surveyed 71 day-one iPad Air buyers. Munster concluded that the early-adopter upgrade cycle is around 23 months, which is quite less than general public’s upgrade cycle of 30 months.
The new iPad Air is readily available in stock in online Apple Store with a shipment date of 24 hours. This might suggest that it may not be as popular as Apple expected it to be. Things might be different for the new iPad Mini with Retina display as Apple may not have enough stock to meet the demand this holiday season. But, we’ll find out if there is a high demand once Apple announces an official availability date.
Source: Macrumors
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