Apple may have been the company that made tablets popular but that doesn’t make it immune to the rapidly shrinking market for the devices. Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has a reputation for accurate predictions and he claims that the competition that tablets are facing from the ever growing phablet will result in 30% fewer iPad shipments in 2015.
Connected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities had predicted that Apple would report 73 million iPhones shipped during the fourth quarter of 2014. It was about as close as an analyst could hope to get to the actual 74.5 million iPhones that Apple said it had sent out from October through December. Now, the analyst is turning his attention to the Apple iPad and things do not look so rosy when it comes to Apple’s tablet. With tablet sales suffering from the competition offered by larger-screened smartphones, and the lack of demand for upgrades similar to the one that drives smartphone sales, Kuo sees Apple shipping 30% fewer iPads in 2015. If he is correct, it would be the sharpest year-over-year decline in iPad history.