The Guardian: Apple probably already top tablet supplier

I found this the most interesting bit:

"IDC analyst David Daoud"

"Daoud" is the Arabic equivalent of "David".

The source of those tablet pc sales is from a 2005 analysis of windows xp tablet edition licence sales forecast into 2009.

Me thinks the numbers are so far from relevant or accurate it is ridiculous. Numbers from 5 years ago???

I agree that there were some poor grammar choices made here but just for fun let's look at this another way: Apple sold over 300k tablets on 4/3. That means that, year to date, they sold 300,000 tablets from January 1-April 3, the 93rd day of the year. So (93/365)*1.25 million = about 318,000 PC tablets sold so far this year, according to the law of averages. And then when you take into account that PC sales are strongest in the second half of the year (due to back-to-school time and Christmas) it is, in fact, very likely that Apple has already sold more tablets than all PC tablets so far this year.

After reading the comments after this article, I'm still going to agree with the Guardian's insinuation with this logic: Apple knows how many they can sell themselves this year and are building to fulfill their numbers. Best Buy and other resellers have an idea how many they can sell and likely have order requests (if not actual orders) in for the rest of the year.

Yep. Apple is indeed the top tablet supplier.

let's not forget that the ipad has only dropped in the us yet!

Yea, all of these reports are guesses until they are proven right or wrong.

That is an impressive number Yuusharo, no on is doubting that. But the article is misleading, but I really think it's a grammatical issue here that people are arguing over.

By "largest" I don't think Dave meant "highest number of units sold" as much as he meant the company that's likely to own the market. That's not "largest," that's something like "potentially largest" or "most aggressive" or "most likely to succeed."

However, if you look at bit into what the numbers mean, there can also be the accurate conclusion that Apple's the largest, in the true sense of that. With 1.25m units TOTAL for non-Apple devices, and the large number of non-Apple manufacturers, it is possible that Apple has just passed any others in terms of total market share for 2010 sales.

The problem here is that tablets have been on sale since before 2010, and that unit shipments are dropping to 1.25m (meaning that many more tablets are out there than will be sold in 2010) and that we have no data here of other manufacturer's total units sold.

If HP has a million units out but is only going to sell 130,000 this year, then Apple still needs to sell 100,000 units since the last sales figures to match HP.

I can see you are excited, but the iPad hasn't sold 2m units yet. 300k < 1.32m, remember? In a year this statement will be true, but right now, it is just poor journalism, bordering on an outright lie.