Apple sold 17 million iPads during its second quarter, marking a "new all-time quarterly record for iPad units sales," CFO Peter Oppenheimer said during Apple s July 24 earnings call. Along with its accessories, the tablet contributed $9.2 billion to the $35 billion in revenue Apple brought in during the quarter.
While the iPad was first introduced with a consumer emphasis, executives needed none of the prompting they did with the iPhone, and the tablet quickly found audiences in any number of enterprise verticals. During the earnings call, these were detailed a bit, with Oppenheimer naming education as a vertical where the iPad is finding "tremendous momentum."
"While interest in the new iPad was high, sales of the reduced price iPad 2 in the K-12 markets were particularly strong, and even though we achieved all-time record Mac sales to U.S. education institutions during the quarter, we sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs to U.S. education institutions," said Oppenheimer.
The Mansfield, Texas, Independent School District, for example, purchased 11,000 iPads, with the intention that every student and teacher will receive one.
Some teachers will use a flipped-classroom concept, putting their lessons and resources online where students can access them anytime with their iPads, said Oppenheimer. As a result, students take responsibility for their own learning, and teachers are able to increase their interaction and personalized content time.
Apple estimates, said Oppenheimer, the number of iPads in Fortune 500 companies has more than tripled in the past year. They’re being adopted by large businesses–British Airways, for example, is using iPads for everything from check-in to cabin services–and (for now) smaller ones. A builder in Japan called Dialogue House is building smart homes that will be controlled by iPads.
While the smartphone market has moved beyond iPhone-dominance, Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King told eWEEK, “the tablet market is mostly about the iPad just now.”
To read the original eWeek article, click here: iPad’s Dominance Helped by Enterprise, Education Markets
