Current tablet owners and prospective buyers alike overwhelmingly have their eyes on just one company's device for future purchases—Apple's iPad. Some 93 percent of consumers who already own a tablet own an iPad, according to a new survey from Baird Research & Insights, while more than 94 percent of potential purchasers are considering buying an Apple tablet.
Coming in a distant second was Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad with webOS, named by 10.4 percent of respondents as a tablet they would consider buying, according to the Baird survey (table below). Given that respondents were allowed to give multiple responses in naming a tablet they'd consider buying, HP probably shouldn't get too complacent about its second-place finish.
And given that Best Buy has reportedly sold only 25,000 of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has supplied the retailer with—this despite HP slashing its asking price for 16GB and 32GB TouchPads by $100 recently—all of the other tablet makers who finished even further behind Apple probably ought to be really worried.
For the record, rounding out the top five "tablets of interest" named by respondents were the Motorola Xoom (8.5 percent), Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 (8.3 percent), and the HTC Flyer (3.8 percent). To illustrate the tough time non-Apple tablet makers have had in building demand for their products, Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook (3.8 percent) barely beat out an ereader, Barnes & Noble's Nook Color (3.6 percent), for sixth place.
Baird also notes that the top four products named in the "tablets of interest" table are 10-inch devices.
The Baird survey of 1,114 mostly-U.S.-based consumers does skew towards a significantly higher average income level than a broader sampling might, the research firm notes. Baird figures that's the case because 28 percent of its respondents reported owning a tablet, whereas a Pew survey from earlier this year put tablet ownership among the total U.S. adult population at just 8 percent.
Be that as it may, the Baird survey provides an interesting look at tablet demographics. Somewhat surprisingly, young people appear to be the least likely purchasers of tablets, though the devices are a new entrant to the technology scene as compared with desktop and laptop PCs, smartphones, and other devices and gadgets (table below).
"Respondents in the age group 18 to 22 were the least likely to own or consider purchasing a tablet," the research firm notes. "We view this as logical as most college students have tight budgets and probably still need a computer for long papers, projects, Excel work etc."
The main goal of the survey, according to Baird analyst Jayson Noland, was "to derive a better estimate of the current PC cannibalization rate—the degree to which consumers are purchasing tablets instead of PCs."
Thought that's "a somewhat theoretical metric," Noland said Baird concluded that the PC cannibalization rate by tablets is about 17 percent (table below).
"We arrive at this estimate based on the fact that only 17 percent of respondents believe that they could do without a PC today [or in the future] and most respondents cited use cases involving personal tasks and not heavy content creation," the analyst said.
Baird does "expect this figure to increase as tablet offerings improve, and especially [as] certain application workloads like Microsoft Excel become less cumbersome."
Some more results from the survey:
- Roughly 50 percent of total respondents were considering purchasing a tablet, with 75 percent of that number representing first-time purchasers.
- Some 73 percent of current tablet owners and 59 percent of potential new tablet purchasers were male.
- About 61 percent of current/potential tablet purchasers believe they would have otherwise bought a PC or smartphone if they hadn't acquired a tablet. Among just potential purchasers, that figure increases to 69 percent, while 39 percent of current tablet owners simply wanted a tablet and did not choose it over another device.
- Important tablet features that would need to improve before such devices could "replace a PC" were, as cited by respondents: Storage, accessories, improved processing, the inclusion of Microsoft Windows, more apps, and cheaper pricing.
And perhaps the most daunting finding for tablet makers not named Apple:
- Of the current iPad owners who are considering purchasing another tablet, all but three participants are considering another version of the iPad.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391313,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000760
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