iPad News: Gartner Says Apple Will Rule Tablet Market Until 2015

A new analysis released by Gartner paints a sunny future for Apple, at least for the next few years. Gartner analysts Carolina Milanesi and Roberta Cozza predict that Apple will keep a market majority until the end of 2014 before finally slipping below 50% in 2015. Not surprisingly, the analysts expect Apple’s stiffest competition to come from Google’s Android.



Gartner forecasts Apple will have a 68.7% share of the market for 2011, with iPad sales of 48 million to Google’s 13.9 million. Google is projected to start catching up next year, selling 26 million tablets to Apple’s 68 million, dropping iPad’s share to 63.5%. By 2014, Gartner sees Apple’s share dropping to 51.8%, with 115 million iPads sold, while Android takes 34.2% of the market with 76 million.


While all of this sounds good for both Apple and Google, since both will be selling millions of tablets, the future looks pretty bleak for the handful of other brands remaining. Gartner expects that by 2015, RIM’s QNX, the system designed for the PlayBook, will have a mere 10% of the tablet market, provided they ever get a tablet out at all. Hewlett Packard’s WebOS and Nokia’s MeeGo aren’t projected to get past the single digits.


Although all these forecasts sound plausible, Gartner does not have a crystal ball. A lot of things can happen over the next few years, and all these predictions are based on one thing: Google coming up with tablets that can compete with Apple’s iPads.




That hasn’t happened yet, and Gartner’s Milanesi points out what they need to do to succeed. “Many [tablet vendors] are making the same mistake that was made in the first response wave to the iPhone, as they are prioritizing hardware features over applications, services and overall user experience. Tablets will be much more dependent on the latter than smartphones have been, and the sooner vendors realize that, the better chance they have to compete head-to-head with Apple.”