We have some early and rather unscientific figures for relative Christmas tablet sales harvested by waxpancake and retweeted by the self-styled “information massage therapist”, A.X. Ian. The figures, taken from some unorthodox first tweet statistics (a sideways look at the market which reminds me of the Freakonomics book), may be as a good reflection of the state of the market as we could possibly get right now. The “study” reveals that Apple iPads outsold Microsoft Surfaces by almost 50 to 1...
Take a look at the Christmas Eve tablet popularity tweet infographic below;
(click to enlarge image)
As you can probably determine from the above, the statistics derive from the number of tweets from each competitive platform which were counted over 24 hours on Christmas Eve 2012. The trigger tweet for the measurement was of the form “First tweet from [tablet]” where the tablet variable was either “Apple iPad”, “Amazon Kindle”, “Google Nexus” or “Microsoft Surface”. You can see from the graphic that the variable didn’t have to be precisely as in the quotes; for example terms such as “my windows surface tablet”, “the surface”, “my Surface”, “a Microsoft Surface” and so on were all counted in Microsoft’s favour.
The winner of this 24-hour test is clear to see and probably as you would expect, however the scale of Apple’s win may be bigger than you would have expected, especially against the very popular and keenly priced Google Nexus 7. Even if you think a new iPad user may have a much greater propensity to tweet than a Surface, Nexus or Kindle user it still looks like a massive win for Apple over Christmas.
According to Digital Cupcake previous best estimates of Q4 2012 sales for the above popular tablets are; iPad: 25 million, Kindle Fire: 6 million, Nexus 7: 2 to 3 million and Surface: < 1 million.
Interestingly a recent note to investors by analysts at RW Baird says that the Microsoft Surface was not recommended by sales reps at new bricks and mortar stockists such as Best Buy and Staples in the US.
