Just 10 years old, iPad has shown absolute overwhelming position before Android rivals

Ten years ago, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad in Yerba Buena, San Francisco. Following the success of the iPod and iPhone, the iPad quickly became Apple's next big "hit", opening the door to tablets filled with digital life after decades of failure.

And when the 10-year-old birthday is only a few days away, the iPad has also proven its overwhelming dominance over Android rivals. Based on new data released by IDC, the tablet market in 2019 continued to decline slightly compared to 2018. Going against the general context, only Apple and Amazon grew while other manufacturers were all failure.

In 2019, Apple widened the gap with Android rivals.

More specifically, in 2019 Apple shipped 49.9 million iPad models, up 15% over the same period in 2018. The leading position still belongs to Apple when the second-ranked rival Samsung shipped only 21.7 million Galaxy tablets. After losing nearly 2 million units compared to 2018, Samsung only had a market share of 15.1%, less than half of the Apple market share (34.6%).

The tablet market has a clear differentiation when Huawei is also far behind Samsung in third place with 14.1 million units shipped, or 9.8% of the market share. With the low-priced Fire line, Amazon is the only name besides Apple to see sales growth, from 11.8 million units in 2018 to 13 million units in 2019. At the bottom of the top 5, Lenovo ships 8.5 million units, down slightly by 4.2%.

Apple's significant success can be attributed to its new product policy in 2019. If in previous years Apple had often launched "regular" iPads at the beginning of the year and high-priced iPad Pro in At the end of the year, this year it chose to "revitalize" the iPad Air and iPad Mini in March and lift the "regular" iPad screen in 10-inch sizes in September. The result is that in the year-end shopping season, iPad sales increased to 3 million units over the same period in 2018.

Apple showed its software advantage through the decision to separate iPadOS from iOS.

Also last year, Apple has removed iPadOS from iOS with many specialized features that are expected to help this tablet line bring more PC features. In terms of software, Apple is still being completely superior to Android. Over the years, Google has nearly abandoned tablet features on the planet's # 1 operating system, instead focusing solely on phones.