Apple, Microsoft dominate NZ slate sales

You can slide a wafer-thin device between Apple and Microsoft’s New Zealand share of the slate computer market.

IDC New Zealand reports Apple shipped fewer than 1000 more detachable or slate devices than Microsoft in 2016.

The total market for the year was 80,000 units. Apple had a 32 per cent market share, which is around 25,600 units. Microsoft was at 31 per cent, a shade under 25,000 units.

Detachable is a curious market to measure. IDC defines it:

“A slate tablet is a portable, battery-powered computing device with a screen size 7-inches to 16-inches.In addition to the attributes of a slate tablet, a detachable tablet is designed to function as a stand-alone slate tablet as well as a clamshell device through the addition of a detachable keyboard designed specifically for the device.”

IDC New Zealand mobile device market analyst Chayse Gorton says this includes Apple’s 12.9-inch and 9.7-inch iPad Pros. Yet both sell without detachable keyboards and not every buyer uses them with one¹.

The category includes Microsoft Surface Pro, Surface Book, HP Envy and others.

Slate-tablet distinction blurry

It is distinct from traditional laptops. The distinction between slates and tablets like non-Pro iPads is blurry.

Either way, Apple topped the market in 2016. Microsoft is second. It had been number one for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015. Microsoft’s shipments climbed three percent from 2015 to 2016.

It was a bonza year for detachable sales. Shipments² increased from 55,000 in 2015 to 80,000 — a year-on-year increase of 45 per cent.

The runners-up are, in order: HP on nine per cent; Samsung on seven per cent and Acer also with seven per cent. Other brands were less than 15 per cent.

Microsoft competition

Gorton says Microsoft faces competition from a range of models running Windows. Its share of the Windows detachable market fell from 58 per cent in 2015 to 50 per cent in 2016.

“Competing Windows detachables often have similar specifications to Microsoft detachables, but are frequently sold at a lower price. Given New Zealand is a price conscious nation, a lower price, even by small a margin can be enough to entice a consumer to purchase from a competing vendor”, he says.

Gorton says Microsoft sharpened its premium market position introducing high-end models and halting low-end models. It introduced the Surface Book early in the year and dropped the Surface 3 from its line-up.

IDC expects detachable shipments to grow between 25 and 30 per cent in 2017. From then IDC says the market will start to flatten off.

1. You could argue the iPad Pro and Windows devices are not direct head-to-head rivals. It’s possible there are buyers who would weigh up buying an iPad Pro against these Windows devices. Yet for the most part the two groups inhabit parallel universes. ↩︎
2. Shipments is a normal term for this kind of survey. Most of the time it means how many devices vendors sent from warehouses to retailers. It gets tricky with detachables because Apple and Microsoft sell direct. ↩︎