A popular US gadget site (it can’t be THAT popular or we’d have heard of it before) called Retrevo, has polled its customers and found that they have even less intention of buying an iPad now it has launched, than they did when it was all rumor and innuendo.
Retrevo asked consumers whether or not they had heard about the Apple tablet before it emerged as the iPad, and again after the announcement. The number of respondents who had heard of it rose from 48% shortly before the announcement to over 80% after the media frenzy on January 27th.
But the number of respondents saying they were not interested in buying one, doubled from 25% before the announcement to over 50% following the announcement.
At its peak the iPad drove 7,000 Tweets Per Minute (TPM) on Twitter almost a record, Retrevo said.
The same survey also reveals (if we assume that the sample was representative) that 9% of people feel they need to buy an iPad, which could lead to millions of sales on its own. But presumably similar polls around the iPhone resulted in far more positive feedback than this, though we can’t remember any.
Additionally the survey asked people if they needed an Apple tablet (they didn’t know it would be called an iPad at that stage) and before its announcement 49% said no, and this rose to 61% after the announcement.
Another question asked whether or not the iPad was worth $130 more if it had a 3G connection, which a majority of consumers also said no to.
Wherever you look there are people daring, in many cases for the first time, to doubt the outright success of Apple’s new baby, and opinions vary from it being incomplete as an offering and needing a camera and Adobe Flash, to being unable to replace a netbook or bring the ease of reading of a Kindle. Other’s say it is too bulky.
Our personal view is that the iPad has had very conservative estimates placed on it by Apple and financial analysts (around 4 million this year) and we think it can easily sell that many. The larger question is what kind of service will Apple have to launch to guarantee a larger success for the device? We have consistently said it needs a set of streaming, scheduled, internet broadcast, TV channels. We’ll have to wait, but without extra services, this will not sell enough to affect Apple’s quarterly results anytime soon.
See full pdf version for graphs