Apple's iPads are facing more competition from both the Amazon Kindle Fire and the MacBook Air and it's affecting sales, analysts said.
The iPad 2 sales are expected to be "lighter" this quarter than expected, according to ZDNet. Analyst Shaw Wu said in a note to investors that the Kindle Fire and MacBook Air are affecting sales -- iPad 2 sales are projected to be 13.5 million, a drop from a previous estimate of 15 million.
In the Mac business, we are seeing particular strength in the MacBook Air, arguably the best ultra-mobile PC on the market. Last but not least, iPads appear a little light of expectations due in part to competition from Amazon’s Kindle Fire but also as some users opt for a more full-featured MacBook Air.
Essentially consumers are looking to either save money by buying a Kindle Fire, or are deciding to spring the big bucks for a MacBook Air laptop. If buyers are heading for the MacBook, that's not bad news for Apple, but our suspicions are that consumers are also buying the $199 Kindle Fire.
If anything, we see that people are still purchasing laptops, so the PC isn't dead. (Is that because we're still addicted to keyboards?) It also shows us that consumers do want Android tablets, provided they are cheap and offer good value. So until Apple debuts its budget tablet at considerably less than the bare-bones iPad at $499, it will lose that segment of the market.
