The iPad is a 20 BILLION dollar a year business. Let's not get crazy on "mediocre" sales, this is one of the most popular product line of all companies combined. Did not get as high as some people were expecting but this is far from mediocre.

Source: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/01/fun-with-charts-a-decade-...

Of course, you can only call it mediocre when comparing to the standout product lines. On it's own it's still a successful product. People have such high expectations for every one of their lines that some merely succeeding quietly is questioned. Says a lot about their success as a business.

> Let's not get crazy on "mediocre" sales

If I've got a product whose sales were falling 5 out of the past 6 years, and whose current sales are 30%+ down from a peak of 6 years ago, I'm pretty worried about it.

Is growth required for success?

I expect the iPad, lacking any new revolutionary functionality, to reach a steady state of (new customer + replacement rate) sales that is some percentage of its peak, pre-saturation sales. If replacement rate is every 4-5 years, this may be below 30% of peak.

This won't mean it isn't successful, just recognizing that existing users don't need to upgrade every year.

Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.

/rant over

Growth is what the shareholders care about, and capital always rules, even at the expense of anything else.

Exactly. If it were not for the OS, the hardware seems to be a lot more capable than casual entertainment. These use cases simply don't push the hardware to its limits.

My iPad must be 4 or 5 years old and seems perfectly capable of pretty much everything I use it for (videos from various sources), lightweight web browsing, looking at pictures, browsing Ordnance Survey maps...

Only reason I would upgrade is if I break it (unlikely as I don't take it outside very often) or when iOS upgrades stop (which is what happened to two previous iPads I have in a drawer somewhere).

He meant UX and feature-wise capable, not hardware-wise.

He's right, if the OS itself was more advanced, than even if the same people who own iPads now wouldn't be interested in using those features other than their regular media consumption, it would still open up a new market for the iPad (new target audience). But with its current limitations, it can't do that.

For doing this sort of thing, most people can get by with a Kindle Fire, which are constantly on sale for $30-40. They are not anywhere near as good as an iPad, but for pure consumption they are more than adequate.