At 15 Years, the iPad Is Less Important Than Ever to Apple

When the original iPad was released 15 years ago, on April 3, 2010, Apple had a lot riding on its success. After all, this device - the last to be blessed with the genius touch of Steve Jobs who passed away one year later - was supposed to be the next big thing coming from Cupertino. Three years earlier, the iPhone had reinvented the smartphone and now the iPad was supposed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops.

For a while, it looked like the iPad could deliver on that promise. The device got off to a great start and in its second year on the market, it already accounted for nearly 20 percent of Apple’s revenue. After peaking in 2012 at $32.4 billion, iPad sales started to decline though, as the market matured and large-screen smartphones gradually eroded tablet demand. Moreover, as time went by, it never became really clear what the killer feature of tablets really was. Was it a web browsing device for the home? A video streaming device for kids? Was it a productivity device for creatives? A full-blown laptop replacement or a larger sibling of the smartphone?

Interestingly, Steve Jobs had foreseen some of the problems that would eventually begin to plague the entire tablet industry. "If there's going to be a third category of device, it's going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks," Jobs had said at the iPad's unveiling in January 2010, listing browsing the web, doing email and watching videos as some examples of tasks that tablets would have to do better than smartphones and laptops. "Otherwise it has no reason for being," Jobs said. With smartphones now bigger and more powerful than they were in 2010 and laptops more snappy and responsive, it's hard to find the tasks that set tablets apart these days, partly explaining why the global tablet market shrank in 7 of the past 10 years.

In fiscal 2024, which ended September 28, the iPad accounted for less than 7 percent of Apple’s revenue - the lowest it has been since its launch 15 years ago. Once (briefly) the second most important driver of Apple’s sales, the company's tablet business is now its smallest reported segment.