We don’t know how your holiday was, but for Apple, it was a blast! And why not, when this year Apple products topped the list of most gifted items. Just like last year; and the year before that; and the year before that one … Flurry Insights, a data analytics firm run by Yahoo, conducts a survey each year during Christmas and New Year. The purpose is to find out what the most traded/bought/gifted items were.
They examined which manufacturers were winning the holiday shopping battle. And their report declared loud and clear, “Apple again took the top spot, with 49.1% of all new devices down 2.2 percentage points from 51.3% last year.”
Also, as expected, was the phenomenal rise of the “phablets”. All products that fell in this category saw a steady rise in popularity. We know that Apple tried to resist the trend for a long time, but finally it had to bow down to the overwhelming demand.
As it turns out, the plus sized phones are now actually their cash cows! Apple’s phablet was introduced in September 2014, and in less than a year and a half, they had grabbed 12% share of all Apple devices activated during the Christmas week.
In 2014, phablets accounted for just 13 percent of the Christmas week traffic. This year, they accounted for 27 percent of all buys – more than twice the amount from last year. The worst hit were smaller phones, those with a screen size of 3.5-inch or less, which took only 1 percent of the share.
This trend is true for all phablets, be it Android or Apple. In fact, Android phablets have done much better than their iOS counterparts.
The increase in sale of mobile devices has quite obviously boosted the number of app downloads. Hundreds of thousands of kids who eagerly ripped off the wrapping on their shiny new gadgets, were scouring through the App Store to download their favorite Apps with equal enthusiasm.
So it was a season of merry for phone manufacturers, app developers, and kids with generous parents. What about you? Did you also give (or receive) an Apple product this season? Tell us in the comments below.