On the morning of April 3, 2010 consumers were found around the world sleeping outside Apple stores as they were eagerly waiting in line to get their hands on the latest popular piece of consumer electronics. 300,000 iPads were sold in the very first day they were available, followed by a million sold just one month later on May 3, 2010. Sales of the iPad continued to rapidly climb to 3 million just 80 days after the first million. Prior to the launch of the iPad 2 on March 7, 2012 Apple had sold more than 15 million iPads. As of June 2014 over 200 million iPads have been sold. It is fair to say that the iPad has been one of the most revolutionary products available to this day in consumer electronics
In relation to the demand curve the iPad has its variations whenever a new version of the iPad is developed and released. It is a tradition of die-hard loyal Apple consumers to always have the latest and greatest apple products. To compensate for this Apple has to have a large supply of their products whenever they release a product without leading to selling out and missing out on maximum sales opportunity. With that being said to this day apple is facing the largest drops in iPad sales for a few suspect reasons. As Lance Whitney from Cnet claims “… aside from enhancements in speed, thinness and display quality, tablets don't really improve all that much. For example, my wife still owns an iPad 2, which she purchased in 2011. It still works fine. It serves her purposes. So she feels no need to spend hundreds of dollars to buy the latest iPad Air 2. That's the challenge Apple faces with existing iPad owners -- giving them a reason to buy the newest model.”
It is fair to say that the company Apple had predicted these sales numbers to be high as they were during this rapid sales period, as they were able to provide these breakthrough devices without having a shortage in supply. With that being said Apple has always been selling the iPad for fairly higher prices than the leading competition. Apple has never came across a surplus of iPads and been forced to sell under market prices. In fact they have actually previously dealt with a supply issue in the holiday season of 2012. Mark Moskowitz a JP Morgan analyst said “Our research indicates that near-term supply constraints impacted iPad sell-in activity during the seasonally-stronger holiday season. Supply did not improve until early December. In our view, it was a supply, not demand issue.” This supply issue lead to four to five week waits to get the latest iPad 2, but that didn’t stop consumers from demanding this product. Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said "We sold every iPad 2 we could make and the demand was stunning," a few months later in April supply began to catch the demand as wait times fell to one to two weeks. In July the supply finally caught up with the demand as the wait time dropped to three to five days. It could be speculated that the wait time created by the huge demand of the Apple iPad 2 could have sparked consumer interest and created a snowball effect of customers waiting in line to purchase the product. Since this supply issue Apple has looked into adding another assembler company other than Foxconn Technology Co. their main assembler in northern China that is having issues keeping up with demand.
Through research we can conclude that supply and demand for the iPad has and always will be an intricate dance. Whenever Apple is leading up to the release of a new version of the iPad they will begin to mass produce the product. Along with whenever the new version of the iPad there will always be a spike in the demand as everyone rushes to get their hand on the latest technology. After the “new” product starts to wear off the demand for the product will begin to gradually fall and apple will follow their production with that trend. That is until the supply and demand for these products spike up again as a new and improved version awaits to break ground in the market.