We love top 10, top 5 lists and other such things, but we can’t ignore a top 6 when it comes to the most sold tablets of 2017. The NPD Group’s DistributorTrack sales database includes mostly US distribution figures, but they should reflect pretty much globally. The six top selling tablet vendors in Q3 2017 are thus revealed.
Keep in mind that this is all NPD data, so if the top sounds fishy to you, it’s on them. Placed on the sixth spot is ASUS, with an already very small tablet market share, that went to just 1.8% over Q3 2017, down from last year’s 3.1%. In 2017 the company unveiled the 7.9 inch ASUS ZenPad 3S 8.0, which follows in the footsteps of the ZenPad 3 8.0 from 2016. The lack of product variety is what took them down.
On fifth spot there’s surprisingly Acer, with a small gain in Q3, as far as market share goes, from 1.4% in 2016 to 1.9% somehow. I’m guessing their detachables like the Switch 3 and Switch 5 had something to do with that, as well as the very affordable Iconia One 10 tablets. Things get more serious on fourth spot with Lenovo and their impressive portofolio.
They dipped to 3.2% from 5.5%, but they have some quality products, like the ThinkPad X1 tablet second gen model and the latest Miix machines, as well as the new Yogas. Things start to get surprising with third placed Microsoft, that reached 15.4% market share during the quarter, compared to the 17.8% of last year. They have the latest 12.3 inch Surface Pro as a product that came in June with bumped up battery life. Even the Surface Pro 4 was still selling well this year.
Then comes Samsung, with 19.8% of the market, down from 22.5% last year and of course the Galaxy Tab S and Tab A models are the ones that sold well. There’s also the niche product Galaxy Book and the Tab S3 sold particularly well thanks to the S Pen. And finally, as you probably guessed it, Apple is on the first spot, with a 53.7% market share, a big jump from the 44.2% of last year.
They probably stole percentage from the other companies, otherwise they couldn’t have grown so much. The new and cheaper 9.7 inch iPad seems to have sold really well at $329 and the iPad Pros are also doing fine. Interestingly, the iPad Mini 4 was the third best sold tablet of the quarter.
