Good bad news for Apple: The iPad Pro is soaring—and killing other iPads

Is the iPad dead? No, or at least not yet. And a new report suggests Apple’s tablet strategy is getting more things right than wrong.

CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners) has posted to Substack an article called iPad Refresh Looks Like It’s Working (via MacRumors). This reveals that customers are increasingly turning to the iPad Pro, at the cost of sales of the iPad Air and iPad mini.

In the second quarter of 2023, according to the organization, iPad sales were split as follows:

• iPad (standard): 35%
• iPad Pro: 38%
• iPad Air: 15%
• iPad mini: 12%

But for the same quarter in 2024, proportions had shifted in favor of the Pro:

• iPad (standard): 35%
• iPad Pro: 43%
• iPad Air: 12%
• iPad mini: 10%

The interesting thing here is that this year Apple launched new models of the iPad Pro and iPad Air: if anything, it might seem intuitive to expect those two to increase share and the other two to drop. Yet the Air dropped and the standard iPad held steady. Why could this be?

Well, firstly the vanilla iPad may not have got a new model, but it did get the next best thing, a price cut, particularly for a device that we broadly liked but somewhat overpriced at launch.

And while the iPad Air got a new model (or two new models, with the new screen size), it wasn’t much of an upgrade. Apple continued to push hard on its upsell strategy; every component and feature decision seemed to have been made to denigrate the Air and encourage users to buy the Pro instead. The Air got an M2 processor, a 6.1mm chassis, and a laminated LED screen, while the Pro was handed an obviously superior M4 chip, a 5.3mm chassis, and a tandem OLED screen. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Air seemed like a weird afterthought that was just there to make the other iPads look better.

So maybe this isn’t as much of a surprise as you might think. And it’s certainly good news for Apple: pushing more Pros is exactly what it wanted to do. Maybe now it will launch new versions of the standard iPad and iPad mini and boost sales at the other end of the market.