ChangeWave Research took a survey last month of 2,893 people asking a series of questions about their satisfaction with tablets and which manufacturer they plan on buying from in the future. I’ll give you three guesses at the name of the top-ranking tablet vendor and the first two don’t count — yep, it’s Apple.
Only 7 percent of respondents said they plan on buying a tablet within the next 90 days, a drop from ChangeWave’s survey in November just before the holiday shopping season kicked into gear. Of those 7 percent, 73 percent (almost three quarters) said they will buy an iPad from Apple, making the Cupertino-based company the leader of the tablet wars right now.
“War” is probably a strong word to use to describe the statistics because tablet market share right now is similar to that of Google, Bing and Yahoo for search engines — there’s really no competition. The second most popular tablet manufacturer according to respondents is Amazon for the Kindle Fire, but that only captured 8 percent of future tablet buyers. After that is Samsung with 6 percent. Following these three, no other tablet manufacturer was able to garner more than 3 percent of the vote.
Even interest in the Kindle Fire, the tablet that everyone said would be the first true competitor to the iPad, is declining profusely. In November 2011, 22 percent of future tablet buyers wanted one. In March that plummeted to 7 percent and now it’s jumped a bit to 8 percent, but the trend is evident.
In addition to Apple dominating future tablet market share, current owners have expressed more satisfaction with Apple than any other manufacturer. 81 percent of third-generation iPad users and 71 percent of iPad 2 users consider themselves “very satisfied” with their device. Meanwhile, 46 percent of Samsung Galaxy Tab owners, 41 percent of Amazon Kindle Fire owners, and 41 percent of all other combined vendors are “very satisfied.” That’s less than half who are fully pleased with each of the latter three categories.