Apple Chart of the Day: The iPad Mini Leads the Way

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), the world’s largest publicly traded company, announced in early November that it sold three million iPads in only three days. The figure included the iPad mini and fourth generation iPad, making it difficult to judge the success of Apple’s first 7-inch tablet. However, a recent chart shows just how popular the iPad mini has become during the holiday shopping season.

According to Statista, a leading statistics research company, the iPad mini is the most popular small tablet in the market. Using global search interest from Google Trends (NASDAQ:GOOG), the 7.9-inch tablet clearly ranked ahead of the Nexus 7 and Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire. In fact, consumers are easily showing more interest towards the iPad mini and other small tablets than the iPad 4.

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The chart below via Statista details consumer interest between November 14 and December 11.

Other firms have also noted the strength of the smaller iPad. Apple’s initial expectations of selling around 6 million units of the iPad mini this year may have been a massive underestimation, according to DisplaySearch analyst David Hsieh. The company has now asked its display panel suppliers to “ship more than 12 million” iPad mini screens in the fourth quarter, Hsieh said in a research note last week. The analyst estimated that the smaller Apple tablet may account for half of all iPad shipments next year, which, according to DisplaySearch, could be as many as 100 million units.

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