Game over, losers. He won an iPad

Harken, go back to a simpler time if you will. A time when Macalope’s columns were mostly about soaking people who said ridiculous things about Apple or Apple products.

What happened in those days, Carol? We were so young. So full of life. Have you ever finished building that dating app? It was for people in open relationships in closed communities. What a terrible idea. But such was our tight-lipped optimism! The future spread out before us like a cruise ship buffet, but without the botulism.

And we didn’t have to talk about AI all day.

Maybe it was all the AI ​​commercials Macalope was forced to watch during the Super Bowl that featured real actors embarrassing themselves and AI-rendered actors’ likenesses practically embarrassing themselves that put Macalope in a nostalgic mood. Or maybe you saw this breaking news: Demand for the iPad is growing as Apple tightens its grip on the tablet market.

It’s been 16 years since the iPad and the Apple device that’s “just a big iPhone!” it still owns the tablet market, which it didn’t create, but created the real thing.

Omdia reports that Apple shipped 19.6 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 16.5 percent year-over-year… The fourth-quarter results boosted Apple’s market share to 44.9 percent.

Of course, the standard caveats about how good analyst estimates are (spoiler: not very good), but if you try to think of the last time you saw someone using an Android tablet, you’ll realize that these numbers are at least roughly correct, if not accurate.

The fact that Apple continues to have the largest market share, and certainly a much larger share of profits, is bitterly amusing to a cranky person who remembers being told how the iPad was doomed because Android tablets were set to surpass it, just as Android phones surpassed the iPhone.

In 2010, one company said that the iPad “failed to convince buyers” after its unveiling, as the number of people who said they were not interested in the iPad nearly doubled. A little footnote to this survey that somehow didn’t make the headlines: the number of people who said they _would_ like to buy an iPad tripled.

Macalope’s favorite pundit from 2011 praised the Motorola Xoom because it had 4G connectivity and the iPad 2 didn’t. Case closed! Advantage: Xoom! Oh, well, except for, ha-ha, a little note, just a little, really: The Xoom didn’t actually have it either. It was simply promised that at some point in the future you would be able to mail in your Xoom and add 4G to it. And that didn’t happen for seven months.

Although Motorola is clearly the better product in the eyes of scientists, unfortunately they no longer manufacture the Xoom. Or exist because the company was sold for parts to Google and Lenovo.

In 2012, we were told that Android tablets were “beating the iPad in business and IT.” Oh no! How do Android fans know? Due to companies that have not yet purchased iPads, 44 percent said they were going to buy Android tablets.

That… um… good. That’s some real faith-based mathematical analysis, but… You do. Aside from these people simply reading what they wanted to see in the survey results, it’s important to point out that purchase intent surveys are notoriously rubbish. So there’s that too.

Macalope could go on for hours about how iPad pundits got it wrong (and he often does, be glad you don’t know him in real life). But as the numbers above show, that battle is largely over. And the iPad won. This year’s updates are likely to be incremental, as tablets as a whole are a mature market, and while Apple amazes us every few years by making them even thinner and more capable, the company isn’t likely to see huge growth from this category in the future.

Don’t worry though. If you want real innovation in tablets—all sloppy and wet with weird results, like when Chicago invented deep-dish pizza—a bunch of crazy companies are doing some crazy things with e-ink screens. None are likely to hit the big time like the iPad, but Macalope found it fun to watch.