Just give me a bigger phone, keep the iPad

If you want to see the impact of the iPhone 6+, look no further than iPad sales: about $9 billion during the quarter, which is down 22 percent, from $11.5 billion during the same quarter in 2013. The iPad as a percentage of overall Apple revenues was down to 12 percent from 20 percent a year ago. Apple saw an 18 percent year-over-year decline in iPad unit sales during the quarter. Of the total iPads sold during the quarter, 45 percent were iPad Minis, down from 49 percent during the fourth quarter of 2013. The iPad mini sales were about $4 billion during the quarter, down from about $5.7 billion a year ago. These numbers provide anecdotal evidence of my earlier contention that the iPhone 6+ is going to cannibalize the iPad mini. Not that there is anything wrong with that: Apple is perfectly okay with eating its old and rejuvenating itself with new products. Year-over-year quarterly iPod sales declined by almost half: 3.3 million units versus 6 million a year ago.

I’ve thought about which device would work best for me since I started commuting daily by train and bus to work and my iPad is less and less useful to me. It is a great form factor for some things (I created a great diagram in the Paper app recently which I couldn’t do on an iPhone) but most of what I do on a mobile device lately doesn’t need something as big as an iPad.

I usually listen to music, read feeds, skim through updates and take photos on the go. I don’t have a data SIM in my iPad so I have to connect it to wifi and that is touch and go. My phone is always connected and with me so its a better option for most of what I need to do. My iPhone 5 is just a bit on the small side when it comes to reading on screen so bigger phones have become really appealing to me (along with better battery life).

If I had cash in my pocket to buy a new phone today, I’d probably be torn between a great Android phone like the Sony Experia and one of the newer iPhone models. I’ve held the iPhone 6+ and it is a pretty big phone but not impossibly so for me. The one thing that dissuades me from going with a huge phone isn’t so much using it, its more the likelihood of the device fitting into my jeans pockets!

What I am pretty sure about, though, is that I want a bigger phone in the future and, once I have that, I probably won’t use my iPad nearly as much as I do now.

Image credit: “iPhone 6 Plus, MacBook Air, Thunderbolt monitor” by Dylan, licensed CC BY 2.0