Christmas Day has declined in importance as a catalyst for sales of Apple’s iPad and iPhone, according to a report, which suggests that cheaper devices have become more popular as festive gifts.
According to Flurry, the mobile analytics company, the number of Apple devices activated on December 25 was more than twice the number activated on average on each day over the previous three weeks.
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That represents a big shift in consumer behaviour since 2012, when more than six times as many iPads and iPhones were activated on Christmas Day compared with the preceding days.
Benedict Evans, an independent analyst, said the decline in the “Christmas lift” for the iPad “may be partly the result of some of the cheaper Android devices getting some of the kids market”.
However, he added that it was difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the data, because parents often give their children second-hand devices that do not show up as new activations.
“iPads seem to percolate through a family,” Mr Evans said.
While gifting may be becoming less important for Apple, which sold 14m iPads in the third quarter alone according to analyst estimates, others have had a bumper year under the Christmas tree.
Acer, the Taiwanese computer maker known for its low-cost devices, stood out with five times as many of its devices activated on Christmas as on other days, a higher ratio than last year, according to Flurry’s data.
By contrast, Samsung, its South Korean rival, saw a “Christmas activation bump” of just 1.9 times, according to Flurry, which declined to provide absolute numbers for device activations, only giving relative figures.
But by far and away the leader in marketing at Christmas was Amazon, the online retailer. Activations of its Kindle Fire on Christmas Day were 24 times higher than on other days, albeit from a lower base than Apple.
“Amazon sells Kindle tablets at cost, putting them within the Christmas budgets of more people than some other devices,” said Mary Ellen Gordon, an analyst at Flurry.
Amazon’s retail business model also means that the company is “top of mind for many consumers during the holiday season, giving it lots of opportunity to promote its tablets as Christmas gifts”, she said.
But with tablet ownership now much more widespread than a few years ago, when the devices were a novelty, even Amazon’s “Christmas lift” was less pronounced than in the past. In 2011, it was 41 times.
Tablets became truly mainstream this year, with more than 200m of the devices sold globally.
Apple, which released the first iPad in 2010, now competes against dozens of cheap, little-known manufacturers, all of which run versions of the Android operating system.
In recent months even retailers such as Tesco in the UK and Carrefour in France have launched their own low-priced tablets that come preloaded with media or ecommerce applications.
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