Apple Will Sell Exactly 169,652,000 iPads in 2016

Need a lesson in the difference between precision and accuracy? Head over to the Gartner web site for the latest predictions of tablet sales over the next four years. With precision down to the nearest thousand–and I suspect that only space requirements kept the last three digits out of the forecast–Gartner purports to tell us how the market will grown and how it will be divided (table below).

Table 1
Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (April 2012)

Many years ago when I was an editor, I needed an estimate of the GDP of the People’s Republic of China. I called the CIA–the best source for such information in those days–and  was given an estimate of something like 8,546,789,000. I asked the analyst how many of those digits were significant. “Maybe the first,” he said.

These Gartner numbers, and similar ones put out by IDC, are ridiculous, made more so by phony precision. A year ago, Gartner forecast the industry would sell 69,780,000 tablets in 2011, an estimate that proved 15% too high based on the new numbers. Last year’s sales were supposed to include 3.9 million BlackBerry PlayBooks; 807,000 were sold (listed as QNX in the table) and even that estimate strikes me as high. Missing from this year’s table are the 4.2 million TouchPads that HP was supposed to sell this year.

Fish gotta swim and analysts gotta publish estimates. But it’s really time for this embarrassing silliness to stop.