iDevice lovers often hold off on purchasing big-ticket gadgets from June to August — many are instead waiting for the latest iPhone to hit the scene in September.
This three-month waiting period can sometimes turn into a dry season for Apple, unless it revs up its back-to-school promotions.
Apart from the November to December holiday shopping season, the months leading up to the start of the school year are crucial to PC and laptop vendors hoping to score big sales courtesy of the education sector.
iPhone And iPad Q2 2016 Sales Decline
It's now a different story for Apple, though, as one market analyst explains. It isn't just the iMacs and MacBooks that are front and center in the promotional kickoff to the 2016 school year. The company has also thrown in the much-hyped-about iPhone 6 series and the iPad Pro to the lineup of devices with freebies.
Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at market research group Creative Strategies, attributes this promotional strategy to the products' sales decline in the previous quarter.
"In the second quarter of 2016, Apple experienced a 10-million unit drop year over year in iPhone sales, down to 51.2 million. iPad sales were down to 10.2 million units," Milanesi says.
Flashback to the summer of last year: Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones in Q2 2015, up from the 43.7 million units shipped in the same period in 2014.
Meanwhile, the iPad continued to struggle then, as it does now.
The company sold only 12.6 million iPad units in Q2 2015, down from the 16 million recorded the year before.
"But the decline was not yet a real cause of concern," Milanesi points out.
Apple was somehow willing to wait out a longer replacement cycle for the iPad — the period before consumers started upgrading to the latest generation of the device. But the product didn't seem to follow the same sale patterns that smartphones had.
Facing its fifth straight quarter of declining iPad sales, Apple now realizes it's time to boost the iPad's promotion.
No New Product For Back-To-School iDevice Shoppers
Rumors that a new MacBook would be announced during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June proved to be mere speculation. There is thus no new iDevice on offer for this back-to-school season.
Instead the tech-savvy are awaiting the big reveal of the MacBook Pro 2016 ahead of the holiday shopping madness. The new Apple laptop is said to be the thinnest, sleekest and most portable yet from among Apple's offerings.
It's already sparking renewed interest in a brand that is currently facing a "pause in growth," as Apple CEO Tim Cook puts it.
