A research note from Brian White, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, reveals that more than 39 percent of online shoppers over the holiday weekend were interested in purchasing a tablet. With nearly $2 billion being spent over the weekend online, customers are bound to have purchased a significant amount of tablets as well apart from a wide variety of other products. Tablets were at the forefront of the consumer electronics segment, with Walmart and Target both revealing that the iPads were the top sellers on Black Friday.
Apple released the Retina iPad mini rather quietly last month amid reports that the supplies were ridiculously tight due to production bottlenecks. The company would have worked very hard to ensure that there was enough supply to go around the lucrative Black Friday weekend, the analyst found all Wi-Fi models of the first and second generation iPad mini to be readily available. Recently it was reported that major U.S. carriers had the cellular Retina iPad mini models backordered and it appears that supply of those particular models hasn’t eased up as yet, with 64GB and 128GB cellular models being hard to find but 16GB models are available at most of the Apple Retail Stores in the U.S. Analysts expect that Retina iPad mini supply will further improve around Christmas and will ultimately close up the demand supply gap in the first quarter of 2014.
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