Apple holds firm on iPad prices

Research from price comparison specialist Idealo reveals rivals are slashing their prices to stay ahead of giant

Apple's dominance of the tablet market is forcing its competitors to slash their prices to keep up, while the price of iPads remains fairly steady.

That was the result of research released by price comparison site Idealo, which analysed the prices from millions of clicks on more than 1,200 tablet products from 149 manufacturers across its sites in Germany, France, the UK and Italy.

Idealo's research covered the year between the second quarter of 2011 to Q2 2012, incorporating the launch of devices such as the Motorola Xoom 2, BlackBerry PlayBook, the new iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and the Google Nexus 7.

The average price of non-Apple tablet PCs dropped 13.6 per cent between Q2 2011 and Q2 2012, with the average price for iPads decreasing just 3.4 per cent.

This means the price decline of non-Apple tablets was almost four times greater than iPads (click on graph below).

The only time non-Apple tablet prices increased was the last quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of 2012, on a per-month basis, between November 2011 and January 2012.

Sticking with a per-month analysis, the average price of iPads fell between January and March this year, reflecting a price drop after the holiday season coupled with the reduction in price for the iPad 2 in preparation for the new iPad.

In terms of which vendors experienced the greatest drop, Archos tablet prices declined the most from February to June 2012 (27.2 per cent). On average Samsung and Asus dropped 17.5 per cent during this time, with iPad prices dropping 4.5 per cent (click on graph below).

According to Idealo, Acer tablets were the only ones in the top five to have had a consistent price rise since March 2012, increasing 10 per cent between March and June this year.

Average prices of all non-Apple tablets (excluding its four biggest rivals: Samsung, Archos, Asus and Acer) declined 4.3 per cent between February and March 2012, and 5.3 per cent from March to June this year.