The story hidden inside Business Insider’s “More iPad Pros sold in 6 weeks than Surfaces sold in 3 months” story

Here’s the story: Business Insider has posted a story with the lengthy title Apple’s gigantic iPad Pro outsold Microsoft’s entire Surface lineup last quarter — and it was only on sale for 6 weeks. They report that with a November 11 release date, Apple had only 6 weeks of the fourth quarter of 2015 in which to sell the iPad Pro, and in that time, they sold over 2 million units. In twice the time, Microsoft managed to sell fewer units of their entire Surface line: 1.6 million of them over the entire fourth quarter.

Here’s the story hidden inside that story: Like most online news outlets, Business Insider tries to squeeze a few more clicks and pageviews out of you by providing links to related stories also on their site. For this story, here are the articles they linked to:

• Microsoft, not Apple, is guiding the future of tablets now
• The iPad Pro: Why Going Big Probably Won’t Save Apple’s Struggling Tablet
• Apple’s New iPads Head Into a Touch Tablet Market, Double-Digit Growth is No Longer Assured

…and here are the IDC numbers they cited. Because Business Insider is really in the clicks-for-money business and not the “informing you” business, they made do with a crappy screenshot of IDC’s table of 4Q 2015 tablet sales:

But because Global Nerdy is just Yours Truly sharing information because I can’t live any other way, I searched for the IDC news release that Business Insider refused to provide a link to (which I just did), and I took both their tables and turned them into these graphs:

Click the graph to see the information source.

Click the graph to see the information source.

Business Insider‘s reporting on the shrinking tablet market is correct. From 2014 to 2015, tablet sales shrank by 10.1%, with Huawei as the only top 5 vendor seeing growth. As for their prediction of the iPad’s Pro’s impending doom: if this is doom, I’d like some of that action, please!