I suppose if your products are going to be cannibalized, you might as well hope it’s your own competing products that cannibalize them. That may be the case with the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones versus the iPad based on data gleaned from Pocket, the popular app that saves articles and videos for consumption later.
The company analyzed more than two million uses of its app by people who upgraded to the new, larger iPhones and found that these folks are using their iPads noticeably less for reading Pocket articles. Here’s a graph of the breakdown between reading on iPads and iPhones, showing that the larger the phone screen, the less time an iPad is used for the same activity in Pocket.
Pocket also has some interesting data on how the time of day combined with the screen size affects in-app usage:
Users with an iPhone 6 now read on their tablets 19% less during the week and 27% less over the weekend. Those with a 6 Plus are on their tablets 31% less during the week and 36% less over the weekend.
[company]Apple[/company] iPhone 6 Plus owners are big video watchers too; Pocket says its users open 40 percent more videos in the app than iPhone 5s users.
This isn’t terribly surprising to me. When I noted in 2012 how larger-screened phones were on the rise due to growing content consumption that’s more enjoyable on a bigger display, others thought phones were getting bigger only to house more LTE radios, antennas and bigger batteries. I’d say that’s partially true, but the consumer trend driving the change was a better overall content experience.
What’s going to be interesting in the coming 12 months or so is how much impact iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales have on iPads.
We already know that the growth rate for iPad sales is declining, partially because the devices have longer replacement cycles than smartphones. Add in more people carrying larger smartphones — and replacing them more often — and I think you’ll see iPad demand slow down further. Of course, if people are simply passing on upgrading or buying a new iPad because they’re buying a new larger iPhone, I doubt Apple will mind much.
