Wait periods for an iPad are weeks long, and the iPhone might be one of the reasons.
If you order one of Apple’s top iPads these days, you’ll have to wait a long time for your new tablet to arrive. And Apple’s iPhone may be part of the problem.
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According to a storey in Nikkei Asia, some purchasers are having to wait up to nine weeks to get their hands on an iPad due to supply bottlenecks and component shortages that the whole electronics sector is grappling with. However, the article implies that Apple’s drive to reduce wait times on iPhone orders is contributing to the iPad delays.
When Apple announced its record Christmas earnings a week ago, CEO Tim Cook downplayed the link between iPhone and iPad ship delays. “If you look at the similarity between various products, there is some, but normally the problem is on legacy nodes, and these legacy nodes are by supplier,” Cook said during a quarterly earnings call with Wall Street investors. “As a result, it’s lot more focused on the provider than it is on anything else.”
However, according to Nikkei Asia, as supply chains began to improve in December, Apple instructed its manufacturing partners to increase iPhone assembly. According to the source, Apple needed additional phones on hand to fulfil demand over the Christmas season and before to the Lunar New Year celebrations in Asia.
As a consequence, iPhone wait times have decreased, whereas iPad consumers continue to spend a significant amount of time twiddling their thumbs between purchasing a tablet and having it arrive. According to the Nikkei study, the average wait time for a 64GB iPad from Apple is about 50 days. Even though it appears to be a long wait, it is better than the 55-day wait clients faced two months ago.
For comparison, iPhone wait times have just dropped to 10 days after reaching as high as a month at the end of 2021.
Configuration/Color |
Delivery time | In-store pickup | |
| iPad Pro, 11-inch | 128GB/Space gray | 2 weeks | Today |
| iPad Pro, 12.9-inch | 128GB/Space gray | 1 week | Today |
| iPad Air | 64GB/Space gray | 1-2 weeks | Today |
| iPad | 64GB/Space gray | 1 month | Not available |
| iPad mini | 64GB/Space gray | 1 month | Not available |
| iPhone 13 | 128GB/Blue | Tomorrow | Today |
| iPhone 13 mini | 128GB/Blue | Tomorrow | Today |
| iPhone 13 Pro | 128GB/Sierra Blue | Tomorrow | Today |
| iPhone 13 Pro Max | 128GB/Sierra Blue | Tomorrow | Today |
Our own brief investigation confirms the report’s conclusions. Only the 12.9-inch iPad Pro had a shipping period of a week or less among the base model tablets that Apple offers, according to Bay Area iPad inventory. Both the 11-inch iPad Pro and iPad Air faced several-week delays, while the iPad mini and standard iPad would take a month to arrive. All iPhone 13 models are shipping immediately, which is a significant improvement over the week or two delays we had in December.
Apple is feeling the effects of delayed iPad delivery. The iPad was the only part of Apple’s business that did not see any sales growth during the company’s Christmas quarter.
dropping 14 percent from the previous year During the same period, iPhone sales increased by 9 percent to a record $71.6 billion for the quarter.
If there’s any good news for frustrated iPad buyers, it’s that Apple believes the supply chain issue is improving, even if difficulties aren’t going away anytime soon. “Overall, we see an improvement in the March quarter in terms of limitations decreasing against what they were in the December quarter,” Cook said.
If you’re in the market for an iPad, you have two options: you can wait for Apple to get its hands on more parts and scale up manufacturing, or you can buy it now. However, if you know you’ll need an iPad sooner rather than later, it may be wise to place your purchase now and accept the fact that you’ll have to wait longer than normal.