Tim Cook's iPad Christmas starts early

Tim Cook made a memorable comment on the last Apple quarterly conference call. He said it would be an iPad Christmas. With exactly 3 weeks before the jolly holiday, iPad interest seems to be solid, and I suspect Tim Cook will be proven correct. This morning mobile analytics firm Localytics shared some interesting data. They tracked usage of a variety of tablets and smartphones from Black Friday to Cyber Monday and compared the data against the prior week. And guess what?

The iPad Air was the big winner, with 51% more such devices showing up on the network during the Turkey weekend. The iPad mini saw 26% growth as well. To be sure, these are relative numbers and we don’t have any absolute data (Localytics didn’t publish it). The iPad Air was only released at the start of November so it was bound to show solid growth. But keep in mind that we’re now into December. With all the iPad Air pre-orders and sales in the first month of launch I think it’s a good sign that the Thanksgiving weekend produced 51% more iPad Air users.

I know it’s easy to poke holes in the data. People knew Apple would discount its products over this past weekend. You’d have to be a fool to buy the product a week earlier knowing that a sale was around the corner. But still, everything goes on sale at Thanksgiving. The Kindle Fire HD 7” posted 23% growth week over week. Not bad at all, but nothing close to the iPad Air’s 51% showing.

People are still willing to pay a premium for amazing products that just work as expected. Even InfoScout reported that 40% of iPad purchases over the weekend were from Android users. This is the kind of data that Wall Street loves. Apple’s stock has been trending higher since July and is finally at a point (again) where it’s trading higher than its year-ago price.

There’s more than just iPad sales for investors to look forward too. A China Mobile deal has reported been inked, and Tim Cook may boost the dividend. We might even see Apple enter new product categories.

I have very little doubt it will be an iPad Christmas, what I'm most interested in is what kind of Apple New Year will it be?

One thing is for sure - owning Apple stock is certainly not boring.