Another Analyst Sees Apple Padding Its Huge Tablet Lead

“There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.”

— Instapaper creator Marco Arment

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says 2011 will be the year of the iPad and he may well be right. Despite the dizzying array of tablets announced at CES earlier this year, there’s still a dearth of non-iPad iPad-class tablets. With little in the way of competition, it’s looking likely the Pad will continue to dominate the tablet market this year and next.

A data point in support of that argument: Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope today lowered his overall forecasts for the tablet industry, while raising his estimate on Apple’s share of it.

“Our iPad forecast remains unchanged, though we have lowered our non-Apple tablet unit assumptions by 2.3 million units in 2011 and 2012,” Shope explained in a note to clients. “Meanwhile, we have raised our forecast for Apple’s tablet market share to 66.4 percent in 2011 (64 percent prior) and 66.6 percent in 2012 (65 percent prior). Overall, we are expecting 57.7 million total tablets for 2011 and 78.0 million tablets for 2012, versus 60.1 million and 80.3 million previously.”

Shope’s explanation for that adjustment? An expected “downward bias” to Android tablets in 2011. Evidently, he doesn’t see devices like the Motorola Xoom and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab blowing up the tablet market anytime soon.