The Curious Geography of the iPad

(Picture credit: Net Applications)

If you’re sick and tired of the iPad, it might be worth a vacation to Wyoming. There are beautiful rugged landscapes to occupy your attention, and you can take a bottle of water and have a geeky moment at the Continental Divide.

But more to the point, Wyoming is currently the state with the lowest level of iPad usage.

That’s according to Net Applications, which provides internet data analysis for thousands of sites, then collates that data to provide overall figures. It’s just released its internet usage report for April, the first to include site visits from iPads. Of course, with the iPad having just 0.12% of all US browsing during the month, there’s a spectacular margin of error to these stats, so it’s best not to read too much into them.

With that in mind, the state by state figures aren’t all that surprising. Generally states with denser populations and bigger cities have more iPad users, while rural and less wealthy states have fewer. (The figures are percentages, meaning there’s a fair comparison of differently populated states.)

There are a couple of surprises: Colorado, Nebraska and Utah all feature in the top 10, while the state with the highest proportion of iPad use is Hawaii: perhaps the iPad experience is truly better on a sun-kissed beach.

On a city-by-city basis, Microsoft might want to hold its next staff retreat in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the only city listed which had no recorded iPad users. Number one was San Francisco, which isn’t a major surprise given that Apple is headquartered in the Bay Area.

There are also national figures, and if you assume the US dominates, you’re wrong. The place where iPad use makes up the biggest proportion of web surfing is the Cayman Islands, with Anguilla, Aruba, and Monaco all scoring highly, suggesting there’s certainly a market among those who can afford grand vacations. Though that doesn’t explain why the second highest country on the list is Mali.

It also appears that either iPad buyers like to travel, or there’s a truly international demand: despite not being on sale overseas yet, the device has been recorded in use by people in 117 different countries.