Apple aims to ship between 12 million and 14 million iPad 2 tablets in the third quarter of the calendar year, possibly doubling its second-quarter sales of between 7 million and 9 million units. A new report from DigiTimes cites anonymous “market watchers” in claiming that Apple will drastically ramp up tablet orders in the third quarter of 2011. An earlier report claimed that Apple’s increased tablet orders in the second half of the year could put tremendous strain on manufacturers, thus limiting production output for competing products such as Amazon’s first media tablet, which is expected to launch later this year. IPad shipments in Apple’s last reported quarter missed big — analysts had huge expectations for the tablet in the fiscal second quarter, but supply limitations held iPad sales to just 4.69 units compared to 7.33 million in the fiscal first quarter.
