Wireless carrier AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) came out with a new offer Thursday morning that may be better for the company’s inventory levels than for its consumers. With the impending release of new iPhones from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), AT&T does not want to be stuck with large stocks of the iPhone 5C and 5S models. To move the older phones, the company is offering heavily discounted iPads as an enticement to customers who are presumably waiting to buy the new iPhones.

The offer is simple: buy a new iPhone 5C or 5S, and AT&T will sell you an iPad for $200 below the retail price. You can even get $230 off a 16 GB iPad Mini, bringing the cost of that device down to $200.

To get the deal, customers need to sign up for a new two-year contract for the iPad. Of course, customers can get $100 off the price of any tablet just by agreeing to purchase one. For most of us, though, the $100 savings still amounts to real money.

The other part of the deal is that customers have to buy their new iPhones through AT&T’s Next installment plan, which means they’ll pay the full price of the phone over the course of the following two years at a rate of $27 a month. In other words, no subsidy on the cost of the phone.

Tablet sales growth is slowing down faster than PC sales growth, according to a report from Gartner. Tablet sales are projected to rise about 24% year-over-year in 2014 to a total of 256 million units. Sales are expected to grow by 25% to nearly 321 million units in 2015, an increase in the growth rate of just 4%.

PC shipments are slated to fall by about 2.9% year-over-year in 2014 but rise about 2.7% in 2015 to a total of more than 316 million units.

As a Gartner analyst noted, “The next wave of [tablet] adoption will be driven by lower price points than superior functionality.”

So, if you want a tablet and can live without wireless connectivity, just wait a little longer and there will be a WiFi-only tablet at a price you can afford that does not require a two-year data contract and a monthly payment for a new phone.

ALSO READ: Tablet Sales Run Into a Wall

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