Slashdot Mirror
Is the Tablet Market In Outright Collapse? Data Suggests Yes
Nerval's Lobster writes Is the tablet market rapidly collapsing? Mobile-analytics firm Flurry doesn't come to quite that stark a conclusion, but things aren't looking too good for touch-screens that don't qualify as "phablets." According to Flurry's numbers, full-sized tablets accounted for only 11 percent of new devices in 2014, a decline from 2013, when that form-factor totaled 17 percent of the new-device market; small tablets experienced a smaller decline, falling from 12 percent to 11 percent of new devices between 2013 and 2014. (Meanwhile, phablets expanded from 4 percent of new devices in 2013 to 13 percent this year.) Boy Genius Report, for its part, looked at those numbers and decided that the tablet market is doomed: "Consumers happy with compact smartphones are not switching to larger iPhones for now, but former tablet buyers are." That's not to say people will stop using tablets, but the onetime theory that they would one day cannibalize all PCs looks increasingly nebulous.
The cost of a large smartphone is hidden by the contract.
With a tablet you pay full price up front.
Most of the time I am using my phone for reading, or for playing music. The Galaxy Note3 works well for that, and its more portable than my Kindle fire HDX 8.9
So will the UI makers retreat on their strategy of forcing PCs to use touch-inspired interfaces? We can only hope.
In my case I can certainly hope *not*.
At home and at work my Surface Pro works perfectly as a day-to-day PC with an external screen, keyboard, mouse and wired network connectivity.
On the bus, an airplane or wherever it works great as a touch tablet. It's the only gadget I carry and need (other than my little iPhone 4s).
These marketing types are all chicken little's. Any engineer/technician could have told you this was going to happen. Tablets are not the new laptops. They are consumption devices used for a specific purpose. Everyone who wanted a tablet, now has one, so expect sales to slow. Expect content creators to keep buying laptops and desktops. And expect anyone with half a brain to keep rejecting touch unified interfaces, the "cloud", and software as a service.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It's all about use cases. My wife uses her iPad for the same reasons you do, but she rarely bothers with a full-blown PC. For her, the iPad is great for road trips, small vacations, etc.
On my part, I rarely bother with a tablet; I have/use CG applications that a tablet simply could not keep up with, if anything were even written for them in that vein. Plus, I prefer the larger screens, bulkiness be damned.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I was carrying my iPad Mini around with me to meetings and such - in addition to carrying my little phone. The Mini is about the perfect size gadget... but I was carrying two devices everywhere, one of which won't fit in many pockets. So... I decided to try using an iPhone 6+ as my one carry-around. It's definitely a compromise for some uses, but it's definitely good enough to replace the iPad for note taking in meetings, ssh'ing into a server in a pinch, or looking up info on the web when I'm away from my desk. I expect, going forward, I'll only have two devices - a biggish phone plus a light 12"-13" laptop (e.g. MacBook Air).
#DeleteChrome
In a drive to be clickbait some company has decided to lie or at least massage the truth with abstract numbers. Market share has never ever and never will be a truly useful metric for the health of some market.
Say i define a market as "portable computing devices without physical keyboards". The would cover smart phones and slate tablets. In year 1 there's a million smart phones sold and a million tablets sold. Each product segment has 50% market share. In year 2 thanks to just basic increases in demand and new features more devices are sold. This year four million phones are sold and two million tablets. Now the market share of tablets has dropped to 33% despite increasing unit sales by 100% from the previous year. Different products have different growth rates. Comparing two categories directly is rarely useful.
As it stands the iPad still dominates the tablet market in terms of units sold even though its share of just the tablet market has decreased. This is due to expansion of the tablet market in the low end.
Tablets were never going to replace all PCs. Anyone suggesting they would or complaining that they haven't is a fool. Tablets have replaced some PC sales but have also simply added to the computing landscape. The PCs they replaced were the ones doing the same job as the tablets: reading, basic web stuff, and light gaming. Tablets just do that job in a more portable fashion.
Tablets in a "free fall" is just a ludicrous clickbait statement. Tablets are a form factor that was impractical for many years and are meeting that pent up demand. They're not going to replace all PCs nor will they get as ubiquitous as smart phones.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Agree, the surface pro (especially the 3) are wonderful devices. Use it at work with a docking station and end up with 3 usable monitors (2x external + device). and when your on the road it just works great. one of the few devices that i can actually use on a plane.
I will say also for such a thin keyboard which is used as a cover, the keys have more travel than expected and works quite well providing plenty of tactile feedback.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I have a (don't judge me!) Surface Pro 2. After my last PC got struck by lightning almost 9 months ago, I haven't bothered building a new one.
The Surface Pro has (just) enough processing power to handle most of what I need it to do. All my standard office stuff (word, excel, visio) and as long as I'm not doing anything too crazy, it handles my personal dev projects (VS2013 and some assorted web and .Net apps) including debugging (although I'm not running a local database on it for development).
Yeah, it can do Netflix, hulu, and prime, but it also runs an Android emulator (hurray for Andyroid!) fairly well for apps I need that aren't available on Windows and for my own cross platform development testing.
It's not a gaming rig though. I'm not going to jump in a 40-person WoW raid with the graphics cranked up, nor am I going to jump into a FPS and count on head shots. I still need an actual rig for that fun.
But as far as having a super handy tablet that I can effectively doc to have a solid work machine (I'm in management now, so I don't need to compile that million lines of code assembly), it does quite well.
As for upgrading, I got a great deal on the Surface Pro 2 as the Pro 3s had been on the market and the 2s were getting cleared out. If/When the Pro 4s come out, I might make the jump, but for now, I'm good.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The summary and comments so far have been comparing tablets to phones. But the proper comparison is between tablets and laptops.
ANECDOTE ALERT
I'm a big believer that tablets will replace laptops. My ipad used to be for games, light browsing, etc. But two things happened that changed everything:
* I got a really high quality keyboard case that comes very close to replicating the look and feel of a laptop (search for ClamCase if you care to)
* my work switched to office 365, which means all of the outlook, word, excel, CRM, and sharepoint is available online and through ipad apps.
Now my tablet has probably replaced 75% of my home computer needs, and 100% of travel needs - I leave my work laptop at home and only take the tablet. It's super cool. It does many things that my home/work laptops do not:
* it is small and light, yet the ipad screen is way huge compared to netbook screens.
* cell connection means you always have email the instant you open it, and any website is available any where. once you get used to this it is jarring to back to a laptop where you're scrounging for internet access (or have a Sting that glows when in the presence of unsecured wifi).
* instant wake from sleep. Another thing where once you get used to that it's hard to go back to the laptop.
* it lasts all day. literally, 10 hrs +. better than my crappy work win7 that burns like a thousand suns.
* road warriors will identify with this one: the charger is small and light (not a brick)
Like I said, anecdote alert. But I think that aside from computer professionals, many people can be more than suited by an ipad + tablet case. The number of edge cases where a laptop works but an ipad doesn't work keeps on shrinking.
Rumor mill says Apple will be updating the MacBook air to be a tablet/laptop hybrid, possibly like the set up I described. That would be cool!
Why would anyone care if stupid people laugh at them?
Because those stupid people in a hospital are nurses and doctors. Give them an opportunity to look down on you as an I.T. professional and you will never hear the end of it. As an I.T. contractor, I worked in a wide variety of companies with different cultures. A hospital is perhaps the most hostile work enviornment. Either you fall in line with the pecking order or the door hits your ass on the way out.
I applied for a tech job at a law firm this past summer. The recruiter submitted my resume along with a half-dozen other resumes. The hiring manager rejected them all out of hand for lacking tenure (i.e., at least three years in the last three positions). The recruiter had to explain to the hiring manager that practically no one has three years in the last three positions since the Great Recession, as everyone is doing short-term contract and getting whatever jobs they can find. Last I heard, the position was still open.
Like I said, anecdote alert. But I think that aside from computer professionals, many people can be more than suited by an ipad + tablet case. The number of edge cases where a laptop works but an ipad doesn't work keeps on shrinking. Rumor mill says Apple will be updating the MacBook air to be a tablet/laptop hybrid, possibly like the set up I described. That would be cool!
I know this is Slashdot so this is a little against the group think but isn't what you described exactly what Microsoft is trying to do with the surface? They made 2 versions, one that is stripped down with great battery life that runs office and a web browser. Then another one that is for professionals that is a full fledged ultra book.
I have used a surface pro 2 and it was a pretty good laptop for data viewing, though I still like a real laptop for coding work. I can see it being the only computing device someone like my wife would ever need.
I think in the long run the tablet market will be squeezed out by phones taking away the bottom and laptops taking away the top. Because lets be honest an iPhone 6+ is a great personal Netflix viewer and a Surface Pro or Convertible Mac Book Air would be better than a tablet with a keyboard case.
A comment on the linked story notes Flurry is only counting cellular activations. This ignores the majority of tablets that are WiFi only