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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.
Oh, you mean my personal Netflix gadget.
I use it (google nexus 7) because the battery lasts a long time, it is portable, and it is specifically NOT my phone.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So will the UI makers retreat on their strategy of forcing PCs to use touch-inspired interfaces? We can only hope.
I'm not replacing my tablet every 2 - 3 years. When it comes to my phone ? Probably every 2 yearsish I'll replace it.
UPS Sucks
I have a tablet and use it all the time, but have no plans to buy a new one. I suppose if there are enough people like me, the tablet market is doomed.
Lesson learned: don't build a good product that is going to work well for a long time.
Couldn't it also be that Tablets are a question of reaching market saturation, and that they fall more into the PC life cycle rather than the Cell Phone life cycle of being replaced yearly? From my personal experience, everywhere I go, I see people with tablets that are a year or two old because they are "good enough", lack compelling reasons to upgrade and also are typically appear significantly more expensive than their cell phone counterparts as they are typically sold unsubsidized.
Thirty four characters live here.
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
"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."
how do you look only at data concerning tablets and phones and come to a conclusion about PC's? What did laptop and PC sales look lik compared to mobile devices? My wife uses a 2 year old tablet as her primary computing device at home... She didn't want a replacement for her laptop when it failed because she can do everything she needs on her tablet.
Wired Magazine keeps saying so!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
but they are not made for data creation...doing graphics or coding on a tablet is a pain without getting a wireless keyboard/mouse... perhaps now we can get back to regular desktops...
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
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.
"Show me the numbers!"
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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
Everything you just said. In addition Tablets are a niche product. Unlike personal computers, or phones, they are a "nice to have", but not really all that necessary. All that hyperbole about them replacing PC's are exactly that. They are not powerful enough, flexible enough, nor practical enough to do so.
In addition, to all that, likely more recently the big thing killing the Tablet market is the size creep of phones. With the new iPhone 6 Plus Gigantor, the previous version of Galaxy McHuge, or even the Galaxy MegaNote the distinction between what is a "Tablet" and what is a "Phone" is a bit more blurry. What was normally an iPad Mini is really like an 6 Plus, minus phone capability, that isn't subsidized... Sooo why am I buying it again? Also many like myself probably realized, do I really need a full sized Tablet when I have a 5.5" smartphone?
So no, I am not surprised that the market is a bit saturated, and really neither should the makers of these devices, as they are the makers of their own downfall (i.e. they make all the devices that are competing with and defeating their own Tablet sales).
To use the age old Slashdottian car analogy, it was thought that within the Nissan car portfolio, that because the Sentra and the Altima were so similar, and were only sized slightly different, that the Sentra ate into the Altima sales because of it. There was not enough differentiation between brands to justify the price purchase. Now consider that in this analogy to be totally accurate, it would be Nissan complaining about why you are not buying a Sentra AND an Altima... (While also having a Maxima at home for long trips). :)
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.
I suspect too much is being read in to these numbers. For the most part updates to tablets have been incremental over the past several years. Other than a fixation in owning the latest and greatest, there's no real reason to upgrade. PC updates have stalled a lot earlier than that for the very same reason. It's not that there aren't tangible performance gains, but for what most people do the difference is negligible.
The mistake that so-called experts have made is to assume that the purchase of gadgets is some sort of zero sum game. When PC sales stalled they assumed that it was because of some sort of technological paradigm shift. The fact is that most PCs were still perfectly serviceable. So when it came time to spend on something they gravitated towards tablets. Of course, the economy was another big factor which was largely overlooked. Although, admittedly, that doesn't seem to stop many consumers from careless spending.
So now we're at a point where tablets have largely saturated the market and people have been using them long enough to know where their utility lies. This likely means growth is going to permanently remain modest for both PCs and tablets.
Anyone who thought that tablets were going to cannibalize the entire PC sector were delusional at best.
There was no way in hell this was going to happen.
Yes, for a small segment, mainly those who can get away with cheap, lightweight laptops, a tablet was probably a better fit.
But for any sort of power use, or business productivity? There's no way in hell a tablet was EVER going to replace high-end laptops and workstations. The form-factor was just too rigidly circumscribed and limited.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Frequent, documented proof of astroturfing means that I will perpetually regard any overly positive review of a Microsoft product with suspicion. Maybe I'm hearing from a real fan or satisfied user, maybe it's just a paid employee.
It's true, "Install Linux, problem solved!" is rarely if ever a useful answer to anything, but at least it's coming from an honestly deluded person (or a troll, but that's possible with pro-MS opinions, too), not a shill.
cell connection means you always have email the instant you open it, and any website is available any where.
That's also available for a laptop. And whether on a laptop or on a tablet, you still have to pay hundreds of dollars per year to a cellular carrier on top of the hundreds you already pay for cable or DSL Internet at home.
The number of edge cases where a laptop works but an ipad doesn't work keeps on shrinking.
But it won't shrink to zero. Because Apple will not allow a compiler on an iPad for the foreseeable future, people working in anything but Codea will still have to subscribe to cellular service and use SSH, RDP, or VNC to compile and test the programs remotely.
In 2012, week before Christmas - full size tablets and small tablets were 33% of the market. iPad for the quarter was 22.9 million units. In 2013, week before Christmas - full size tablets and small tablets were 29% of the market (decline 14%). iPad for the quarter was 26 million units (growth of 14%). Of course IDC - and their made up numbers had Apple market share down from 38.2% to 33.8%. This year - 2014 - flurry has the market shrinking to 22%. Apple numbers will be out soon and my be down but collapse - complete BS. Junk tablets may be collapsing but IDC makes those numbers up so who really knows.
It ain't exactly "subsidized." You still pay for the entire thing.
I was off-contract with AT&T for a year with my old phone and I just opted for a Nexus 6. I thought about just buying it outright at $650, but if I signed a contract with AT&T for 2 years, I'd get the phone for only $250. Well...I've had good service with AT&T and when I tried T-Mobile it was impossible for me to make calls at home or work. No coverage. So okay, I'm not jumping ship from AT&T any time soon, anyway. The AT&T version only has 2 extra, easily uninstallable apps and is completely rootable and unlockable as any other Nexus, so vendor bloatware not a problem.
So I buy my $250 phone. At checkout, they tell me there's a $40 "upgrade fee" that will appear on my next bill. Huh. Okay...still $290 is better than $650... I get my phone activate it, love it. A few days later I get a text from AT&T. Oh by the way...when you were off contract we were giving you a $15/month discount. But now that you're on contract, you no longer qualify for that. So your bill will go up by $15/month.
Wait, so...let me get out my abacus here...$15/month...times 24 months...is $360...plus the $40 upgrade fee...plus the $250 out of pocket for the phone...damn it $650!
And that's how they getcha. They always getcha...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
My wife has an iPad 3. no reason to replace it as it does everything perfectly for her. it's fast, it has a nice screen, the battery lasts forever. Mine is the ipad 4 and it works perfectly.
When am I going to get upgrades? when those break or there is a real reason to upgrade. My 3 year old Nexus 7 works perfectly for it's uses as well as my Surface Pro (version 1) that I use at work. No reason at all to replace them as they all still work and all still do the job.
In fact the surface pro 3 is a joke as it's the exact same specs as the 1 maybe if they made a quad i7 that boosted up to 4ghz came with 16gb ram and had a door that I could open to replace the battery and upgrade the SSD.. I'd buy a new one. But the exact same i5, screen, ram and SSD in the new one is 100% MEH.
In fact the Pro 1 is better than the 3. I can install linux and OSX on it if I choose to (I dual boot Win8.1 and Ubuntu) Cant do that on the 3 so it's inferior.
They need to make tablets cheaper and break easier if they want people to buy new ones ever year. Nice fast tablet at $199? I'll buy a new one yearly. but at $699 (or $1499 for the surface) It's not going to get replaced until I really need to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nerval apparently doesn't understand the difference between relative and absolute, or they'd know it's possible to shrink as a percentage while growing in absolute terms. This isn't what's happening here, but iPad sales are certainly not collapsing, and iPads are really quite an important component of the market
http://www.statista.com/statis...
I'm still (very regularly) using my 2013 Nexus 7 and my kid loves her 2011 IPad and they both work perfectly. Tablets age rather well; performance and display res have been more than good for several years, and they don't get dropped down the toilet/left in a bar as much as phones.
It would be much more useful to see data from Apple/Google on daily device usage...
[FrLz]
You're going to be paying for the Internet connectivity anyway whether it's a tethered laptop or a tablet with appropriate radio circuitry built in.
If your device supports offline use, you don't have to pay any more than you're already paying for home Internet access. I've found laptops to be better at doing things offline than tablets running "mobile operating systems". For example, if I open a web browser, load a bunch of web pages in tabs, and close the lid, a Windows or Xubuntu laptop will still have them ready for me to read once I board the bus and bring it out of suspend. Tablets are more likely to "forget" the contents of all but the two most recently viewed tabs, instead going back to the Internet to reload the page. This is because iOS and Android are designed to avoid swapping at all costs, even if it means loss of access to data. Furthermore, an Atom laptop runs GCC at least as well as your Pentium 4-powered space heater PC used to, whereas an iPad can't run a compiler (and its output) at all because of its strict W^X policy.
A comment on the linked story notes Flurry is only counting cellular activations. This ignores the majority of tablets that are WiFi only
Look, some genius "analyst" has figured out that people don't buy ten tablets per person. Next up: The food market collapses because people do not increase their daily food amount constantly.
This fixation on "growth" as if by magic everything would grow indefinitely is the primary evil in our world today. I've seen perfectly healthy companies with good revenue and solid profits being closed because they're not growing to the amount the corporate owners wish for.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org