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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.
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
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.
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.
Lesson learned: don't build a good product that is going to work well for a long time.
Additional lesson learned: If you accidentally build an overly reliable product, as Apple did with the original iPad, you can still sabotage it by changing connectors, making it ineligible for OS upgrades, requiring new apps to include bulky "retina" images that aren't even used yet fill up very limited flash and RAM, and (starting Jan 1st) no longer allowing compatible apps to be submitted to the Apple App Store. There are many ways to retroactively screw your customers.
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.
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...
A comment on the linked story notes Flurry is only counting cellular activations. This ignores the majority of tablets that are WiFi only