The Great Tablet Gold Rush Is Over (mashable.com)

Earlier this month, Dell announced that it will no longer sell Android tablets. The company added that slate tablet market is "over-saturated" and is "experiencing declining demand from consumers." The company says it will focus more on 2-in-1 -- otherwise known as hybrid laptops -- devices moving forward. Dell is right. According to IDC, tablet sales have fallen greatly in the last few years. Mashable goes on to say that the "great tablet gold rush is over." From an article: Pretty much every major tablet maker's growth fell year-over-year. Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tabs, the two most popular brands of tablets, were down 18.8% and 28.1%, respectively. [...] In the beginning, the pitch was: The tablet is the future of computing. It'll replace your phone and your laptop. Then it became: A small tablet will replace your smartphone. Today, the pitch: It's good enough to replace your laptop. But only for some people, and only if you're willing to get by with a mobile OS. Long story short: Tablets are a complete mess right now. We can't seem to decide if we want them to replace all of our devices or only a few of them.

Comments

Saturation

[Ann Coulter]

It is probably market saturation. It happened with music players a decade ago and happens to almost every other invention.

Re:Saturation

[frovingslosh]

Lets tell the whole truth. Not just "Dell announced that it will no longer sell Android tablets", but that lots and lots of Android tablets were sold and now Dell will no longer provide updates, including security updates, to their customers for the tablets that they did sell. Now they want to sell something else. They hope to sell lots of them. Can anyone figure out what is going to happen when that market is "saturated"?

Re:Saturation

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Tablets are facing the very same problem as desktops did (and still do): the hardware is easy. It's the software that is really hard. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when Alan Kay has envisioned DynaBook for the first time. Today's tablets are 1968's DynaBooks without a soul. We simply don't have that kind of adaptable, malleable, fun software we were supposed to get. Instead we get gigabytes of stuff that can't do almost anything useful. I wonder if it isn't some kind of mental block on part of the overwhelming majority of vendors, because most of them aren't even trying.

Re:Saturation

[jafiwam]

I am eagerly awaiting the end of the stupid trend for websites to all look the same with the same gigantic blocky format in an attempt to "capture" the tablet market.

Every tablet can zoom, there's no need to dumb down the entire internet for them.

Re:Saturation

[Chryana]

You would have a point if Dell was an exception. Unfortunately, it seems software support ends for a lot of Android device on the moment that they leave the factory. I just checked the Staples site, and most of the tablets they offer are still running Lollipop. Now, even Google has stopped making tablets, so good luck finding an Android tablet whose manufacturer is willing to keep providing updates on it. Thus, I don't see how Dell is better or worse than the rest of the manufacturers out there.

Bad input

[Moof123]

The touch interface sucks for a lot of things, making it a lame replacement for many things. Browsing the web is good. Games are are largely bad. Many really need a game pad or mouse style input to be decent. So while an ipad can easily run doom or quake level stuff with ease, mostly the bad control interface ruins them.

Typing sucks on a touch interface, too slow for anything beyond a few sentences at a time.

So our ipads mostly get used to watch Netflix while cooking dinner, playing music, checking news, and not much more. Much of the promise is ruined by a lack of mouse and keyboard.

Re:Bad input

[The-Ixian]

I couldn't agree more.

My uses for the ipad are:

casting to the tv
Playing one of the 2 games (The Sequence and MTG 2015)
As a notifier and viewer for e-mail

That's it. Everything else I do (playing music/podcasts, checking weather/news, etc) are all done on my phone or on my gaming PC.

I don't browse the web on it because of the screen size.
I don't reply to e-mails because I can't stand typing on a touch screen.
I don't read my ebooks on it because the screen is terrible for reading (prefer print books or e-ink)
I don't take pictures or video on it because it is too big and heavy to carry around with me all the time (ipad mini)

Re:First they came for my desktop ...

[Yvan256]

First they came for our desktops, and we stood our ground.

Signed,
Pro users and gamers.

Verdict?

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktops still not dead.

What else is new?

[spaceyhackerlady]

Step 1: Apple introduced the iPad and everybody was desperate to get one because it was the trendy item to have.

Step 2: people started figuring out what they could do with a handy portable computer.

Step 3: everybody who had a use for a tablet had one and the sales dropped off to replacement level.

Any remotely interesting new product is going to grow at unsustainable levels until the market is saturated. Then the growth stops.

...laura

Re:I saw this when the rush started

[Junta]

Also, Point of Sale equipment. Tablets ate a big chunk out of that market.

I'll say that the PC industry is faring better in new sales that Tablets by a *wide* margin, showing that PC market continues to be driven by upgrades, while the tablet market is generally not seeking better, faster, stronger.