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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.
It is probably market saturation. It happened with music players a decade ago and happens to almost every other invention.
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.
I've used a tablet to take notes, read books, do research, keep kids busy, surf the net etc over the last 6 or so years (I have a gen 1 Galaxy Tab 8.1)
The only thing I still use it for is reading books, and occasionally as an ODBII reader with Torque. It hasn't replaced anything, it's just another computer I use in situations where a smartphone isn't big enough (or I need the smartphone for something else) and a laptop is too big.
First they came for the desktops, but I didn't care, I could use a laptop with an external screen and keyboard. ... Tablets!
Then they came for the laptops, but I didn't care because
Then they came for the tablets, and I didn't care because Smartphones make tablets feel like boat anchors.
You can have my smartphone when you pry it from my cold dead hands!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Desktops still not dead.
Most people see a tablet and know what they want to do with it, or are surprised when it's better than expected. Only tech reviewers and vendor marketing departments were planning on tablets replacing all those things listed. I bought mine because I wanted a tablet, not a phone replacement or a laptop replacement or an interactive dinner plate/hack du jour. I assume most of it is due to a need to generate sales and page views and all that, but mostly I found it was all fairly silly. I like my tablet because it's a tablet, stop trying to tell me why I _should_ like it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Tablets were never going to replace anything, they're a flawed compromise between everything else. Manufacturers pushed them in the hopes that they could expand the relevance of the new mobile walled gardens, and the media fueled the hype because blind consumerism. Tablet OEMs who started designing keyboards into new tablets were ahead of the curve.
Tablets are for consumption, not production. Only now are people realizing this, so their tablet upgrades are laptops or nothing. If you don't need a video clipboard, you don't need a tablet.
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
Good for surfing the web on the couch or reading a book. Anything that requires actual work, requires better I/O devices like actual keyboards and mice.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
It hasn't replaced anything
Sounds to me like it replaced books and your ODBII reader.
See also: The Gartner Hype Cycle
I thought I would use a tablet for everything, but then I found I hardly used it. My 3 screened desktop is just too good at everything. A one app tablet is just a chore to use. switching back and forth constantly. Having everything right there is too easy. The last time my desktop died I didn't even bother getting out the tablet while waiting for the part to arrive.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
The tablet has some pretty tight bounds, but working within those bounds can make a pretty powerful muscle in its own right. I bought my tablet for about a c note a gazillion years ago, and after playing with it a while, let it collect dust. Then I used it for a TV remote, and for playing podcasts on my 3+ hour commute. Now it has Guitar Tuna, Kodi, a flavor of Python and I somehow got Touch Vim to spell check! It's pretty sweet with a full size Bluetooth keyboard. I even watch internet TV on it. Now, it doesn't do everything - it's stuck on Android 4.4, so no editing files to the external storage, does not have a full featured LibreOffice or other such muscles, and I've given up on mirroring to a larger screen. But when I install VNC, it becomes the on-the-road front end to my other computers. And if that works well, it might inspire me sign up for an AWS/Digital Ocean VC. Imagine using a tablet to control all that muscle! I'm impressed with that tablet more than ever, and plan on getting another. Eventually.
I never understood the need for a tablet since when the phablets came out. I have big hands and no trouble with large screen smartphones, i.e. phablets.
I have a 5.7 inch display Samsung Galaxy Note, which does most if not all the tricks a tablet does, and many many more since its a phone too.
In the end the gold rush was over before I even joined.
Big brittle screens are going to break far more easily then small brittle screens simply because they have more length to twist over.
It sucks.
At least e-ink is starting to get flexible plastic screens instead of glass but they are still rare. LCD tablets with flexible screens may follow in a few years, but until then is you don't treat them like glass the glass breaks.