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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.
First they came for our desktops, and we stood our ground.
Signed,
Pro users and gamers.
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