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Tablet Shipments Decline For 16th Straight Quarter (venturebeat.com)
The tablet market has now declined year-over-year for 16 quarters straight. According to new estimates from IDC, "Q3 2018 saw an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline: 36.4 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 39.9 million units in the same quarter last year," reports VentureBeat. From the report: The only silver lining is that the Q3 2018 decline wasn't double digits again. While 2017 quarters only saw single-digit declines, Q1 2018 and Q2 2018 were in the double digits. The estimates come from IDC, which counts both slate form factors and detachables, meaning tablets with keyboards included. Apple maintained its top spot for the quarter, with Samsung and Amazon rounding out the top three. Huawei was the only company in the top five to ship more tablets than the year before. The top five vendors accounted for 68.4 percent of the market, up from 67.1 percent last year.
6 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet. 4 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet. 4 weeks ago I had a hard drive crash, 100% dead, no recovery possible, thank $diety for decent backups. Tablet would not do half of what I need to do (half: web browsing and email. Other half: everything else).
I'm sure everyone who wants one already owns one.
They're selling replacements only at this point.
Also, time I deploy a "detachable" type to a user, one more person learns they will never have another one of these awful things. They all want a proper laptop thank you very much.
And in two different ways. First, screens just kept getting bigger on phones which limited that advantage on a tablet. Second, phones have been getting incredibly expensive, just forces a lot of people to have to choose one or the other.
Not rocket science here.
That's because tablets these days suck. I own a 2nd Gen Nexus 7, and it's still my main tablet. When I walk into a tech store, and they ask if they can help me, I say "I doubt it." They see it as a challenge... So I show them my 5 year old tablet, and say "I want an upgrade that's in this price range, and I don't want an Apple product." They offer a few products to me, but basic things like screen resolution, storage size, or RAM are either equivalent or WORSE than my 5 year old tablet. I would buy the Huawei Mediapad M5 in a heartbeat were it sold at a store I could go to.
I think I know why. Marketing now runs the industry, not technology improvements. When technology dictated what was more or less expensive, the rule was that the smaller the phone, the bigger the price. Miniturization means the highest price. Now that the public has gotten used to tiny devices, tech companies have arbitrarily decided that larger devices should carry the premium. Larger device with a larger price tag is now the new normal.
By this rationale, a tablet should always carry an astromical price tag. Tablets with an LTE modem are essentially cell phones with the "talking" portion of the software disabled. Essentially, the big players in the market have deliberately neglected the tablet industry to maximize their profits in their "premium" phone brands. In this crazy industry, "bigger" is more expensive, which means tablets have no place.
Because a 6.something inch phone should probably be considered as a tablet. 7 inch tablets aren't much bigger, 7 inch tablets are of course much, much less expensive than giant phones.
None of those uses suggest I even vaguely need to refresh my device that's a few years old.
I will be quite sad if I do need to replace my tablet and the market is gone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Tablets for the most part just work. Modern materials, batteries, and manufacturing, have made them very durable. The things people use them for have not changed a lot since they've been introduced. They are the "personal digital assistants" from the 1990s brought to maturity. They give us our e-mail and other communications. They keep us on schedule with clocks and calendars. They give us the information we crave with weather reports, stock prices, news, opinions, and just whatever else we can grab from the internet. They amuse us with music, games, movies, and so on.
With a phone people crave new and shiny more often because they fit a different need. People want more data in a smaller package, which means chasing the latest cellular technology even if the phone is otherwise up to task. A tablet will often be used at home, in an car (where internet access is increasingly a common feature of the vehicle's electronic package), at work, or otherwise in an environment where WiFi exists or brought to the tablet by the latest and greatest cell phone.
This is also a market for which the average user has a computer for the "heavy lifting" of high resolution gaming, office productivity apps, internet access, and computing beyond the mundane of checking the weather or seeing if there was a response to an e-mail.
I've thought of buying a tablet but I find myself instead craving a better phone, laptop, or desktop computer. If I'm just checking for a quick bit of information then my phone comes out of my pocket. If I need more screen space, want to write a longer message, or I'm expecting a longer bit of down time, then I grab my laptop or walk to my office so I have plenty of screen and a real keyboard.
The increasing trend for tablets to have keyboard attachments, and a greater number of ports for accessories, just means they are encroaching on the space already occupied by laptops. And losing on the competition. On the other end is making them smaller, lighter, and simpler, which just means they are getting into the territory of cell phones and other pocket electronics. All I'm seeing with tablets these days is larger and larger versions of my very old iPod Touch. That's not a bad thing, only that I'm only seeing a need to upgrade unless I had my iPod broken, lost, stolen, or considered so old that I can no longer run the latest version of my favorite games.
Perhaps this is just a matter of drawing a distinction where there should not be one. A tablet computer is just an arbitrary distinction along the spectrum of electronic communication devices from pocket sized (generally a cell phone or whatever an iPod is considered these days) to desktop sized. Draw that distinction somewhere else and the market could look very different.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I also had the Nexus 7, which I used daily for 6 year until the lithium battery wore the hell out.
It was good, but evidently not enough for me to bother replacing the battery.
"Apps" are all bloated spyware, so towards the end firefox and VLC were the only "apps" I had installed.
Anything you can do on a tablet, you can do 100x times faster on a desktop, so the form-factor is actually pretty shit.
That was my main tablet for three years until it failed for some unknown reason. The closest thing I could get to replace it was an Asus ZenPad 8, and it's nowhere near as good. Support sucks and it's flaky, and it's jammed with crapware. At least their launcher is OK. I hear the Amazon Fire pads are OK, but still aren't up to snuff with the Nexus 7. Plus I have a few apps I don't want to repurchase on the Amazon store.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
...in Spanish doubloons?
Egonomically speaking of course. Tabblets and quite frankly a lot of phones now, are TOO big to hold comfortably. It's to the point people are putting handles on the back. The other issue I have is with build quality, if you're going to sell a tablet as a replacement for books or other print media you better make sure it's durable. That means an aluminum shell not plastic.
Captacha: increase
When I'm playing Dark Souls, watching MST3K, referencing wiki pages, and texting all at the same time, I find my tablet is very handy. With 4 displays in front of me, it's *almost* enough distraction to drown out existential dread. Almost. Maybe I should add a smart watch... And a third cat...
Tablets would be great if the market hadn't decided the target customer for a secondary device will only want something bottom-of-the-barrel.
The long tail of the poors keeps tablets from becoming a useful niche.
This report doesn't include 2 in 1 laptops like the Microsoft Surface, HP Envy, Dell Latitude 7K series, and Lenovo's plethora of 2 in 1 offerings. Most people are realizing they don't need a laptop and a tablet. They just need a tablet that runs Windows. I suspect that's part of the reason Google is finally bringing Android apps to the Chromebook. I've had numerous execs turn in their iPad and get a Surface Pro because the hassles of the iPad outweigh their utility.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
As tablets increase in capability and power, they will cannibalize laptop sales, and start expanding into new markets they are not used in currently - so the long term forecast for tablets is growth.
To some extent large phone sales detract from tablet sales, but that is only true to a certain degree; for some things you just need more screen estate.
So basically I think we are in a localized dip and will see some tablet sales increase again before too long.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is no analysis in this article, because the reference article was all numbers and no analysis. So I can only speculate that 2 in 1's are killing off tablets, which means that x86 cpus are getting more business opportunities.
Tablets are lighter and therefore more portable than 2 in 1's, but they are more vulnerable to breakage. Phones are getting larger, so they offer a challenge to tablet end use. Many tablets don't come with sim cards, so they can't compete as well with mobile phone use.
The reference article does not mention the "kindle" type of ereader market. I'm not sure if ereaders are included in tablet decline.
Many web sites do not code for tablets, so I frequently have to go back to the same web sites with a Windows or Linux machine. That makes me feel that tablets are less useful than 2 in 1's.
Tablets don't have usb and sd card ports. They don't have mouse pads and mouse buttons. Without a usb port, the full size bluetooth keyboard is useless, because the dongle has no where to go.
Tablets aren't designed as development machines. 2 in 1's are. Aside from the portability factor, the 2 in 1 design wins out over the tablet.
Ultimately they are frustrating, disappointing, and I smash them.
Too big, too small, can't run my own software, no keyboard, difficult to hold, slippery, crack the screen, shitty all over.
I've smashed 4, 2 APPL and 2 Android.
No I don't have anger issue with anything else. Except the BPD narcissistic psychopath Ex Wife. Who puts hazelnut syrup in the coffee. Bleah!!
USB-C audio has the ability to be so so much better if only the manufacturers understood
all you have to do is place the DAC in the bulge away from the phone/device and close to the headphones
(the dongles all place the DAC near the EMF emitting device)
IT HAS TO BE USB Audio Class 3.0 otherwise its a fail...
cost about $10 to manufacture and charge $49
I had an iPad 2 which was a nice media consumption device, more comfortable than a laptop for that use, and great for travel too.
Since last year I have the previous generation iPad Pro and while all the above is still true, I find that the processing power makes it quite compelling for a lot of uses, esp. on travel. On holiday evenings, I find it relaxing to import photos from my dslr (yes, yes, it needs that dongle), and edit them in pretty powerful software. While sipping a glass of wine. And when ready it all syncs back with iCloud. The admitedly expensive keyboard cover is also good on trips, it is good enough to be scribbling ideas in Scrivener etc.
What holds it back for general use? Mainly the limited file system access. It will never be the tool of choice for a programmer, but it may well be powerful enough for typical home and small office use. The processor of the newest generation makes them pretty convincing for creative use in general as well.
My retired parents are enjoying an old Macbook for browsing, light document writing, and facetime. When it eventually dies, I think I may give them a new iPad instead. Doesn't even need to be the "pro" variant.
I am looking for a new Android tablet, because 2GB of RAM and a dual core CPU does not really cut it any more.
But it is hard to find a tablet that has even remotely the number of pixels of a mid-range phone, or remotely the CPU power or storage.
Plus Android on a tablet really sucks. It is as if Google has given up on it.
Of course the iPad Pro is very nice, but also unreasonably expensive, and much more limited.
There are use cases where a tablet fits well, for media viewing on the go/traveling business and entertainment. Artists like the iPad pro pen for on the go or casual drawing. However many people prefer to invest in a phone device for main mobility and PC / Notebook for other computing. Tablets in the middle of the road as the expression goes often get run over. The tablets also last a while before desiring an upgrade since usually 3rd level device behind phone and PC/notebooks. Still some money to be made but less demand than the big or small.
I've bought two iPads and my wife got one as a present once, but neither of them see much use and the newer iPad has since been given away to someone who found it useful.
With notebooks becoming smaller and lighter, and phones getting bigger and faster, the niche that tablets fill is becoming smaller and tablets are not taking bites out of the notebooks market because everyone insists on treating them like big phones instead of small notebooks. MS had the right idea with the Surface except that they decided to treat the entire OS like a big phone with Win 10 and "tiles" and the other bullshit.
I'm looking at the iPad Pro and waiting for the day it ships with macOS and not iOS. If I had a proper Unix shell, a tablet might become a replacement for my notebook. Until then, between notebook and phone, I simply don't need one.
The other development is e-Paper. If tablets were flexible the way books are, they might find a niche again. If I could roll it up, put it in my pocket, stuff like that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I would never spend upwards of a $1000 or more thinking a iPad Pro will replace a good notbook like my XPS 13. If Apple thinks adding a USB C port will solve all of the iPad Pro issues, as well as raising the price. I think they are delusional.
Seems like those figures aren't including convertibles as those have been selling pretty well and have made some major inroads into the laptop market. The drop-off in tablet sales probably has a lot to do with how convertibles offer both the tablet form factor and the utility of a laptop whenever needed.
However the main reason for the continued drop-off in pure tablet sales has probably more to do with how there was a single big surge in interest in 2012-2013 and the people who bought in haven't had any compelling reason to upgrade since then. I bought my first tablet, an original Nexus 7, back in 2012 and when I finally got to replacing it earlier this year I found that the decently priced alternatives weren't that big of an upgrade and the ones that were came with an iPad-like price tag. Ended up getting a leftover stock Nexus 9 for just over 100 euros which should probably serve me for another few years.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Apple has raised prices on most of its mature stagnant growth products. If you really dumb enough to buy them, were going to make more money per device off of them.
6 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet. 4 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet.
Tablet's aren't useful for everyone. I don't own one for personal use though my company uses them rather heavily to good effect. There are lots of great uses for one but unfortunately the software to facilitate those use cases to date has often been rather lacking.
4 weeks ago I had a hard drive crash, 100% dead, no recovery possible, thank $diety for decent backups.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with tablets?
Tablet would not do half of what I need to do (half: web browsing and email. Other half: everything else).
Tablets are useful for a LOT more than just web browsing and email. If you think otherwise then you haven't really bothered to look at them seriously.
That said, the problem with Tablets is that the companies making them (Apple especially) are treating them as either supersized smartphones or as low performance laptops instead of treating them as their own unique category of device with special capabilities. The problem is mostly with the software. Tablets should be targeted primarily at replacing a pad of paper and pencil anywhere those are used. I don't need a smartphone with a 10 inch screen. I need a product I can take awesome notes and annotate documents as well as some of the things you use a laptop or smartphone for. My company uses them for a tooling/product database on our manufacturing floor. A smartphone or laptop wouldn't work nearly as well for this purpose. Tablets should be the go to device anywhere a large touch screen or a stylus would be useful and particularly for document editing and note taking. Laptops are awesome at documents where a keyboard and mouse are the best interface (email, word processing, spreadsheets, coding, etc) but not for stuff like equations, drawing, annotations, etc. Smartphones are great where portability and touch screens are paramount but the small screen and power limitations limit them for document creation or annotation. Tablets should be their own unique thing but companies like Apple have been taking the lazy path on the software for them and just treating them as some sort of half assed smartphone/laptop hybrid that doesn't do as well as either.
Unfortunately when vendors finally figure out that they made hardware a little too reliable, they'll start making hardware about as shitty as your average smartphone.
Of course, they'll depreciate software support as well. If the kids can't download the latest PC emojis to complete their life, they'll be forced to upgrade. It would be downright offensive if you had to send someone a smiley face that was the wrong skin tone...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A tablet is a pretty useful media-consumption device.
Sure but to think of them as just a media consumption device is a gross under utilization of what they can do. Tablet's should be the go-to device for replacing tasks that currently are done with a pad of paper and a pen. Simple example: it's nigh impossible to take notes in a math class with a keyboard and mouse. A keyboard+mouse is a terrible interface for that application. A stylus and touch screen is vastly preferable and a tablet with some good note taking software should be the ideal tool for students taking notes in classes or for business people in meetings. As an engineer I'm constantly annotating prints of products we manufacture and a tablet would be great for this task. We use them for providing work instructions to our production staff in a portable format which works great.
The problem is that Apple and other companies have been lazy about the software to take full advantage of what a tablet could possibly do. They instead write some software for smartphones with the limitations of smartphones and then call it a day. Or they slap on a shitty keyboard and declare it to be a laptop without really spending any time or effort making the software work well with a touch interface or stylus.
Dear Manufacturers,
My tablet needs to be WATERPROOF. As in it will survive being dropped into the bath tub (because that's where I read).
My tablet needs a BATTERY that will last all day (or perhaps two).
My tablet needs to be 10.1" across the screen, and the resolution does NOT need to be higher than 1080p, because nobody can see beyond that anyway.
My tablet needs to have BlueTooth, Wi-fi and an option for GSM.
My tablet needs to run ANDROID OS not some strange Windows version or knock off OS.
My tablet needs enough CPU to be snappy when running my apps.
My tablet needs a USB-C port and the ability to take a micro SD (200GB or better would be nice).
Does that sound like what they are making? I thought not.
Everyone has one already and the devices last 5-10 yrs. Just like a $20 toaster.
I've had a tablet since 2010. That first one had lots of problems and was relatively slow with jut 8 hrs of battery. 10 inch. It was $400+. But I became addicted to ebooks. The size was a little too large.
Got a Fire 8 HD in 2017 for $50. Blocked all the Amazon advertising. Still can't easily root it or wipe the OS to flush all the other Amazon stuff, but adding an alternate app store was easy and finding music, video and ebook readers that don't report back to amazon was the first things I did. For me, 7inch was too small and 10 inch was too big. 8 inches, just right.
I listen to music, stream video from the house plex server, can connect to home LAN over openvpn when needed and read thousands of free ebooks. Also have it hooked into both our Calibre, wallabag (like read-it-later), and Nextcloud servers, so all that content is available from anywhere in the world.
Not bad for $50.
When it breaks, I'll probably get another.
Yeah obviously. You were marketing tablets as solutions to a proper computer.
Due to the fact that most people today arnt critical thinkers, and appear to be less intelligent than previous generations, you had them fooled for a while.
After a good try of shoehorning a kids toy into adult life, most people have abandon tablets for anything outside Netflix or super casual internet usage.... basically the only use case theyre good for
bingo. the market is saturated. Upgrading to the latest iSamsung is no longer of critical importance, and kids are getting by with phones or hand-me-down tablets. Kids aren't really rushing out to get laptops, you can tell that by the slowly declining sales. The PC market ain't what it used to be. With larger screen phones like the Galaxy S8 (5.6") being so popular, it is easier to argue that the tablet market is transforming than to say it is dead. (not to be confused with "phablets" of 6+ inch)
My company had to get out of the tablet SoC business because the margins eventually became too small to support R&D.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Google made the 2nd Gen Nexus 7 in 2013.
It fits in the inside breast pocket of a jacket or in a medium sized, fashionable purse and runs straight android, no carrier bloatware.
When e-reading it fits in the hand like a paperback book - slightly taller and much thinner, but pretty much the size people have found handy and comfortable since the 16th century Octavos.
It can stream HD video at full speed from a wifi connection, and has a decent sound system including a standard headphone jack. It was available in wif-only and phone-capable versions.
If you built the same machine today with a reasonably modern processor and added an SD card slot or two, it would be the most capable e-reader and small tablet on the marketplace. You'd sell 'em like hotcakes - Amazon sells their kindles, which are inferior to the Google Nexus 7 released in 2013 - just fine.
But nobody will do it; vendors are incapable of resisting the urge to ruin the software with "enhancements". They are not providing what the market wants, so they fail to make sales, full stop.
My sister just gave my dad his first tablet because Verizon keeps giving her more tablets. If I were to buy one, I'd check Craigslist before Best Buy for a deal. I'm also willing to bet that there are retailers that over-stocked on tablets at one point. That more than likely forces retailers to sell over-stock at unexpected discounts in the hopes that they move old models before they're obsolete. If the old model becomes obsolete then I wish them good luck in moving those units at all for any price. With a couple of years of consumer data, retailers have surely adjusted their orders to more accurately predict actual sales.
A laptop with a detachable keyboard (e.g. Microsoft Surface Book) or one that flips under (e.g.Thinkpad yoga) is functionally equivalent to a large tablet, and a large (6+in) smartphone (which are increasingly popular) is functionally equivalent to a small one. Even a Nintendo switch is a tablet too, but it gets counted as a game console (for good reason of course). Much of the use of those devices is tablet use, but it doesn't get counted in the tablet category. So what is being measured here is not purchases for the purposes of having a tablet to use, but purchases of devices that are called tablets, which is a different thing.
Why buy a tablet when you can have the best of both worlds.
Do you mean having a desktop and a tablet OS in one?
Because that is not the best - that is the WORST. Normal people hate maintaining one system, why would they want to maintain 2?
For 99% of computer users they will be FAR better off when desktop OS's are well away from everyday work they have to do.
Tablets have more or less maxed out their sales potential
If you think of all the ways and places there are laptops and TV's today, you'll realize how tablet sales are not anywhere close to maximum.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The new Diablo game will surely increase tablet sales.
would you buy and carry [a tablet] around in addition to your phone, which you always carry
I did just that back when I carried a flip phone. For years, I chose a flip phone with a separate tablet over a smartphone because it made my cellular bill hundreds of dollars per year smaller. Only a few years ago did it become common for carriers in my home country not to cram data service onto a voice SIM inserted into a smartphone.
What I think would be perfect is something in the form factor of the Yoga Book
Try a Lenovo Yoga or a Dell Inspiron 11. The screen on these convertible laptops folds all the way around to become a tablet. A different convertible laptop geometry existed a decade ago with Lenovo's ThinkPad X61, whose screen turned around and folded over the keyboard.
The specs of last year's flagship phones can now be bought for midrange or lowend prices, unless you're that brand conscious
Or unless you're a developer who has been hired to port an application to an operating system that brand conscious end users prefer, in order to take advantage of the greater disposable income of brand conscious end users. Then you need a Mac on which to run Xcode and an iPhone on which to test.
Saw the word "nigg3r" and knew instantly the website was going to be spouting far right wing ideology. Kept reading and was not disappointed.
Do yourself a favor, stay away, a bunch of old white men circle jerking each other pining for the days of slavery to return.
Fucking pathetic.