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.

Comments

Sooo, 4 years?

[Snotnose]

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).

Re:Sooo, 4 years?

[gman003]

A tablet is a pretty useful media-consumption device. If I'm sitting in bed watching movies, I'd rather have a 9" screen a foot away than a 40" screen twelve feet away - it gives me more flexibility in positioning (like with reading a book, much comfier to do while laying on your side since it rotates with you), and better UX than a TV and remote control. Especially given how slow most "smart TVs" are.

So maybe it's not a "need", but it is a pretty nice "want". It was definitely worth it for me - I got mine for a different reason, but I have to concede I mainly use it to watch Youtube and read tech articles.

The problem for tablet makers is, there's no upgrade cycle needed. As soon as we got to a point where tablets could stream Netflix, 99% of people never needed an upgrade afterward.

Yup

[youngone]

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.

Re:Yup

[ranton]

I'm sure everyone who wants one already owns one.

On top of that, there are former iPad owners who now have phones large enough to fill the need I once filled with a tablet. I had an iPad when my smart phone screen was only 4", because it gave a much better media consumption experience than my phone. Now that my phone screen is 6"+, it's no longer worth it to lug a phone and tablet around. Based on just cost I wouldn't mind paying for both but it is simply much easier to carry around a smart phone.

I still have tablets for my kids, but only because they don't have phones yet. My guess is they won't get new tablets once I feel they are ready for phones.

Cell Phones Cannibalized Tablets

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Most suck.

[Stoutlimb]

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.

I love a tablet for a very narrow range of uses..

[Junta]

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.