Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.