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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.
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...
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
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
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.
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.