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.

Re:Sooo, 4 years?

[iggymanz]

they're actually useful when you don't want to lug even a laptop around and just need to do email/calendar or meeting notes..or read a book.

The nice thing about my tablet I bought 6 years ago is it still does the job. that's why sales are falling, a tablet good then is fine now. Come to think of it, my laptop is 6 years old and this PC I'm on is 8....

Re:Sooo, 4 years?

[dgatwood]

It wants to be closer to your jugular. Your cat is biding its time.

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.

Re: Yup

[jwhyche]

I have a surface and they are horrible tablets. They weight a ton, and the interface is clumsy to use. Plus the battery life, while good for a laptop, sucks for a tablet.

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.

Re:Most suck.

[blindseer]

I had a similar experience. My brother showed me his Android device some time ago (long enough I forgot many specifics) and I was quite impressed with it. One impressive feature was the HDMI output (or, that's what he called it, I found out it was really MHL) and how he could mirror the display on his TV, direct the sound to his stereo, while powering the device, on a single cable. I thought that looked awesome and thought I'd look for something similar for myself.

Here's what I found out, device manufacturers (or maybe just the ones I looked at) dropped MHL support in the next generation devices. The old devices used mini-USB for power and A/V out which was a standard (or "standard enough") means to make this connection. New devices use USB-C which made such cables obsolete. There's laptops and such that support video out from the USB-C, notably Apple products, but this seems quite rare to the point of near nonexistence.

In their defense these devices often offered some kind of wireless means to output audio and video but that meany buying a new TV or buying an expensive dongle to do what my brother's device did with what seemed to be an off the shelf, and relatively inexpensive, cable. The video was also higher resolution but that seemed like a non-issue since the source material would often be just 720p anyway from some internet stream.

USB-C is nice but it introduced a "reset" on what we had before. There's going to be a lot of mixed up messes on standards until we get back many things lost with older and well established (for the time) connections like mini-USB and the 30-pin Apple connector.

Oh, and this...

Tablets with an LTE modem are essentially cell phones with the "talking" portion of the software disabled.

That really bothers me for some reason. I don't see myself holding a tablet to my face for a phone call but if someone wants to call me on my tablet then they should be able to do so. I can use it like a speaker phone, plug in headphones, use some kind of Bluetooth device (like those built into the dash of many cars these days), or whatever to talk. This would be especially useful for outgoing calls and other cell phone based (as opposed to the general internet protocol based) communications. If I want to make a quick phone call while holding my tablet then in my hands is all the electronics needed to do so, except it's been hobbled for no reason I can really understand.

Maybe if the people making tablets want to sell more of them then they should enable all the features of that cell phone chip it's got, meaning it can make and receive a phone call. Is there some FCC regulation or something preventing this?

Re:Most suck.

[Ramze]

As a fellow Nexus 7 2013 owner, I share your pain in finding an improved model after so many years. I like the specs of the M5, but I hear there are 2.4 Ghz wifi / Bluetooth interference issues and there's no 3.5 headphone jack, so the search goes on for me.

I get what you're saying about the marketing, but really... tablets just have a much longer product life cycle and the profits are razor thin, so there aren't many models. Phones which are still often replaced every 2 years (thanks to "new every 2" phone plans) have a much shorter cycle and can be mass produced at a much larger scale.

The tablet market was saturated quickly. Then, e-readers and smart phones cannibalized most of the tablet market. Amazon's Fire HD tablets and other low-end tablets ate the rest of the Android tablet market. Most adults have large smart phones and give their kids the cheap, even larger tablets. (You can get a refurbished Fire HD 10" for only $120... or a Fire HD 8" Kid's Edition for $130)

Me, I want something like the M5, but with better quality wifi/bluetooth... and I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack. The M5 has double the cores and RAM of my Nexus with a higher def screen and 4x the internal storage plus a card slot for more. NICE! But, it doesn't come with Android 9.... and there's no indication of when it'll get it - if ever. With Nexus devices, Google does OTA updates almost instantaneously upon release, but even Google only supports devices for a couple years, then you're on your own with your unsupported device with gaping security holes.

The Android ecosystem is enough to make me want to pull my hair out over the security issues and lack of support and updates by hardware manufacturers. I'd like to switch to LineageOS, but they're in eternal beta as well.

Re:Most suck.

[blindseer]

I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack.

I'd rather have some quality headphones with a USB-C connector.

For years I've had all kinds of problems with the built in audio from computers, except from Apple. The problems are that I can here noise from hard drive access, mouse movement, or some other device in or around the computer. Ever since buying a pair of some very expensive headphones years ago I've been a bit spoiled on the quality of the audio from my electronics. I expect a clean signal because I have headphones that allow for nuance that I could not hear before. The only way I found to address the problems of noise from computers with terrible built-in audio is a USB audio dongle to use with my headphones.

What I'd like is a set of nice headphones with a USB-C connector on the end so I can plug it into the increasingly common USB-C ports on electronics, including those from Apple. This is what I expect though with this new Audio Accessory mode that's been added to the USB-C spec, a return to the crappy internal audio just on a different analog connector. So long as there is still support for an external DAC on that USB-C port then I can still happily replace the crappy internal audio with something of my choice. If devices drop support for this because they provide an analog output on the port then I don't want it. It's bad enough that audio output quality took a dive long ago, we don't need to repeat that history.

I won't miss the 1/8" audio jack. The lack of concern for a quality output on those ports made them useless for me long ago.

Are they counting ginormous phones?

[bobstreo]

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.

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.

Tablets are vital

[TimMD909]

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...

Nope

[SuperKendall]

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.

USB C audio up the wire

[johnjones]

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