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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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...

Re:Sooo, 4 years?

[dgatwood]

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

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.