When the iPad burst onto the scene in 2010 its momentum was such that pundits almost immediately argued that its arrival presaged the end of the PC-era. Tablets were the future in a world gone mobile.
Alas, tablets like the iPad where never especially mobile – a point Mark Zuckerberg made very early and at a time when Facebook was being criticised for its tardiness developing an app for the new platfrom.
PC sales are certainly in decline – expected to fall by almost nine per cent next year – and then continue declining until 2019 when they will either rebound (as predicted by IDC) or not – by which time IDC will be hoping that its prediction is forgotten.
It turns out however that tablets – and iPads in-particular – where not the future after all , but merely a path to the future.
In 2011 Statista forecast five years of robust growth as Chart One shows.
Alas in the world of real things, the iPad’s long golden summer was little more than a deceptive flash.
As the business intelligence site now reveals (See chart below), the global tablet market is in sharp decline.
And as Statista, points out, it’s not just the iPad that is in trouble, the tablet market worldwide is struggling. “Global tablet shipments have declined in each of the past four quarters and the negative trend appears to be accelerating.”
As the site notes, “As smartphones are becoming larger and more powerful, they are crowding tablets out of their own niche. Moreover, as tablets typically aren’t subsidised by carriers the way smartphones are, people tend to upgrade their devices less frequently. This explains why market saturation is setting in much quicker in the tablet market than it did for smartphones.”
This article originally appeared on B&T’s sister site www.which-50.com
