Tablet shipments decline 10.1% in 2015 | Hacker News Reader

Tablet shipments decline 10.1% in 2015

venturebeat.com

101 pointslxm149 comments

This shouldn't be a massive surprise: it is pretty obvious the market hit saturation point where most people who want/need tablet have at least one. The remaining sales are upgrades, replacements due to damage/loss, people buying second/third ones (maybe getting a 7" or 8" as the 10+" is to big to take everywhere in a pocket, or a 10+" because while the 7" is practical carrying-wise a bigger screen is required) and just the occasional fresh person joining the ownership club. With upgrades being the biggest chunk of sales ATM and there not being much revolutionary coming out I'm not surprised sales overall have slumped over the period.

The article doesn't say whether they included phones or hybrids in those figures. Larger phones are replacing small tablet purchases for many (why carry a 7" tablet when you've got a 6" phone screen everywhere you go already?). It does explicitly count hybrids though which some articles I've seen don't, so the decline isn't being exaggerated by people switching from just tablet (or tablet plus bluetooth keyboard) to a hybrid laptop/tablet device.

> This shouldn't be a massive surprise

Except for the "economics" "institutes" which extrapolated the first-year sales onto the next 20 years and were adamant that tablets would soon™ replace desktop, laptops, phones, cats, and, finally, hydrogen atoms in the sun, because somehow "infinite growth" and "crash" are the only possible business models.

Same crap as with the netbook "boom" that was supposed to revolutionize EVERYTHING!!1 for about a year.

The netbook boom was nipped in the bud by Microsoft licensing. They gave away a free version of windows on it with heavy restrictions. Consequently hardware manufacturers brought out new models but stopped improving them (they topped out at a measly 1GB of RAM, upgradeable to 2).

They quickly died out because of course they did. That's a ridiculous restriction.

After my old one died I scoured for ages trying to find one that didn't adhere to those ridiculous restrictions to no avail. There were ~35 models available with a 2GB RAM restriction and zero without. The next year there were none.

I'd argue that the netbook boom was nipped in the bud by the introduction of the tablet. Netbooks, tablets, low-end laptops, and phablets that are too big to fit in a pocket are all the same market. They serve a person who wants to browse the web, check e-mail, instant-message, take notes, and do other information consumption tasks with a device that is small enough to carry around in a handbag or backpack but too large to fit in a pocket.

I suspect that the decline in tablet sales comes from category confusion at the edges of this market. At the low end, people are buying phablets to stick in a handbag instead of 7" tablets. At the high end, some people have gone back to lightweight laptops like the Macbook Air, Microsoft Surface, or equivalents. The "market" - defined as the group of people with similar needs - continues to grow, but a growing percentage of people are picking products from a different category to satisfy it, as more such products become available.

And now Chromebooks are eating some of the tablet market, and are absolutely replacements for the original netbooks, and are the most popular form factor of new notebook sales now.

> They gave away a free version of windows on it...

Not true. It was a low cost version of XP, for which OEMs paid $11 to $15.

> ... with heavy restrictions.

That's certainly true (as defined by Microsoft and Intel). However, it was arguably better for users to have machines with 2GB or 4GB of RAM and without letterbox screens, and there was no restriction on making those.

Today there are dozens of "netbooks" with 10in screens that outperform the old netbooks, run full Windows 10, have touch screens, and cost a lot less than the old netbooks.

> "it was arguably better for users to have machines with 2GB or 4GB of RAM"

Microsoft intentionally restricted the RAM in netbooks during the main growth period for netbooks. This article shows that RAM was limited to 1GB for Windows 7, I'm pretty sure the same restrictions applied to Windows XP:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-windows-netbook-h...

Yes, as I've already said, that was part of the deal. OEMs could choose to design whatever they liked, or choose to exploit a netbook/nettop design package that provided some discounts on Microsoft/Intel technologies.

Netbooks were originally intended for school uses (see Intel's Classmate) not to replace consumer laptops. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education-solutions/c...

IIRC the Intel Classmate was announced after the first Asus Eee PC, so I wouldn't say they were originally intended for schools.

The original Asus Eee PC was designed for schools and was launched first in the UK by the then leading education supplier, RM. I was there.

It had a Celeron inside.

It was part of Intel's response to the threat of the OLPC.

Chromebooks are netbooks and they seem to be doing just fine. To me they're a bastardization of what the concept what's supposed to be but that's beside the point.

I thought they had a shitty hd? The netbook was awesome because it was a full-stack dev station that was wicked portable. It wasn't the best dev environment, but I could do whatever I needed- from mysql script updates to javascript to whatever else.

And MS&Intel choked the life out of them because they threatened to undermine those expensive ultraportables.

No, they didn't. In fact, under OEM pressure, Microsoft foolishly prolonged their life by providing support for a next generation of netbooks with Windows 7 Starter.

Fact is that that you could get a proper laptop for the same money as a netbook, and this was much better for users.

Note that the original netbook (from Asus) had a 7in screen, and this was a substantial part of the cost saving. However, market forces drove bigger screens into the netbook market: 10in became the standard, and some had even larger screens. Prices went up to match.

The netbook actually died because OEMs reduced laptop screen sizes from 13.3in (which used to be very popular) while retaining the extra RAM (2GB or 4GB) and the extra screen resolution (1366 x 768).

At this point, many real laptops with 11.6in and 10.1in screens were cheaper than netbooks, so you had to be an idiot to buy a netbook. Or to manufacture one, which is why they disappeared from the market.

This had nothing to do with Ultrabooks.

Note that Ultrabook is an Intel trademark and Ultrabooks were also required to follow Intel's specification, which made them premium products.

But every OEM was and is able to make whatever thin-and-light laptops they like, regardless of the Ultrabook spec.

Thing is that to get XP, and later 7 Starter, OEMs have to follow strict specs defined by MS. This then choked off any potential differences the OEMs could experiment with.

Similar restrictions came out of Intel, iirc.

Yes, that was part of the deal. OEMs could choose to design whatever they liked, or choose to exploit a netbook/nettop design package that provided some discounts on Microsoft/Intel technologies.

OEMs were not obliged to market netbooks. They did it because they thought they could make money that way.

I loved my eeePC back in college - either a 700 or 701 running, I think, Xunbuntu. Perfect for taking notes in class, which a tablet, or even the Surface RT I have now, would be garbage for. Not bad for light hacking either.

Still, that's a pretty small niche.

I still have two of the original eeePC machines, which I use to run antique Teletype machines. The Linux version is crappy. The WiFi connection system gets hung up if anything at all goes wrong, and the "union" file system leaks inodes, which have to be cleaned up with a script every few weeks of use.

You can get a tablet for $39, which is useful for little dedicated applications.

> Still, that's a pretty small niche.

A niche that existed for years before and was filled by (slightly less useless) subnotebooks like the Macbook Air, or Thinkpad X series.

Still, I could buy 3-4 of my old eeePCs for the price of a Mac Air, and neither is really in the same form-factor. When you're working an $8/hour work-study job for your discretionary income, that price differential matters. The eee was also great for fitting on those comically tiny lecture hall chair-desk surfaces that a 10-13 inch laptop would swallow up, with room to spare for a honking big container of bad, strong coffee.

They would also fit on an economy-seat airline seat, and I didn't have to worry about the douche (no offense) in front of me breaking it by slamming his seat into recline mode. Was awesome.

so the macbook air is useless?

I'd probably get a Chromebook with an SD card slot and get ~144GB out of that. Throw on Kubuntu and I'm good to go.

To make matters even worse, the ones that did have adequate RAM suffered from those terrible 8/16GB SSD drives. Heck, I bet even my 32GB SDHC card is faster than those drives were.

I thought tablets would replace a bigger chunk of the desktop market, but I also assumed that at some point they would get proper mouse/keyboard support and better multi-tasking, so you can actually get things done. Nope.

As much as people were hollering Post PC, you'd think, but alas, it didn't happen.

Yeah, the only way to get desktop style multi-tasking and keyboard+mouse support is one of the many Windows 8/10 tablets that are floating around, but that isn't ideal for some tablet use IMO so you have to compromise one set of needs to cover the others. It works for me though (my table has for a while been a cheap Win8 machine for which I have a stand and bluetooth input devices for when I need to use it for something that needs a keyboard).

Ah, yes, the "post PC era" where we would do all our computing on a tablet.

The netbook did change laptops to be smaller and (Windows) cheaper then they were before they came out. I bought my wife an EEE netbook and it was super cheap at $499.

Since when is $500 "super cheap" for a netbook? The original EEE was ~$250 (depending on Linux or Windows).

The later iterations on the concept were vastly superior to the original Eee and Eee clones. Netbooks in the $500 range typically had dual core Atoms (a big deal since the CPU was the weakest link), 10.1" screens that had a resolution that was actually usable (1280x720 instead of 1024x600), and usable amounts of storage.

That market didn't last very long as hardware costs dropped so quickly that full size, full power laptops suddenly cost the same with the only trade off being battery life.

The original EEE 700 was $399.00 and the 900 was $650. My 700 for my wife had extra memory for $485 or something.

EDIT Reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

Chromebooks are $250 new, with a haswell proc.

Though you can get real Windows laptops for less than that....

EDIT: for whoever downvotes simple statements of fact... Lenovo - Ideapad 100s 11.6" Laptop $199.99; HP - Stream 11.6" Laptop $199.99; New! Dell - Inspiron 11.6" Laptop $199.99. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&st=l...

Entry level Windows laptops and Chromebooks are competitive on price and specification. OEM Windows licensing is essentially free on these machines. The very cheapest Chromebooks (~$150) undercut the cheapest Windows laptops by using a Rockchip ARM processor, although this limits performance.

Users understand the value proposition of ChromeOS - it is more limited than Windows, but it is more reliable and secure. For many users, this is a very worthwhile tradeoff. Two of the ten best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

Those "real" Windows laptops have smartphone CPUs (and less RAM than recent smartphones, to add insult to injury); and run in the same price spectrum as Chromebooks – there's $200 ARM Chromebooks, too.

Actually useful versions cost around $250+ in both cases.

New Atom chips are actually quite fast -- certainly they're much faster than the ones in netbooks. Also, Windows 10 runs quite well in 2GB of RAM, for most ordinary purposes.

In my experience, these machines browse faster than Chromebooks, support more tabs (in Firefox), let you use non-Google browsers (eg Vivaldi), and run lots of stuff that Chromebooks don't (eg Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc). They also work much better offline.

You can save a trivial amount of money by buying a cheap Chromebook, but you lose a lot of performance and capability.

I'm not saying that Chromebooks don't have advantages for some use cases, because clearly they do. However, they're not significantly cheaper than comparable Windows 10 laptops, which is where we came in....

Some smartphones surprisingly decent specs.

  1440 x 2560 pixels 
  Quad-core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57
  3 GB RAM
  32/128 GB SSD
  And 2 cameras / other smartphone features.

But, they cost 2-3x what a netbook does.

Which laptop & smartphone CPUs are you talking about?

I haven't kept up with news lately. Could you post some links

Meh. Subnotebooks were a thing before netbooks and after (until they were killed by cheap ultrabooks), and $250 notebooks faster than the eee crap existed before, if you bothered looking.

To my recollection, you could buy a small laptop or a cheap one, but the combination was almost impossible to find until netbooks came out. Before them, it was the UMPC/Project Origami craze, and they cost $700+.

Even in '09, the cheap subnetbook market was very badly served. I got a 12" HP DV2, but it cost me $500, and that because it was on sale, since it originally retailed for $730.

Toshiba Libretto, Compaq Aero. Ok, that's long ago but those were netbooks in just about every sense of the word.

I'm not sure what exact models you're referring to, but the one's I'm seeing were all $1500-3000 machines.

That's not what I paid for them. Even so, computers back then in general were more expensive than they are today and 'inexpensive' is a fairly relative term for something that you earn your living with. The last one in that formfactor that I bought was an acer aspire one, probably also not a netbook by some definition but extremely convenient (especially with the built in cellular modem).

I've been exclusively using netbooks for personal use since they came out. Now that I've switched to RK3288-based netbooks, all the problems I had with the Atoms are long-gone.

I know I'm a minority, but some of us did jump on the revolution and stay.

Which economics institutes did so?

Gfk was the leading hype driver over here in Germany.

I agree entirely with your first paragraph. I didn't realize how much I wanted a tablet until I had one, but my current tablet is almost 4 years old and I'm not in any hurry to replace it. Compare to me just having gotten my 4th smartphone in a bit under 6 years.

Funny, I didn't realize how little I wanted a tablet until I got a brand new iPad as a signing bonus. I gave it away after half a year to a friend of mine, as for just two millimeters more, I'd have my MacBook Air, with a real operating system, a decent keyboard and an implicit stand that will hold up the screen upright when I'm watching something in bed. Never looked back, tablets just didn't make sense for me.

> a real operating system

Must say that the notion that some OS is more "real" than another is odd. I could kinda understand it back in the featurephone days. But these days the distinction seem arbitrary at best.

If you cannot install a native program you wrote for the device without hacking the firmware on the device, you do not have a 'real' operating system. I mean, of course you have an operating system, it's just one that Apple, Microsoft, or Google controls in the strict sense what you can do with it.

You can do that on iOS, insofar as you can attach any arbitrary iOS (or tvOS, or watchOS) device to Xcode running on a Mac, and pressing Run in Xcode will launch the "native program" you wrote on the iOS device (and keep it installed afterward.)

It's distributing binaries to others that's the hard part of these mobile ecosystems. Running your own code on your own device has never been restricted.

And what would native be in the case of Android?

Flip the "unknown sources" setting and you can dump any random APK onto it.

The tablet market neither begins nor ends with iPad.

Being that endymi0n was talking about an iPad, it certainly relates to the conversation.

And dismissing the whole product category after having encountered only the most restrictive entry seems hasty.

I will admit that Android has issues as well, but running arbitrary code is not one of them.

The distinction between a locked down mobile OS and a relatively open desktop OS is really not that arbitrary IMO.

To me a real OS is something where you can have root access on the command line out of the box.

Depending on what we define as "root access", OS X might no longer qualify, considering the restrictions imposed by SIP[1], which comes enabled out of the box.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection

The problem is see is that Google has been back and forth about their tablet commitment.

Back when Android 3.0 shipped, they introduced a single bar UI that could be compared to the Windows UI that has existed since Windows 95.

But then as later version of 3.x, and then 4.x was released, Google was introducing new restrictions and slowly rolling back the 3.0 UI.

For example with 3.0 you had one storage permission, "external". But come 3.1, they introdced another, "media". And only system apps could gain write permission to "media", unless the OEMs went in and changed up key files.

Thing about "media" was that it got applied to all removable storage. Be it SD slots or USB drives.

Then as 4.3 shipped, anything smaller than 8" got a "hybrid" UI that looked like a phone, but acted like a tablet in various ways. And with 4.4 the tablet UI that was introduced with 3.0 was fully replaced with the phone UI.

Odd thing is that with 6.0(.1) they seem to be moving somewhat back towards the 3.0 tablet UI. rather than having the 3 bottom bar buttons always centered, they split up and move to the bottom corners on larger tablets.

I think a lot of people have also been burned by utterly crap cheap tablets. There are thousands of sub $100 tablets, and I don't think any of them are worth while. Some are downright off-putting in their uselessness and lack of speed. I figure there's a subset of super-non-techies out there who've bought one of these at TJ Maxx and have now sworn off all Android tablets.

To be fair, there aren't even really great experiences to be had with a good android tablet. The OS and app ecosystem simply isn't good enough for big screens.

I don't know what you mean by "big", but I've loved the experience of my Nexus 7 (2012). Great for reading books, good for reading comic books, good for watching movies/TV by yourself. Not really any better for social media than a phone. Haven't tried any content creation on it other than a few memes, and sshing into an emacs session on a real computer.

I'll replace it this year because of hardware problems (does not recognize charger except when turned off). But it's run up to Android 5.1.1 with no trouble.

I bought an Android tablet last year. I was holidaying in South America for six weeks and did not want to carry a full laptop with me.

I basically used it as an Ebook Reader / Mp3 player /way to upload photos from my camera to cloud while travelling.

Since I returned to Australia it has been gathering dust there is no use case for it in my day to day life. As a cheap almost disposable laptop for travel it was great for anything more then that I don't see the point.

I agree. I was pretty stoked when I got a Nexus 7, but it was basically killed by system upgrades slowing the system down to nothing. Apple has done an okay job keeping the older models still functioning even if they do not get all the functionality of latest iOS.

My Galaxy Tab S is a great ebook reader. The screen is the best I've seen, and it's a joy for art/photo books and graphic-heavy PDFs.

But it doesn't get much use as a browser - not least because of Google's bizarre decision not to include a PDF reader.

>(why carry a 7" tablet when you've got a 6" phone screen everywhere you go already?

I'm not so sure about that. Phones are always battery starved and even the big ones are small compared to the tablet experience.

Heck, I have a 6p and an iPad Mini. The mini is "only" 2 inches wider than the 6p but its a massive difference in perception and a completely different experience.

If anything, my larger phone has kept me from buying a kindle. It makes for a decent ebook reader anywhere I go.

That sounds right. Slates are great for children to play games on and watch video, they're also great for grandparents who want to read their news app and want to email or have facetime with the grandkids, but for other adults, they want something akin to the detachables which offer more flexibility.

There are also a ton of business uses like kiosks, point of sale, and field work. These users aren't going to be upgrading every year, but they are quite sticky.

Exactly. So many people focus on the consumer use cases, but I still feel like so many of the commercial ones haven't been realized yet. A failed startup I was part of in 2009 was working on a tablet app before iOS came out, and it was specifically for mechanical engineers and similar folks walking around buildings quickly, without having to stop and type on a laptop. Now I'm working on a tablet app to be used by nurses and doctors who are on their feet. No doubt there are numerous cases of people who need something they can use on their feet and who might also appreciate a slightly larger form factor than even a 6-inch phone screen provides.

That's true. It's my impression they use "ruggedized" embedded systems and elo screens.

>it is pretty obvious the market hit saturation point

The market just turned out to be much smaller than people expected. In hindsight it makes sense, many of the things people where expected to do on their tablet works just as well on the phone.

They're simply not seen as quite the necessity smartphones are.

I think my own personal anecdote is indicative of the majority's experience. It's telling how long ago all the personal electronics in my house were acquired:

2009- My personal PC. Used heavily and daily, 3 monitors, 2 mice, gaming and development.

2011- iPhone4S, wife's phone still in use today.

2011- Nook Simple Touch.

2013- Dell Haswell i5, wife's laptop.

2015- My phone is an iPhone5S. I love this phone. I was on an upgrade treadmill for the last 5 years though with Android. Having gone through 3 phones in that time. Each with the hope I was getting the 'iPhone' of the Android world and never found it (ended on the Samsung GS3 on Cyanogenmod). Including the infamous HTC Thunderbolt. HTC found a good way to get people to replace their device..

The only thing I intend to replace on this list before it breaks is my personal machine built in 2009. That only for VR (something like this with a video card from this summer's selection http://pcpartpicker.com/p/m2gN3C), which may put me on a replacement treadmill again.

If I don't buy a VR headset this year, I'll probably stick with Intel NUCs, particularly Skull Canyon with Iris Pro for the foreseeable future. That may also put me back to more frequent upgrades since the GPU is limited enough to warrant a new NUC in a year or two.

I'm fairly into my devices and there's really little hook IMO for most people to replace anything. Maybe if one has a strong desire for "latest and greatest" but I don't unless I need it. Unless you're on some sort of higher powered gaming treadmill and even then I've been using one from 2009 to this day. Granted, it was born with a $600 Intel 160GB X25-M SSD among other pretty good items that held the test of time.

In Apple's case, they have incentive to have a device last as long as our 4S as the business model is predicated on the AppStore ultimately. Not many businesses are as vertically integrated though so it's a problem when sales decline ~10% for everyone else.

>they have incentive to have a device last as long as our 4S as the business model is predicated on the AppStore ultimately

The incentive your touting doesn't really match reality. At the start of 2015, Apple made $7.5B in revenue from the App Store cumulatively ($3B in 2014). Apple made $10B from the iPhone in Q1 2011, and has only been growing from there.

The AppStore, like Apple's many other software departments, contributes a fraction of what the high-margin hardware business brings in.

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-i... http://www.statista.com/statistics/263402/apples-iphone-reve...

That's irrelevant to the point made. The incentive existing and being stronger for some more than others, is entirely unrelated to the actual profits brought in currently.

It's a longterm plan, and I believe good for the environment and consumer.

So, you concede grandparent's point that Apple's revenue from (smartphone plus tablet) hardware sales is and always has been at least 10 and probably 20 times as much as revenue from the (smartphone and tablet) App Store, but you won't retract your statement that Apple has "an incentive for [their hardware] to last" a long time "as the business model is predicated on the AppStore ultimately"?

Can you point to any statement by a leader at or spokesperson for Apple that suggests that that is Apple's long-term plan?

Apple's cost for manufacturing and delivering to a customer a new iPad or iPhone (and providing post-sale support and warranty service) is only 60 or 70% of the selling price of that iPad or iPhone -- the rest is pure profit for Apple (provided they would have been profitable without that one additional sale -- provided, that is, that revenue is enough to cover the "fixed" costs such as design and engineering). If their "marginal" cost were 99% of the selling price, then it might be different, but the way it is now, surely the more iPads and iPhones Apple sells, the more profit they make. And since that is the case, in what sense does Apple have an "incentive" to make it so that any customer replaces his iPad or iPhone less often?

I disagree with the premise that it's a point at all. Certain hardware is hot right now but it won't be forever (ask Dell and HP).

Dude, stop, you're spoiling the shared certainty that companies are fucking us up with their planned obsolescence conspiracy! We need to believe!

I tried to find the data but I could not, but I wonder, what did blender sales look like 15 years after their invention? 40 years? I picked blender because it is a useful appliance that it seems most people have one of today, and some people have had the same one for 30+ years (like my parents).

My point is, I wonder if this is just the typical performance of an appliance -- at first there is a lot of innovation and sales growth, and then it slows down as there just aren't that many new features to add and everyone has one.

Anecdotally, I find this to be pretty true. I would probably still be using my old 2012 Nexus 7 if the combination of flaky storage hardware and Android updates hadn't caused it to die a slow painful death.

Offtopic: All this talk of tablets and blenders reminded me of this http://www.cc.com/video-clips/iymjih/the-colbert-report-step...

Unless my 2013 Nexus 7 has a hardware problem I don't see any reason to replace it. It's really hard to imagine a compelling reason to upgrade from today's crop of tablets.

I agree, and I appreciate the analogy. Like a blender, people know what a tablet does, what it is good for, and how to compare models. They also know what a tablet doesn't do - they're certainly not the desktop/laptop replacement they were supposed to be - and at this point, that's fine. A blender isn't going to cook a steak, an iPad isn't going to run Visual Studio.

It's probably mostly replacements and upgrades at this point, that graph is the graph of a maturing market.

Innovation in blender space :

Smoothie makers : dedicated to crushing frozen produce to make drinks

Vitamix : so powerful it cooks your food, vegetables in - hot soup out

Nutriblend types : blend and walk without changing container

Handheld blenders : blend right in the pan

You forgot the magic bullet. Sold like hot cakes.

Funny that you should choose a blender for the analogy.

Many other things that could be used for an analogy have been absorbed into the converged device that is a tablet or a phone or a proper PC or even a console.

Because of this there are not a lot of analogies left. However, I think the mountain bike is perhaps a better analogy, with 'off road' being no keyboard/mouse. In the early 90's mountain bikes sold like hot cakes, people would upgrade to the latest model (with even more gears) and eventually every able-bodied person had some lame MTB that was fairly useless on paved roads and not really that great off-road.

Eventually people came to their senses and the realised a normal road bike or a 'hybrid' bike would actually be better for going from A to B (rather than some mountain they never really needed to get to). The mountain bike market didn't die, it just evolved to what we have now, with most so-called mountain bikes being cheap junk - 'bicycle shaped objects'. Despite the plethora of such rubbish there is a smaller market for 'proper' mountain bikes that is doing fine, an established market. However, there was a time - decades ago - when many bicycle shops could not give road bikes away, every sale was for a mountain bike. At least the tablet craze never got so mad that all other devices where blotted out of the market.

I think the main issue here is that they're competing with phones and the main differentiating factor is size, I can't think of anything I'm comfortable doing on my phone but not on my tablet. Most people would rather use one device than two. Android phones have long been available in larger sizes, iOS ones have since the latest update. Perhaps a natural result of larger phones is fewer tablet purchases.

That's how I feel with smartphones. I've skipped the last 2 generations of Nexus phones (although I had to go back and buy a Nexus 6 to use Google Fi) simply because it works well enough for me and there are no new hardware features that I care about.

I don't plan on upgrading until my phone starts to become a hindrance.

I have an S4. I'd consider an S5 if I could nab one for like $150, just to hate slightly better hardware, and possibly stock 6.0 since the S4 won't get it and Cyanogenmod is always a PITA to keep working.

I feel different about my phone because I use it so much. Outside of my desktop at work it may be the single most used item I own. Given that I spend so much time on it, I want it to be good. I want the screen to be nice, I want it to be fast, I want it to have the apps I want when I want them, etc...

Whereas for a tablet, I rarely use ours. It really has turned out to be a replacement for our son's portable DVD player on long trips.

This makes sense. My existing second-gen Nexus 7 does everything I want it to (basically, it's my TV when I'm home, and a portable paperback when I'm out & about); I'd get a new one if there were something better, but so far there's not. The Nexus 9 looks _too_ big: I really like that my 7 fits in my back pocket or the inside breast pocket of a coat. The Pixel C looks like a notebook which would be a pain to install Debian on — while it's great to have a keyboard and a mouse, without emacs and a shell what's the point of a notebook?

I've read that the closest to a new version of a Nexus 7 is the Nvidia Shield tablet, but frankly I don't really feel the need for anything more powerful.

You can have Emacs and shell on Android tablets with https://termux.com/

Problem for tablet producers is they don't follow the 2 year phone contract life cycle.

Neither do watches.

Although current generation e-watches are so terrible that for all practical purposes nobody will want to use a watch produced in 2015 or before.

But I agree in the medium to long term, e-watches won't have a lot of turnover unless there is significant technological improvements (e.g. better biosensors).

My wife loves her MS Band (almost made her want to get a MS Phone). I would get her the Band 2 but they just gave her a new original Band under warranty, so no rush (maybe I'll take the old one, I do have an MS phone).

Yep -- tablet makers biffed by not building in 2-year obsolescence. "Consumers" are much more profitable when you can tell them when to "consume."

The 500 cycle battery life should take its place. I wonder, though, that the larger batteries of tablets cause them to be cycled more shallowly and less frequently, causing them to last longer than phone batteries.

which tablets have larger batteries than phones?

I've been using mostly chinese tablets/phablets, but they never have good battery life. How long does a Nexus 7 last on a charge?

On my 2 year old Nexus 7 2013, I get about 8 hours of screen-on-time. I never use more than 50% of the battery a day.

Same here on my Nexus 7 (2012), despite never shutting it down. It's kind of amazing how little it consumes in idle.

Really? I think it uses more than that when it is off.

Neither do phones now on MOST us carriers. Now we have 2 year leases.

Yes, and this will likely show up in shipment volume declines at some point if they don't find a way to mitigate it.

I wonder if their financing plan is seeing strong uptake in the US? If it does, they may be able to boost margins a bit.

It's already showing up as shipment volume declines for the iPhone 6S series.

Yeah most places you can keep your phone. I got mine in the UK, about £40/month for 24 months with a new iPhone included, £15/month if you keep the old handset and just use the network.

LOL you should look at how much we pay in the States! http://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-phone-plans,review-2953.htm...

The cheapest of the cheap is $40 without a phone and you get 3gb with crappy service. Most are $90 and $24 a month for your iPhone.

Interesting how smartphone, tablet as well as PC/laptop markets have stopped their growth trajectory or even gone into decline. We seem to have reached some form of market saturation (at least in developed countries) in conjunction with a decline in technical innovation. Producers will need to adapt to the different market dynamics and pressures.

Particularly Apple has not been used to these kind of pressures for a while. Personally, I hope prices will come down a bit. Unsure what else may happen?! A focus on services such as longer warranties or cloud services instead of hardware?

Having said that, my 2+ year old iPhone, 3 year old iPad as well as 2+ year old nexus tablet are still working perfectly fine. Why would I buy a new one if the "old guard" is still more than adequate?

The PC market is 40 years old, so it's a fair bet that, in the developed world, pretty much everyone who wants one has one.

The real problem is that a decent PC will now last five years (on average). This means sales of PCs will halve compared to when they lasted 2.5 years, even if usage stays exactly the same.

If smartphones only last 18 months, smartphones will sell at 3x the rate of PCs even if usage is the same ;-)

Otherwise, I disagree somewhat about the "decline in technical innovation" in the PC market. There's been a huge amount of innovation in Windows (adding apps, touch and pen support, voice-controlled AI, cloud integration etc) and in Windows hardware (smartphones, tablets, 2-in-1s, PC-on-a-stick, all-in-ones etc).

Seems to me the innovation is well ahead of user (and developer) adoption, which may be the real problem....

>he real problem is that a decent PC will now last five years

The real problem is that there are no killer apps driving a need for faster hardware.

PC 1.0 was an office WP/accounts machine PC 2.0 was a home entertainment, Internet and games machine PC 3.0 was a pocket/handheld version of 2.0, and is still catching up with 2.0

Meanwhile we're still waiting for PC 4.0.

VR might be a good-enough driver, but I'm not yet convinced people want to use a PC with a giant plastic blob clamped to their heads.

If displays shrink to the point where they're light and unobtrusive, and hardware gets fast enough to have local versions of something like Siri (but smarter and better), full VR/AR could definitely become a 4.0 thing.

>The real problem is that there are no killer apps driving a need for faster hardware.

Up to a point ;-)

The modern web is pretty much a killer app. Opening one tab in Chrome now consumes more resources than Microsoft Word...

Seems to me the innovation is well ahead of user (and developer) adoption, which may be the real problem....

That seems to imply that adoption will eventually follow and it's just a matter of time. On the evidence so far, it seems a credible alternative theory is that most people simply don't want these kinds of innovations.

Unfortunately, the most innovative area in tech today seems to be consumer-hostile but potentially more profitable business models: privacy-invasive and ad-driven systems, rental models for software and cloud services, version ratcheting and built-in obsolescence, DRM and software activation controls, and the list goes on. It's like most big companies in tech can't figure out how to deliver anything valuable enough that users actually want to spend real money on it.

> the most innovative area in tech today seems to be consumer-hostile but potentially more profitable business models: privacy-invasive and ad-driven systems

Google, Facebook and Android seem to be quite popular with consumers.

It certainly seems that consumers don't want to pay for either software or content.

In fact, the old idea of paying programmers to write good software is evil, isn't it? Everything must be free ;-)

Google, Facebook and Android seem to be quite popular with consumers.

While undeniably true, it's not clear how much of that is because they produce inherently good or desirable products, and how much is because they are the default choice or consumers are otherwise pushed to them for reasons not related to actually wanting their product.

For example, it's getting harder and harder to walk into a phone shop and buy a regular feature phone so you can speak to your friend who is somewhere else, so you're getting a smartphone by default. If you don't want an Apple one for whatever reason, there is a good chance you're going to get an Android device, even if you had no particular interest in the Android part of it. There's also a good chance that you're actually paying a huge amount of money for that device even though you're not going to use it for very long, but that you don't know how much because it's disguised within some broader contract for access to a mobile network.

Sad but true ;-)

However, you can still get cheap feature phones in the UK. My wife recently bought a Nokia Series 40 to replace one that was stolen. She preferred that to using one of the Android phones or an old iPhone 5 that I no longer use...

The real problem is that surveillance-based advertising generates much higher returns than software sales. Google can easily make $10 to $50 a month from a device where even a Windows PC only makes Microsoft $1 a month, or less.

Same story as the PC in 2001.

http://www.appliancedesign.com/articles/84637-pc-data-decemb...

Market saturation.

Except that PC sales grew for the next decade....

Because PCs kept getting faster for the next decade... and software kept requiring the faster speeds. Once we got to the point of the Intel Core Duo (06-08) the modern processor was fast enough for the majority of the PC fleet. You can take one of those 8 year old PCs and install Windows 10 on it and it will work as long as you have at least 2gb of memory in it. Also, PCs at the time didn't have much horizontal competition yet, notebooks were still pretty expensive, smart phones weren't smart, and tablets didn't really exist.

The current and previous generation or two of tablets do what most people ask of them. Facebook, Youtube, record some crappy video, all still work. If the tablet stops working the user might just stick with their new smartphone with a 6" screen.

> Once we got to the point of the Intel Core Duo (06-08) the modern processor was fast enough for the majority of the PC fleet

Core 2 era was definitely the change-over point for me - before that I was upgrading pretty much on a yearly basis. I then built a Core 2 Quad machine in mid-2008, and stayed with the same hardware until mid-2013. TBH, that upgrade (to a i7-4770K) wasn't really necessary - I only did it because I started doing a fair amount of HD video encoding/editing. The Q6600 was handling everything else fine.

After the Core Duo we got integrated graphics, built-in video (etc) support, and lower TDPs that allowed thinner laptops with longer battery life. Oh, and lower prices.

We also got 10-second start-up times via UEFI.

There are more things to PC life than raw single-core performance ;-)

I must be a statistical outlier. I use a 4 1/2 year old MacBook Air and a 6 year old Linux laptop for programming. No hurry to update my laptops that I use for work (except I did buy a $200 Windows 10 laptop to play with, and a Chromebook to see what it is like).

On the other hand, in the last 5 months, I bought the most recent iPad mini and the iPad Pro (giving away my old iPads #1 and #2). I do use iPads for some work. I am an author and I find them fine for research and typing in a few paragraphs. They are great for watching movies, web browsing, and listening to audio books. For some reason I like have the newest iPads but old work-horse laptops are fine.

I have a Surface Pro 3 and I use my original Thinkpad Laptop most the time instead. All I do is play a few android games on it or surf a bit (slowly).

Honestly not sure why I bought the SP3 outside of just wanted to try it out. I keep thinking I want handwriting, I don't.

As an artist the apple pencil has been a complete game changer for me. I don't find tablets particularly useful for much other than drawing, and the apple pencil delivers the most realistic experience to date. It used to be the case that working digitally meant you needed to learn how to apply your skills to the digital environment, but now when I draw / paint on the iPad I'm just doing what I'd normally do; it looks the same.

Have you tried one of those wacom drawing tablet/screen things? Is the latency comparable (or even noticeable)?

After the responsive web design movement, I wonder if people will move back to designing for desktop+phablet, forgetting about the tablet forms.

But this decline just means people aren't upgrading tablets so often, not that they're not getting used. And tablets would seem to be primarily used for web browsing (moreso a reason why people don't need the latest and greatest features and performance).

I doubt it. Responsive design techniques solve a lot of problems regarding flexible window sizes and the multitude of phone screens. Tablets can quite easily come along for the ride.

I still see no reason to upgrade my iPad 2. I only use it for casual web browsing on the sofa and reading on the airplane. What new features could be useful enough to me to warrant an upgrade? Unless it gets damaged or the battery craps out, I won't be buying a new one for a long time.

Frankly, you're missing out here. Speed and performance may not sound all that interesting and might be taken for granted, but I'm pretty sure if you ever had the chance to use in iPad Air 2 for half a day, going back to the iPad 2 wouldn't be an option anymore. It's a huge difference.

I hated my iPad 2 once I upgraded it to iOS 8 (IIRC). That thing become slow as a snail. Safari became unusable for tabbed browsing. I sold the thing. Before the upgrade it was a really nice device and I guess most apps would still be ok to use, even after the upgrade to iOS 8.

The iPad 2 was a great machine at the time, but it's saddled with a low-res screen, very little RAM, and a slow processor. A newer iPad would be nicer on your eyes, and would be far less likely to purge non-active browser tabs from memory.

I recently switched my iPad 2 for the latest model. The main reason for the switch was a broken screen on my old iPad. The new iPad is fantasic. I will be upgrading my partners iPad 2 later this year.

The latest iPad is so much better. So much more response, you can have 2 apps open at the same time. Web pages are fast and iOS is really snappy. Also, touch id which I always saw as a gimmick turned out to be the handiest thing ever. I now sigh when my thumb doesn't unlock my phone.

The only thing that niggles me a bit is I feel the life of the iPad2 was cut slightly shorter by Apple and it's iOS updates. iOS7 killed the performance. It shouldn't really have had the update or any update after. I am still not sure if Apple gave delivered iOS updates to avoid fragmentation or to slowly kill of the device to encourage new purchases.

I am not convinced either are valid reasons considering the degradation in performance of an otherwise pretty good device.

I sold my iPad 2 because it was so slow with the latest iOS it was practically unusable.

The only reason I'm thinking of upgrading my 1st generation ipad mini is how slow it's become. Lesson learned, never let Apple install major software updates on an older device. The same happened with my iPhone 4 when iOS 7 came out, suddenly it became painfully slow.

Android isn't ready for large tablets. It needs a tiling window manager and more apps need more consistent treatment of the clipboard. But if that were to happen I'd rather use native Drive apps than the web ui.

Actually the decline is far worse (21.1%) for the classic slate form tablets. Even though they are included in tablets, the iPad Pro or Surface Pro are closer to a laptop in spirit than a tablet.

> IDC argues that the biggest trend to watch for in 2016 is the transition towards detachable devices. Indeed, pure slate tablets experienced their greatest annual decline to date of 21.1 percent, while detachable tablets more than doubled their shipments since the fourth quarter of last year.

My 2013 Nexus still does the trick. Same with the S4. There is just no obvious incentive to upgrade unless you play games on it or something

Apple shot itself (and everybody else) in the foot by making tablets that last forever. My first gen Air sees quite a bit of use, and it's working fine, so I don't see a reason to upgrade. The only thing I wish it had is the fingerprint sensor. Dazzle me, and I'll upgrade.

If computers/tablets finally actually "mature" as a technology, apple might have done the best possible thing ever. That used to be the Mercedes tactic. Make sturdy cars for the first half a century of your existence. Then coast with that reputation for the next five decades.

(It's curious I'm defending Apple on something. Usually I'm anti-fanboy.)

This was predicted: http://a16z.com/2014/02/07/love-affair-with-tablet-is-over/

The most interesting part to me is that the slate-only tablet form factor appears to be dying. This is surprising given that phones have completely adopted touch over physical keys, and yet tablets seem to be headed back to supporting both.

That's really a figment of IDC's decision to count Microsoft Windows tablets and 2-in-1s as tablets when the tablet format is usually more incidental than essential. (1)

It also means that IDC's PC industry numbers are also misleading. If somebody buys a Windows 2-in-1, that gets counted as a tablet and not counted as a PC. This makes the PC market decline look worse than it really is.

(1) "Pure" Windows tablets -- ones with ARM chips that didn't run traditional x86 software -- crashed and burned.

I don't think that's true at all -- I think they have the same lifecycle as a PC. I still use an iPad 2 pretty regularly... probably will buy a replacement next year, but I'm a cheapskate.

Professionally, I have several hundred line of business users with iPad 3's. They are just starting to complain about battery life, etc. So you're looking at a 39-48 month lifespan, similar to a PC.

A pity Jolla tablet project failed (I'm waiting for the refund). I doubt I'll be buying any tablet soon, until may be 10nm Intel SoCs will come out and there will be a tablet with such Intel GPU to run it with open drivers.

The sad Jolla tale made me seriously ponder about making a full change to Apple. I'm currently testing how an iPad Pro might work for a 95% laptop replacement.

> The sad Jolla tale made me seriously ponder about making a full change to Apple.

I supported Jolla because of their push for mobile Linux. I wouldn't touch anything from Apple with a ten foot pole.

The market is saturated. I've bought many of my family's recent iOS devices as second hand. A generation or two old devices are still fast enough for casual use and offer great bang for the buck.

I'm not surprised. People are buying phablets instead of tablets. I haven't used my iPad in I don't know how long. Don't need two devices.

I own an octa-core chinese phone from late 2014 purchased for 300 bucks, it does everything I need in a smartphone. why would I need to buy a new one?

Also a thin laptop looks a lot like a tablet with a physical keyboard these days.

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