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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

The dramatic collapse of iPad sales is interesting. A tumble of 23% is huge, to go with five straight quarters of year-over-year declines.

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Much like the laptops and desktops tablets are suppose to replace, most people don't have a reason to upgrade every two years. For most customers upgrading your phone is very different from replacing your tablet.

Couldn't agree more. I have an iPad 2 (I think) sitting at home that I occasionally pick up. It serves it's purpose and there's no reason, or incentive to go out and get a new one.

Our ipad 2 runs netflix just fine.

Mine is a Songza machine basically and we take it on vacation. Works great for both.

Yes, especially casual users, who use it for browsing on the couch. There is no strong pressure to upgrade, when your browser works just fine.

Agreed, I still have the first iPad, bought when it launched in Europe. The browser dies pretty often compared to an iPad 3, but it us still sort of usable for browsing and watching movies.

I've got an iPad 3, and I kinda want to get a new iPad, but... like, it still works just fine.

It's troubling to me, the only iPad user I know. Other than my Mac at work, my iPad is my most-used computer.

Out of curiosity, do you interface with it primarily through touch on-screen, or through a connected keyboard?

Just the screen. I've never tried an external keyboard.

I have an iPad 2 and it is still usable (with a noticeable slow down for web browsers after the iOS8 upgrade) after all these years. I suspect a lot of people just upgrade their tablets less often that their phones. I use it mainly as a glorified e-reader.

True that. I have no motivation to update my iPad 2 so far!

I think the larger iPad will help. My mom (iPad target demo?) is waiting for the larger iPad to upgrade to. If it's A4 / letter size then it will really take off for the publishing industry and academia (reading PDFs).

A big downside to the iPad is slow text input. Many people love their laptops because they can quickly communicate with people.

The trouble is that the larger iPad will likely be more expensive, and iPads are already not cheap.

$600 is still $400 less than a Surface. I'm not sure how much they compete, though.

I suspect a lot of this is due to the rise of tablet-phones. The iPad is now like the iPod was earlier, essentially an iPhone 6 Plus without the phone functionality.

Competitors tablets are getting better and better, the market is pretty much saturated and the large phones that even Apple has started to produce make them less interesting.

Most likely tablets are dead: no room between large phones and ultrabooks.

I think more likely the market is somewhat saturated. There's not a lot of compelling reason to upgrade if you have one from the past 2-3 years.

We ditched our iPad pretty much as soon as the kids got iPod Touches.

And there are few compelling reasons to develop sophisticated iPad apps anymore. App prices are low, the platform is buggy, and building a good iPad app is a more complex and expensive endeavour than building an iPhone app.

> the platform is buggy, and building a good iPad app is a more complex and expensive endeavour than building an iPhone app.

Citation needed? What do you find buggier about iPads than other iOS devices, and what makes them harder to develop for?

iOS as a general platform tends to blast API's more quickly than most platforms--take a look at all the top-line games that needed special versions for iOS 8.

In addition, Apple has it's own "private" API's that app developers aren't allowed to use which makes development more complicated than it has to be.

Finally, iPad's have way more screen size than iPhones. Little things that you might get away with on a 5 inch screen suddenly look really bad when blow up to 10 inches.

I wouldn't say they are dead. The decline of the sales for iPad can be attributed to its wildly successful launch. People just hang on to their iPads a lot longer than they do their iPhones. The numbers should stabilize soon.

They haven't stabilized for 5 years and the trend is accelerating downward.

They sold 12.6 million iPads.

I wish something I sold could collapse like that!

Are android/surface tablets seeing a similar decline or are they taking market share from the iPad?

Overall tablet sales are still going up with low-end tablets (mostly Android) eating up market share.

I think this is probably the key. The rise of $200 90%-as-good-as-iPad tablets is capturing a bunch of the market. And really, if you're not already on iOS, they're >90% as good.

The Surface Pro is growing very well, though I don't think it would be accurate to say that it is signicantly taking away share from the iPad. As far as I know, the SP3 sold ~800k units last quarter, as compared to the iPad's >12 million.

It's really hard to say how Android tablets are doing because the market for them is so diverse.

I bought an ipad 2 at release and I'm just now getting to a point where I need to think about replacing it.

Or simply on a slower replacement cycle. There's room, but it's not for essential or daily use, like a phone or a notebook, and the things it's used for don't require the latest shiny hardware.

So many people that own one don't replace it until the battery starts dying.

Phones are also typically on multi-year contract (or a multi-year payment plan depending on your location and/or carrier), so you get "prompted" to upgrade on a regular basis when you finish a cycle. I only really upgrade my tablet when there's a serious tech jump, like going to Retina or cutting 1/3 weight or whatever.

Note that is true only in America and some richer western markets. Phones in mich of the world are bought just like tablets, but are used often and so still get replaced every coupke of years.

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