Tablet sales have declined for the past 16 quarters in a row and it does not show any sense of an uptick anytime soon. IDC has just reported that in Q3 2018 saw an 8.6% year-over-year decline: 36.4 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 39.9 million units in the same quarter last year.
“The detachable market has failed to see growth in 2018, a worrying trend that has plagued the category off and on since the end of 2016,” IDC research analyst Lauren Guenveur said in a statement. “In October, we finally saw the highly anticipated refreshes of Apple’s iPad Pro and Microsoft’s Surface Pro, as well as new products by Samsung and Google, which lead us to believe that the last quarter of the year will turn the detachable category around, at least for the time being. Increasingly sparse are new products by the top-tier PC OEMs as they remain more focused on their convertible portfolio, a move that will ultimately affect the overall trajectory of the detachable market going forward.”
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.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
