The boffins at IDC say that global tablet sales have dropped by 17.4 per cent year-on-year in the last quarter of 2023, with only 36.8 million units sold in that time. For the whole year, sales reached 128.5 million units, down by 20.5 per cent from the year before and the lowest yearly total since 2011.

"With no real boost to the economy and customers spending their cash on other things than gadgets, tablets may not be very high on the wish list," said Anuroopa Nataraj, a top researcher with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers.

While 2024 may see some bounce-back chances, if the economy picks up, tablets still face a lot of problems. Tech advances around AI will likely focus more on the PC and mobile for the next two years, but tablets will try to join in that chat, he said.

Apart from 2023 being rubbish for the tablet market in general, it was also bad for Apple, which lost about 7 per cent of the market share after its last quarter sales fell from 21.1 million to just 14.9 million.

Its main rivals, Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo, and Xiaomi all grew their market share while the Others lot also went down but by less than 2 per cent.

The biggest winner of these was Xiaomi, which saw 35 per cent growth year-on-year in the last quarter and the biggest loser was Apple, which saw a 29.3 per cent drop in sales. The situation with Apple is quite funny, because its customers have more money than sense and are usually the ones who can keep up with buying, but it looks like even they are not that stupid.

When we look at the whole year, Apple did alright, gaining 0.4 per cent of the market share. Meanwhile, Amazon was hit hard, with its market share falling from 9.9 per cent to 4.2 per cent.