Published in AI

Apple has murdered the tablet market

by on31 December 2014


Wins the holiday season

The tablet market has been suffering lately as people woke up to the concept that they were largely pointless, but it is starting to look like the outfit which started the Tablet craze might have had a hand in bumping it off.

Analytics firm Flurry suggests that, among the top five mobile-device manufacturers, Apple “won” the holiday season, with the company’s hardware accounting for 51.3 percent of device activations worldwide followed by Samsung with 17.7 percent, Nokia with 5.8 percent, and Sony with 1.6 percent.

But most of those activations came from phablets. This Christmas, it appears even more consumers are switching to the larger phone now that there is an iOS option and tablets sales are falling.

According to Flurry’s numbers, full-sized tablets accounted for only 11 percent of new devices in 2014, a decline from 2013, when that form-factor totalled 17 percent of the new-device market.

Small tablets experienced a smaller decline, falling from 12 percent to 11 percent of new devices between 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile, phablets expanded from 4 percent of new devices in 2013 to 13 percent this year.

Based on these figures the tablet market is doomed. Nearly all the sales gains that Apple’s new, large iPhones have made were stripped from the tablet market, Consumers are happy with compact smartphones are not switching to larger iPhones for now, but the former tablet buyers did.

We predicted the death of the tablet soon after it launched, mostly because there has never been a killer app which made it anything more than a novelty. The rise of Phablets basically removed any tablet functionality to the phone. When Apple told its own fanboys that a Phablet really was cool, it killed off its own market.

Last modified on 31 December 2014
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