This year alone, IDC says 55% of all tablets are 9 inches or smaller. But bright skies line the horizon.
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The decline of the worldwide tablet market is set to continue for the remainder of 2016 as year-over-year growth reaches an all-time low of -11.5 per cent and shipments of 183.4 million units, according to forecast data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker.
So when will the turnaround commence? And despite the facts that Apple will end 2016 more then double the market share of Windows tablets, IDC magically see’s Windows making the biggest gains in tablet growth from 2017 to 2020 as noted in the chart below.
Though progress has been slow, its stake in the tablet market has been steadily rising, and according to IDC research director Francisco Jeronimo, its market share could finally reach double digits this year. “By 2020, however, this share is forecast to drop to 40 percent”, says the company.
IDC advises that ‘most of these will be destined for emerging markets where consumers seek out any low cost computing device’.
If there’s some magical formula IDC has to explain why only Windows will show a spike in tablet market share by 2020, with iOS and Android stagnating and/or declining, they didn’t wish to reveal it in their report.
Today, with Microsoft’s Surface being on the market for years now, hasn’t been able to made a dent in the market against Apple’s iPad in proportion to its own created hype. The bad news is that it will overstate the decline of the PC market.
Microsoft and Apple are competing against each other in a variety of businesses, and the software giant has long tried to get closer to its rival in both phones and tablets, but we probably all agree that it pretty much failed to succeed with the first part of this plan. They buy them to use as PCs. China-based white-box players that have joined Intel’s China Technology Ecosystem (CTE), have also mostly stopped pushing tablet products. There is hardly any market for pure Windows tablets, and I’d bet most people who snapped up a cheap one during Intel’s short-lived bid for the tablet market added a third-party keyboard.
Higher demand will come from detachable tablets which will steal the market of traditional PCs.
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Dear IDC, isn’t it time to stop this charade and move on?
