According to a recent report by IDC, the worldwide tablet market took another hit during the fourth quarter of 2015, with unit shipments declining 13.7 percent year over year.
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Apple remained the tablet market leader through the fourth quarter of 2015, even though Cupertino faced a year over year decline of nearly 25 percent.
Detachables, however, finished with an all-time high of 8 million devices shipped in the fourth quarter, more than doubling their total over the fourth quarter of 2014, which reached 3.1 million, IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani said in an interview.
“One of the biggest reasons why detachables are growing so fast is because end users are seeing those devices as PC replacements”, said Jean Philippe Bouchard, Research Director, Tablets at IDC.
The result, driven by the $49.99 version of Amazon’s Fire tablet, vaulted the e-commerce giant into third place in global market share among tablet vendors in the fourth quarter, behind only Samsung and Apple. The estimates peg iPad Pro sales at 2 million units against 1.6 million units for Surface in Q4 2015. “It’s also important to note that the transition towards detachable tablets has presented positive opportunities for both Apple and Microsoft”. It’s possible that multi-window capability will come in the next generation of Android, the “N” version, sometime later this year.
“Amazon’s success in the tablet market has thus far been purely based on price”, the research firm says in a news release about the numbers.
IDC’s definition of the detachable category includes those devices that vendors term 2-in-1s where the tablet portion can be separated from the keyboard/cover portion. The Yoga and other convertibles are counted as laptops by IDC and not as tablets, Ubrani said.
What’s insane is the iPad Pro, Apple’s work-focused tablet, first went on sale on November 11th, about halfway through the quarter, so it didn’t even have a full period to rack up sales.
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With the iPad Pro starting at $799 – and up to $1079 for a fully loaded model – IDC sees performance as a bigger factor than price for buyers of detachables.
