The Evolution of Tablets and Their Place in Today's Tech Landscape
MKBHD here with a quick word on tablets. We got tablets a couple years ago to fill the void between the smartphone and the laptop, I don't know if we needed to fill that void, but what we got was something that's a little more personal than a laptop but also a little more spacious than a smartphone, and just a lot of fun to use. The iPad was obviously huge and it got a spike in popularity pretty quickly. A lot of people could say it was just a bigger iPhone, and in a lot of ways it really was, but that was fine, people love the iPhone already, and we did get way more tablets that followed it in the next few years.
Now fast forward to today, and we've seen an evolution in all three categories, and they kind of converge. Our smartphones do more and more, 2010 is the industry standard for your big smartphone if you remember, was the 4.3 inch display, all the big smartphones had the 4.3 inch display, today that's literally considered compact by a lot of standards. So, the smartphones are getting bigger as they're capable of doing more. Laptops also in a bit of a transitional period, too, there are still plenty of big laptops, but now we also start to see laptops that are nearly as thin and as light as tablets. That's again kind of blurring a line.
We even see some convertible machines that kind of try to be both, but right in the middle, tablets are tablets dead well they've also evolved in the past couple years, they've gotten better and better, and the best tablets ever have come out, the most recently. So, you might not think so, but on paper, tablets are a Dying Breed by volume, tablet purchases over the last few years have actually started declining, they didn't level off; they started to go down 24 million tablets shipped in quarter 4, 2014, 16 million tablets shipped in quarter 4, 2015. That's like a minus 20% difference, that's not a little bit off, that's a big drop off.
Plenty of research has gone into trying to figure out why, and it's sort of still a new category, so there's no definitive answer why people are buying less tablets, but you can see that the big smartphones getting larger and larger, and the small laptops getting smaller and smaller, has sort of pushed tablets into this sort of a specialty category. They still do a ton; they have the best hardware, they've ever had, they have way more optimized apps, they have better dedicated accessories. You can game on them, you can surf the web on them, you can explore, you can take pictures with them, uh, you can do so much more on a tablet than you could in the past.
Performance is great, battery life is great, tablets have never been better, but the total user base of these tablets has hit its peak. Discovery was great that initial spike with the iPad and all the huge competition in the first year or two was awesome, and then it's just sort of leveled off. There are two main reasons I think to explain why people are buying less tablets now than that initial Spike.
Firstly, people don't upgrade their tablets as often. The smartphone industry has people upgrading every 12 to 18 months maybe every 2 years; your tablet you're not upgrading every one or two years a lot of people who are buying tablets for the more casual stuff, like light gaming, web browsing, surfing that stuff doesn't need a new model every 2 years. So, you'll just buy one and kind of let it sit around use it for a while.
Secondly, on top of all that convergence, one could argue that there's been a genuine lack of any super exciting crazy new features in tablets in the past couple of years. If you look at that Tech of the year 2015 video and just look at what tablets have been doing in the past year or two, sure they've kind of pushed up against what laptops are doing and tried to do more but still try to stay as friendly as a smartphone. But in the end, they still find themselves somewhere in the middle; that's exactly what it is at the end of the day. They're not dying; they're just more focused, and that's exactly what they need.
Tablets turn out are not for everyone; they're a niche, there was all this awesome enthusiasm at the beginning when tablets first came out about all the possibilities. People thought they could be the next big thing, but now we see the reality of it. We have three different categories: smartphones, laptops, and tablets. And each category has its own strengths and weaknesses.
The people who are buying these new gadgets; that's where this shift happens. They're no longer looking at these as a replacement for one another; they're just looking to buy whatever feels best. But there is still space in the market for all of these categories, even if it means adapting and evolving every year to keep up with what people want.
They're not dying; they're just sort of discovering themselves. People are figuring out that each category has its own strengths, so why try to fit into all three? This discovery is a shift in how we think about technology in our daily lives, where it's more than just a tool but a way of life.
The final part of this shift is understanding the importance of what makes these devices tick. We need to see what each device offers and why it matters. The market is constantly changing and evolving; as we move forward, there's bound to be even more growth in new technologies and trends that we don't yet fully understand.
Thank you for watching, and talk to you guys in the next one peace.