iPad Sales Are Flat! The Sky is Falling

I've seen a couple of articles of late like this one in MacWorld and this one in Above Avalon decrying the fact that Apple iPad sales are essentially flat and speculating about the future of one of the iconic Apple devices. I think what we are really seeing is the natural maturing of a market where technological advances have slowed, technical limitations (and hence potential applications) are inherently limited and just about everyone who wants one has it and sees no reason to replace it.

The one surprising thing is how quickly this all comes about in the tech fields. The first large-screen iPads hit the market in April 2010, a little over four years ago, and the first Minis landed in November 2012. Over that span, Apple has sold 250 million of the devices including 11 million in the last quarter. But that kind of performance for what is fundamentally an "add-on" product to either a laptop or a smartphone simply can't be maintained. In fact, the Above Avalon article notes that the tablet market as a whole is showing zero growth, so the tablet woes are not Apple's alone.

In the larger context, however, Gartner's projections for worldwide sales in 2015 estimate 321 million tablets, but 1.95 billion smartphones.

While I did have three tablets for a while (an iPad, a Kindle Fire and a BlackBerry Play Book) the last one died about a year ago. The surprising thing is that I don't really miss them - if my iPhone disappeared, I'd shoot myself! The Play Book stopped taking a charge, the Fire got dropped, and the iPad suffered an unfortunate collision with my bedside table when it continually disconnected from my Wi-Fi network during a show I had been dying to watch. I have since fixed the Wi-Fi, but haven't found a compelling reason to replace the iPad.

What I have discovered is that while I can't get along without a laptop or a smartphone, I don't have any task that specifically requires a tablet. My wife has an iPad Mini that is just sitting on her bedside table most of the time, but I never feel any inclination to pick it up - maybe it's the pink cover, but I don't think so.

The inherent limitation of a tablet is that at the end of the day, it is first and foremost a media consumption device. While I do read two or three newspapers and countless newsletters every day, I now read of them on my iPhone. Since most of my email requires a response I generally do that on my desktop and occasionally on my laptop if I'm out of my office.

The thing is that I do content creation, and find the tablet is still a pretty poor tool for that. You can get the Office suite on it now, but slapping a keyboard on it just seems to defeat the purpose and if I'm going that far, I might as well use my laptop which is designed for creation.

It is, however, fun to think back on the early days of the tablet market when the talk was all about the "Post-PC" world. In those days it was easy to tell the cool guys and cool gals at the trade shows, because they were the first to show up with an iPad. What's more, they tried to use them to do as many tasks as possible despite the fact that their fumbling with them more than adequately demonstrated either that 1) the user was a total klutz, or 2) it really wasn't a very good tool for that particular job.

The cool factor was picked up by marketing departments that all wanted to get tablets in the hands of their customer-facing employees to capitalize on the "cool factor." As I predicted then, the "cool factor" very quickly dropped to the same level as "Mom jeans." Not that we didn't find some great applications like putting all of a commercial pilot's flight manuals on one so they didn't have to carry those ridiculous "book bags" around with them anymore.

We are seeing attempts to expand the tablet's footprint, however, most notably with the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that straddles the line between a tablet and a laptop running a full Windows operating system and combing the attractiveness of a touch interface with the ability to do real work when you need to. However, that seems to be the same definition as a touch screen laptop.

So if someone gives me a tablet for Christmas (hint, hint) I'll probably use it to watch Netflix and maybe read the Wall Street Journal, but if I get a lump of coal in my stocking (again), I won't be that let down either.