Trouble in Detachable Tablet Land?
Now that Apple is out with its earnings, IDC has the critical iPad data necessary to refresh its assessment of the worldwide quarterly tablet market.
The short version is a decline in quarter-over-quarter tablet shipments of 3.4 percent. Total units shipped for the second calendar quarter of 2017 were 37.9 million.
One interesting aside in the report is some bad news for the detachable tablets subsegment, which IDC says was "once touted as the savior of the [tablet] market." Detachables would be the category pioneered by the Microsoft Surface, and later joined by the iPad Pro.
Without offering specific numbers in its Thursday news release discussing the results, IDC said detachable tablet shipments declined.
"There's been a resetting of expectations for detachables as competing convertible notebooks offered a convincing and familiar computing experience for many," said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers, in a statement. "To date, the 2-in-1 market was bifurcated as Apple and Microsoft led with detachables while the PC vendors led with convertibles. Though that is slowly changing as smartphone vendors and traditional PC vendors begin to offer compelling alternatives, the pace has been rather slow as Surface and iPad Pro still dominate shelf space and mindshare."
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 03, 2017