iPad Turns 10 – Yep – Display Daily

In case you missed it the iPad had its 10th birthday this past week. It was January 27, 2010 that a noticeably thinning Steve Jobs presented, to much fanfare, the first iPad tablet device. Least we not forget, the device broke all sales records, with the $499 (and up) product selling 1 million devices in less than one month, that’s half the time needed for the iPhone to hit that number.

Overall sales that first decade in the new millennium, were some 25M devices. Media buzz was just as ecstatic with the best line coming from the Wall Street Journal: “The last time there was this much excitement over a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” (Wish I said that!)

But one decade later, all is not happy in tablet land and IDC reckons in its Q4 Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker that the full year, downward trend in tablet sales (world-wide) was continuing, and that the preliminary numbers showed growth in the minus 1.5% range. Specifically:

The worldwide tablet market declined 0.6% year over year during the fourth quarter of 2019 (4Q19) as global shipments fell to 43.5 million units. For the full year 2019, the tablet market shrank 1.5% year over year as global shipments totaled 144 million units according to the report.

jobs ipad From the heart, Steve Jobs shows off his new iPad in January 2010, source: Apple

Meanwhile, top tablet maker, Apple generated $6 billion in tablet sales in Q4 revenue alone, according to CEO Tim Cook, whose data includes contributions from all geographies. This was enough to place it at the top of the market share heap with sales of its trendy product line, and new iPad operating system. The Apple earnings call also reported “…growth in key emerging markets, including: Mexico, India, Turkey, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines and Vietnam”.

But the IDC evaluation of Apple was a bit more cautious about the fate of slate tablets in general:

Apple maintained its lead in the holiday quarter, growing 22.7% year over year. The new iPad launched last quarter accounted for nearly 65% of their shipments and helped the company gain share to 36.5% compared to 29.6% last year. As the company’s product portfolio is moving more towards detachables, slate tablet shipments have been at an all-time low with a 79.3% decline.

So does this mean the demise of the once mighty slate tablet, envisioned by Steve Jobs as “the other screen”? Are tablets destine to move closer to notebooks, shipping with keyboard and pen accessories with notebook-like OS interface making it a hybrid laptop? Perhaps, but for now, let us take pause to celebrate a generation past – empowered by the device and creative spirit that put the once nascent internet into our lap. And along the way, showed once again, the transcendent process of pushing the universe with dreams of what could be, that still lights our path forward today. (SS)