Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD 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 and it took off the iPad was obviously huge and 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 converged our smart phones do more and more in 2010 the industry standard for your big smartphone if you remember was the 4.3 inch display all the big smartphones have 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 are also in a bit of a transitional period too there are still plenty of big laptops but now we also are starting to see laptops that are nearly as thin and as light as tablets so that's again kind of blowing a line and we even see some convertible machines that kind of try to be both but right in the middle tablets our tablets dead well they've also evolved in the past couple years have gotten better and better and the best tablets ever have come out the most recently so you might not think so but on the other hand if you look 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 for 2014 16 million tablets shipped in quarter for 2015 that's like a minus 20 percent difference that's not a little bit off that's a big drop-off and plenty of research has gone into trying to figure out why and it's sort of still 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 and you can do so much more on a tablet than you could in the past performance is great battery life is great tablets has never been better but the total user base of these tablets has hit its peak so 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 number one is people upgrade their tablets as often the smartphone industry as much as we love it has people upgrading every 12 to 18 months maybe every two 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 your light gaming your web browsing your surfing that stuff doesn't need a new model every two years so you'll just buy one and kind of let it sit around use it for a while number two on top of all that convergence one could argue that there's been a genuine lack of any super exciting crazy new features and 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 - 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 with sort of a niche and 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 turns out are not for everyone they're a niche there was all this awesome thews ii Azzam at the beginning when tablets first came out about all the possibilities of what they could do but now we've realized it's these pockets of users these dedicated smaller groups tablets aren't for everyone but they are for the parent who wants to buy their kid not a smartphone but still something to keep them entertained or the casual gamer who wants a bigger screen than his smartphone but doesn't want to carry a laptop around or the graphic designer who wants a specifically a really good stylus designing experience stuff like that these pockets of users who are dedicated and enthusiastic about tablets are not dying they're just sort of discovering themselves thanks for watching talk to you guys the next one peace