back to article IDC: iPad sales crash incoming ... Win 8 killing 2-in-1 typoslabs

Market-watcher IDC has bad news for makers of tablets and two-in-one typoslabs like Microsoft's Surface: sales of the former are going to slow markedly and punters are avoiding the latter due to Windows 8. “The worldwide tablet market is expected to see a massive deceleration in 2014 with year-over-year growth slowing to 7.2 …

  1. John Sanders
    Holmes

    As it was widely predicted...

    In this blessed house y half of its inhabitants, for the many years this tablet-replacing everything nonsense has been force fed down our throats.

    Tablets are only good for wasting time or reading while in the crapper(TM)**

    **Blessed place.

  2. Salts

    Attention All El Reg Readers...

    You all qualify as analysts for IDC, well apart from the fact you got to these predictions a few years earlier :-)

    1. Vociferous

      Re: Attention All El Reg Readers...

      > You all qualify as analysts for IDC

      More to the point, we all qualify as Chief Strategists for Microsoft.

      "tablets probably aren't taking over as primary content creation devices, said he as typed on his full-size keyboard and gazed at a 24-inch monitor"

      The truth, succinctly.

      1. Richard Taylor 2

        Re: Attention All El Reg Readers...

        Well that is reasonable. Tablets mainly consume not create. Shame but understandable why that part of Microsoft undervalued consumption. Now if the Xbox division had been given tablets.....

  3. jnemesh

    Looks familiar

    Kind of like the massive growth we were speed to see for Windows phone! Love how the numbers only work when they predict 17+% YoY growth for MS right at the end too! Hey, guys, can i pull some numbers out of my butt and make millions as an "analyst" too? I promise i can make even products as poorly designed as Surface, Windows Phone, Xbox One, and Windows 8 look like they are on the path to dominating too!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Looks familiar

      Feel free to try my friend. But to temper your enthusiasm.... "analysts" don't make millions.

      If they did you'd be first in line I'm sure.

      And, while they often pull numbers out of their nether ends - they do give them a good clean before publication so they look appetising.

  4. P. Lee

    In fairness

    It probably isn't that Win8 is as bad as the figures suggest, its just a first-past-the-post decision with the two large ecosystems taking the vast majority, leaving little reason to go W8.

    If MS want to do well, it has to be a free tablet bundled with the laptop, to build the ecosystem. They can afford to play the long game here. Even the Win8 failure is not the end for them. Win10 on all laptops which have morphed into convertibles with detachable screens could get them there eventually.

    What MS really needs is their OS to boot nicely from the same system image on different hardware. Linux LiveCD anyone? Then people could take an NGFF disk from their i7 PC and clip it to the back of their "Surface certified" tablet/phone (which may also ship with/run Android) when they are moving rather than creating or plug it into their home PC if they want. No you won't use photoshop on a tablet, but outlook might be ok. The flash disk could clip onto the back of a phone like a battery pack. You might need a little slider switch on the tablet that says, "conserve power, I'm just watching a film / Ya cannae break the laws of physics, Captain" so people can work on a Word document with the battery lasting the one hour train ride from the office to home. The tablet could be the screen from their office laptop. Of course, just because the OS boots on different hardware doesn't mean the exact same versions of all the apps need to run - we just need to make sure the OS doesn't fall over because the hardware has changed. I wonder where MS could get that kind of tech?

    In other words, MS needs to invest in the OS and in the hardware tech to make laptops and tablets better, not spend oodles on marketing, desperately trying to convince people to buy their stuff which is less than "me too."

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No news here

    iPad sales have already "crashed", given that Apple already reported two consecutive YoY sales declines, so it is too late to predict a crash - the IDC doesn't predict any massive drop from where they are now. Apple has already suggested the reason is replacement cycles appear to be more PC like than phone like, so the IDC is as usual behind on news (like how they missed the massive PC sales decline that started nearly four years ago)

    No one anywhere, to my knowledge, ever predicted tablets "taking over as primary content creation devices", I don't know where the author dreamed up that fantasy. OK, maybe Microsoft sales reps did. A few breathless analysts who are only able to extrapolate trends as far as drawing lines and fitting exponential curves may have predicted tablets outselling PCs, but only the fools who extrapolated another five years beyond that to predict three tablets sold for every person on Earth.

    Oh, and the PC market that some like to claim is "recovering"? Instead of the 3.5% sales drop IDC predicted for the year, they now think it'll have a 2.5% sales drop instead. So looks like going on four years of PC sales declines, despite all the people (especially in China) moving up in economic circumstances to where they can afford a PC. The problem for Intel/Microsoft is that they're using their smartphone as their "PC" and don't need a "real" PC. Because the author that forgets that the majority of PC users are content consumers only, not content creators.

    1. Vociferous

      Re: No news here

      > No one anywhere, to my knowledge, ever predicted tablets "taking over as primary content creation devices"

      Are you kidding me? Or just remembering as selectively as you pick your sales statistics?

  6. thexfile

    Lo and behold.

    The PC will never die!

  7. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    No news

    Courageous of IDC to forecast all the way out to 2018. Would be nice to see how their previous forecasts have held up.

    I think anyone who's got a tablet should give themselves an award for predicting longer replacement cycles. But I'd also expect the market to continue growing not least because we're getting a generation of kids who are growing up with the tablet as their primary computing device. I suspect the main displacement is going to be gaming and media consumption devices but more may follow over time. They will use PCs only when absolutely necessary.

    The Surface has failed as a device (RT was bizarrely crippled, the Pros are overpriced for the mass market) but may end up being the shape of things to come as tablets and notebooks converge and useful form factors made with commodity components emerge. Though it's still not clear as to which eco-system will profit most from this.

    1. launcap Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: No news

      > Courageous of IDC to forecast all the way out to 2018. Would be nice to

      > see how their previous forecasts have held up.

      How very dare you! Holding them to their predictions? How very.. functional of you, thinking that their 'predictions' are good for anything other than pleasing their corporate paymasters.. (and generating a bit of cash from page impressions serving ads to those of us unfortun^w clueless enough to not run adblockers).

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: No news

      Would be nice to see how their previous forecasts have held up.

      Well, why don't we?

      In 2010, according to the Reg, IDC predicted:

      - Netbooks will be around for a while. Well, they didn't put a time limit on this one, so one might argue they meant only for 2011. Netbooks aren't looking so healthy now.

      - The adoption of open-source software by businesses had "plateaued". I don't have any figures on this myself, but my sense is that this was a miss.

      - Around 570 million PCs would be sold in 2014. By March of this year they had revised this down a tad, to 292 million. But what's a 49% correction between friends? Looks like their latest estimate is 307 million, so that 570m was only off by ~46%.

      - They were dubious about Microsoft winning 30 million feature-phone users over to WinMob 7. They might have been right about this one.

      - By the end of this year, 70% of server workloads would run on VMs. No idea if this is correct; it sounds plausible to me - if indeed not low. Most mainframe workloads are running on LPARs, for example, and that's an awful lot of "workload". But are they including HPC in "server workload" here? That would throw the numbers off.

      There were a bunch of other predictions that I couldn't be bothered with. Feel free to do your own search.

    3. Kepler
      Thumb Up

      My compliments, Charlie Clark! ("Re: No news")

      On a perceptive, illuminating comment.

      In particular:

      * your observation that the market for tablets will continue to grow anyway "because we're getting a generation of kids who are growing up with the tablet as their primary computing device";

      * your further observation that their future tablet purchases will come at the expense more of "gaming and media consumption devices" than of PCs, because these users — being primarily content consumers rather than content creators — weren't going to be using PCs anyway (unless "absolutely necessary", as you point out); and

      * your concise explanation of why the Surface has largely failed to date — because "RT was bizarrely crippled" and "the Pros are overpriced for the mass market".

      When I first saw the Surface several years ago, in an article here at El Reg, I couldn't stop drooling. I thought it was so cool and such a clever idea; I think I even made a post about it on Facebook!* And ever since then, I have wondered why it has bombed so miserably.** Your answer makes perfect sense.

      So kudos and thanks.

      .

      * Anyone who has noticed the scorn and vituperation I heap on Microsoft elsewhere should remember the almost fawning praise I had for it here.

      .

      ** The unmitigated suckiness of Windows 8 — or at least its user interface — is not even remotely sufficient to explain Surface's failure to gain market share relative to other laptops that do not double as tablets (and relative to other tablets that do not have any sort of physical keyboard at all). Especially since most other laptops have to use Windows 8, too. Windows 8.1 ameliorates things considerably, but likewise does so in a manner neutral as between Surface and other machines.

  8. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Devil

    Windows 8

    It's terrible on a desktop but it would be alright on a tablet or 2-in-1, I thought. Then I tried a Windows 8 tablet. It's still a clusterfuck.

    I don't know how MS have managed it, but they've come up with a UI that's useless for every form factor.

    1. cambsukguy

      Re: Windows 8

      When I was 12 I tried driving a car, it was rubbish, nothing like my bike, all the controls were in a different place, it crashed far too easily.

      You may think that operating a new PC/Tablet/Phone should be the same as operating the previous one you had and that strategy may suit for a vehicle because of safety implications - although driving a Prius seems different than a regular car.

      Using your view, we would still be typing at a command line for almost everything (Oh! you are, well carry on).

      Swipiness on the Nokia N9 and subsequently on WinPhones is hugely better than the standard iPhone method continually clicking a back button/icon and selecting another menu sub-system - while ok for mouse use, not so much for finger use - those people must get RSI a lot. And, I much prefer icons that tell me things like the weather and my next appointment/birthday than some picture indicating that the weather could be ascertained if you just tap here and wait a while (what a fucking crappy system).

      Windows 8, especially in a Surface or similar is easy to use, only an idiot couldn't operate it after a short introduction. The browser may have no back button, boo-hoo, more screen real-estate, swipe from the left and it goes back, swipe from the right, it goes forward, shall I explain it again? (clue, a bit like pages in a book).

      Yeah! but the search is invisible - except that it is a) has a specific button (on a Surface and WinPhones) and b) The few minutes tutorial (which I have never needed - I am in IT so I get it), would explain these minor changes. Not to mention the Windows button/key shortcuts.

      And, the lack of a Start button, FFS grow up, I have forgotten that the Start button even allows you to browse the program system, jeez, just type a couple of letters and there is the program you want. By a Strange co-incidence, that is exactly what happens with Win8.

      I am sure that the slow uptake is more to do with the fact that it looks a lot different and operates somewhat differently and company IT departments just hate change. I subscribe to the Dilbert view that they hate us anyway so I don't care what they want.

      Windows 7 is a very good product, If I ran a company I wouldn't see a reason to add extra cost to have Win8 as well as Win7 support and certainly not the extra cost of changing wholesale to Win8.

      I haven't updated this laptop to get Win8 because Win7 works so well, with an SSD especially - it is not because Win8 doesn't work. I and my partner often use a Surface when the laptop is busy or we are elsewhere (it is much more portable than a laptop connected to a TV and a power supply).

      A surface is always ready, stands on its own, doesn't need a case, allows real or close-to-real typing, has a lovely screen and was pretty cheap. It also means I don't need an ultrabook, which means I can have a desktop replacement laptop connected to a TV, which means I don't need a separate desktop.

      All-in-all, I see PCs and tablets co-existing indefinitely but my tablet will always be a laptop-tablet running a PC-style OS.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Windows 8

        My simple test was...

        Was it possible for me to use an iPad and get to know the basic stuff in 5-10 minutes? Yes.

        Was possible for me to use an Android tablet and get to know the basic stuff in 5-10 minutes? Yes.

        Was it possible for me to use a Windows tablet and get to know the basic stuff in 5-10 minutes? No, it's a clusterfuck.

  9. Bassey

    New definition of the term "Sales Crash"

    How does a year-on-year growth of 7.2% qualify as a crash? I wish my Salary were crashing like that!

  10. Jay 2

    People who have tablets don't replace them every year shock etc... I'm reminded about the TV situation when virtually everyone has a HD flatscreen that talks to things over HDMI, so are in no need to buy another one. This, of course, concerns the manufacturers and analysts who then try and make up some bollocks or push some un-wanted functionality to try and kickstart things.

    I agree with Charlie above. Win RT was DoA, but the Surface Pro is a bit more of a go-er. Though that it hamstrung by being very expensive.

  11. David Roberts

    Hardware architecture

    Tablets are stalling because in general the architecture on affordable tablets doesn't support a true mult tasking OS. That is, Windows/Linux/Unix etc.

    The vast majority of tablets have a software base for "big phones" not small computers.

    I am typing this on a tablet, which I bought to replace a netbook and to use when travelling.

    I have since bought an 11" laptop to replace the tablet for that use - i.e. a more recent take on the netbook and at around the same price point as the original

    The tablet software to support two of my main uses - email and Usenet - is just not as mature as the Linux and Windows versions.

    Low power Intel/AMD x86 chips which can provide the same range of OS and applications as PCs could give the market a new boost.

    It isn't the form factor it is the software.

    I can use my tablet with the available software and I don't gain anything appreciable by upgrading.

    Give me Thunderbird and Pan and you might see a tiny uptick in sales.

    1. joeldillon

      Re: Hardware architecture

      Err. The vast majority of tablets run either Linux or iOS which is a BSD variant. There's nothing about the architecture which prevents them running a multitasking OS - they're equivalent to PCs a few years ago which were perfectly capable of running such things.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Joeldillon - Re: Hardware architecture

        Poor you, it seems you had a pretty lousy PC a few years ago.

        Mine was able to run at least two or three applications at the same time, each in its own window. Oh and it allowed me to do everything I wanted with it without messing with encrypted boot and such stuff.

  12. Phuq Witt
    Facepalm

    Bye Bye Blackbird... er... Berry

    And Firefox, Jolla, Ubuntu et al.

    According to IDC's Nostradamus-like predictions the "Other" section will drop from 0,2% to 0% market share, between now and 2018.

  13. The Godfather
    Holmes

    Can these analysts give me this Friday's lotto numbers please?

    by 2030, we'll all be using telepathy....there...and there's no point replying coz I know what you're going to say. If you want my full report, it'll cost you just £5,000.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Those 2018 figures look like absolute stab in the dark guesses to me. The market could completely change within the next 12 months - impossible to guess currently. Extrapolating current trends shows nothing.

  15. Gis Bun

    nonsense!

    In April 2013, IDC said that tablet sales would be at 410 million by 2017.

    In August 2013, Forrester research announce [or predicted] that tablets will become a mainstay of households in developed markets by 2017, with 60% of online consumers in North America and 42% in European owning one by 2017. Or by percentage, roughly a 25.6% increase compounded annually to maybe 381 million by 2017.

    So who do you believe? These so-called research companies don't know their butt from their elbow. Not saying they are wrong this time but look what they said just over a year ago: huge sales in tablets!

    These same companies predicted sales in netbooks at 130 million in 2013. Manufacturers stopped manufacturing them in January 2013.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    iPad sales crash?

    Sat in meeting late last night (trying to work out how to manage the "challenged" NHS funding in our patch). Room full of doctors using iPads, all bought from own pocket. Meanwhile more of our work is getting untangled from windows, instead being app or browser based. Windows is the dead platform from where I am looking.

  17. Gannettt

    Price

    I had my eye on a Surface Pro 3, looked pretty compelling, especially with the Windows 10 on the horizon, but the $1000+ price tag is eye-watering, may as well splash out on a Macbook Air or an Ultrabook with a better keyboard and bigger screen. Now, it they did one with reasonable specs for $600...

  18. xeroks

    Big ipad coming

    I reckon the delay on the much-vaunted 12" iPad is the OS. I'd put money on it being available running OS X.

    With that, and a couple of bluetooth toys, you'd have something capable of doing useful stuff.

    Of course,you still wouldn't get to have unrestricted use of that SD adaptor in the camera kit...

  19. Infernoz Bronze badge
    Joke

    Mostly wrong

    Yes, Apple will lose market share, but you have to be kidding to think Windows 8 will grow that fast and get that much market share! A surprise may pop out of Others than Microsoft and hammer it.

  20. Kepler
    Windows

    "Thanks for everything, Mr Sinofsky"

    Thanks indeed! How badly that man and his handiwork suck cannot be overstated.

    Another golden nugget contained in the article:

    "Longer product replacement cycles as users avoid upgrades so they can keep using software they like . . . ."

    Love that Metro . . . er, Modern . . . interface! Let's just force everyone to use it, and to abandon the software and the modes of interaction they know and love. Sheesh!*

    A good and informative piece, Simon. Quite revealing.

    .

    * People who do not know me personally cannot fully appreciate the significance of my scorn and sarcasm, for it is impossible to overstate how predisposed I am philosophically to defend large, successful companies like Microsoft. But 20 years of its giving users the finger have made me ready to light a torch. (By which I do not mean a flashlight.)

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