First and foremost, Apple is estimated to have shipped 15.8 million iPads during the opening quarter of this year by Strategy Analytics, with the same figure however dropping to “just” 12.1 million units in the IDC’s view. Either way, of course, the Cupertino-based tech giant reigned supreme among the world’s largest tablet vendors (yet again), and curiously enough, both firms believe the iPad makers took a similar dive in sales between Q1 of 2021 and the same period of 2022.
Following closely on the heels of the most recent quarterly smartphone market reports, global tablet sales figures for the January – March 2022 timeframe are now available, and they’re… somewhat contradictory. This is due to the fact that two different research firms have decided to publish their most recent data at nearly the same time, ranking the same companies in the top four positions while disagreeing and even strongly disagreeing on a few key elements.
Apple was not one of the top tablet vendors to show growth in Q1 Then again, Strategy Analytics claims Apple’s shipment scores actually improved from the final three months of last year, which would be highly unusual, resulting largely from supply constraints that weren’t quite as bad at the beginning of 2022. With overall tablet sales falling between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022, it’s not exactly shocking to see the market’s leader go down by 5 or 6 percentage points, but at least one other company managed to boost its figures in the same timeframe.
According to Strategy Analytics, that company is Microsoft, which ranks fifth behind Lenovo, while the IDC thinks silver and bronze medalists Samsung and Amazon were the industry’s biggest growers. Interestingly, the IDC ranks Huawei rather than Microsoft in fifth place, with Lenovo’s huge year-on-year decline being one of the few things the two research firms can agree on (almost) to the letter.
Apple was not one of the top tablet vendors to show growth in Q1 The other thing is that the market is suffering after getting a huge and mostly unexpected boost in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Granted, sales numbers remain higher than the industry’s “pre-pandemic levels”, and with more and more big brands like Xiaomi, Nokia, Honor, and Oppo turning or increasing their attention on low-cost Android tablets with good specs, the recent bleeding could stop relatively soon. Android tablets, by the way, are not doing as well as they used to, dropping to a new all-time low market share of roughly 50 percent that’s… likely to bounce back in the near future.
The entire tablet category is a farse, especially when none of the 2 in 1 laptops and notebooks sold today, are even included in that tablet category, they fall under the PC category. The same is true for the smartphone 2 in 1 category of foldables, especially when foldables like the Galaxy Z Fold’s, Oppo Find N, Mate X, and even Microsoft’s Duo Android foldable devices fall under the smartphone category.