It's time to rethink your tablet strategy

Now is the time to come to terms with the fact that tablet's not a part of our mobile future. They’re a part of our PC past and you should be thinking about any plans you have for them through that lens.

In January of 2015 Gartner reported that the PC market was poised for growth after 2 years of decline. “The PC market is quietly stabilising after the installed base reduction driven by users diversifying their device portfolios. Now that tablets have mostly penetrated some key markets, consumer spending is slowly shifting back to PCs,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.

Instead, PC shipments declined 5.2% in the first quarter of 2015, then staggeringly, another 9.5% in the second quarter. After an eventual 7 years of straight decline, 2019 was finally that year of growth: 0.6 percent, which wasn't to last. PC sales suffered the worst decline since 2013 in Q1 2020, compounded by the supply chain and consumer demand implications of COVID-19.

This trend of decline since Gartner's prediction of turnaround wasn't because tablet penetration was soaring, either. Tablet sales have also been in decline with worldwide shipments continuing to fall. The tablet market shrank a further 1.5% in 2019, compared to 2018, with 144 million units shipped globally - a little over half that of PC shipment numbers. This decline would have looked far more drastic without iPad sales propping up those numbers.

The argument that upgrade cycles are longer for tablets than smartphones is valid - the lack of demand to replace existing tablets has indeed long been identified as one of the main constraints for growth - but that’s precisely the point. Consumers are upgrading their tablets in cycles similar to PCs due to the role they play in their personal computing lives — which is increasingly a less important one.

Lower prices and better features can't revive these devices because they have become fundamentally non-essential for large portions of consumer populations. There’s no desire or need for people to frequently upgrade cumbersome machines for things they can do on the small ones that are always with them and always connected, being upgraded every 24 months on teclo contracts.

If it’s hard to imagine that most people don’t need a PC or a tablet at home, or at least not use it regularly enough to bother upgrading it, it’s important to remind yourself that the needs of a typical consumer are far different to many of you reading this article. Smartphones are now at a point in application maturity, screen size and hardware performance to meet and surpass the wants and needs of the average consumer. Messaging, gaming, reading, banking, writing and even media consumption.

To really understand who that average consumer is and what their personal computing needs might be, all you have to do is look at what the top 25 occupations are in the USA, by volume of employees.

1. Retail Salespersons
2. Cashiers
3. Office Clerks
4. Combined Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Including Fast Food
5. Registered Nurses
6. Customer Service Representatives
7. Waiters and Waitresses
8. Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
9. Janitors and Cleaners
10. Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers
11. General and Operations Managers
12. Stock Clerks and Order Fillers
13. Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks
14. Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers
15. First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales
16. Sales Representatives,
17. Nursing Assistants
18. Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners
19. First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers
20. Elementary School Teachers
21. Maintenance and Repair Workers, General
22. Childcare Workers
23. Accountants and Auditors
24. Teacher Assistants
25. Personal Care Aides

I won’t bore you with the next 25, which is similarly abstracted from the computer use many readers here would be accustom to. Most people aren’t developers, authors or video editors. Many of the roles in that list don’t need big screens or powerful hardware, especially not at home where they often wouldn’t carry on doing their day job in any capacity - although the increasingly common shift to remote work for many companies, in light of Coronavirus, clouds this matter considerably.

All of this said, tablets aren’t dead. Just like PCs aren’t dead either. Neither are mainframes. It does now look clear however, that large format computers will be resigned to increasingly narrow use cases for fewer and fewer people over time. For most everyone else, a shift in personal computing behaviour continues to reshape what personal computing actually means.

Almost without us noticing, smartphones have become our primary and preferred personal computers. In the circumstance of many individuals — young and old, from America to India — they’re the only personal computers we need.