What happened to tablet sales?

Tablet sales have been dropping for the past couple years and even though companies refresh their offerings the tablet market keeps getting softer. There are a few ideas as to why this is happening and the lack of usage (which prolongs life of the devices) is one them. Regardless of the reasons, the announcements of new tablets haven't been getting the fanfare they once did. TechCrunch has the full story.

In the past month, both Apple and Samsung have refreshed their flagship tablets for the first time since 2014. A lot has changed in the space in the intervening years — mostly for the worse, as overall sales have continued to slip. In Q4 of last year, IDC reported that shipments had dropped 20 percent, year over year, while Strategic Analytics has the number at half that.

There’s room for debate as far as precisely how down the overall market is (not to mention what precisely qualifies a device as a tablet), but there seems to at least be a consensus that early predictions of the tablet space eclipsing PCs missed the mark. The space has suffered for a variety of reasons. Among them, the fact that users simply aren’t refreshing tablets at a rate many manufacturers no doubt predicted.