“The news Monday that tablet sales dropped off for the first time last quarter are bound to accelerate the ‘tablets are dead’ punditry we’ve seen around the web over the past few months,” Ben Bajarin writes for TIME Magazine. “But the vast majority of commentators writing about tablets get one big thing wrong: The tablet market isn’t one big market, it’s many small ones.”
“When many people think ‘tablet market,’ for instance, they think ‘iPad.’ But Apple’s iPad is only one kind of tablet. And still its performance gets lumped in with cheap kids’ tablets. The two are entirely different in their usage, yet spoken about without appreciation for each device’s key functionality,” Bajarin writes. “When I see a forecast saying the tablet segment will be up or down in 2015, I like to ask, “which segment?” Will gaming tablets be up or down? Computing tablets like the iPad? Tablets that get stuck on walls at retail? Which ones are growing and which are not? No good answer exists to these questions, because the people projecting these numbers aren’t looking at the market this way. That makes their predictions less valuable.”
Much more in the full article here.