IDC sees tablet sales falling, new gadget on the block rising

Sales of tablets like Apple's iPad will fall this year, IDC says.

The market research outfit reckons worldwide tablet shipments will drop to 195 million units in 2016, down 5.9% from 2015.

Apple has reported declining iPad sales for more than a year now. The latest quarterly fall was reported on January 26 when Apple said it had sold 16.1 million iPads in the three months to December 31 against  21.4 million during the year-ago quarter. The new supersize iPad Pro failed to reverse the trend.

At the same time, IDC is picking a rise in so-called "detachable tablets," sometimes also called "hybrid laptops," "two-in-ones" or "convertables" (yes, the industry's failure to come up with a single buzzword does reflect that it's an immature market). Examples include HP's Blade and Microsoft's new Surface Book, both of which run on Microsoft Windows (read Scott Bartely's review of the latter here). They look like regular laptops but their party trick is that their screen can detach to function as a standalone tablet. 

IDC predicts sales of detachables will grow from 16.6 million shipments in 2015 to 63.8 million in 2020.

"Everyone in the industry recognises that traditional personal computers like desktops and notebooks will potentially be replaced by detachables in the coming years and this is why we will see a lot of new products being introduced this year," IDC tablet research director Jean Philippe Bouchard says, citing a slew of new two-in-ones that were on display at the recent Mobile World Congress trade show in Spain (the telco industry's main global shindig).

If detachable tablets do take off as IDC predicts, then it sees Apple's share of the total market (tablets plus detatchable tablets) crashing to 7.3% by 2020, while Microsoft Windows-based tablets soar to 74.6% from where they are today.

Another factor: Microsoft markets its Surface as a replacement for your laptop and tablet. But the few times I've bumped into someone who uses a Surface (who doesn't work for Microsoft), they had usually kept their iPad too.

So: the rise of detachable tablets isn't a done deal. But it does give Microsoft a genuine chance at a comeback after being thrashed by Apple's iPad and cheap Androids during the first round of the tablet war.

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