Apple’s Smart Keyboard the key to sales success as the tablet market looks set to suffer in 2020

2020 is going to be a rough year for the economy with coronavirus fears impacting people’s spending, plus huge supply chain and manufacturing issues coming out of China.

With that, it seems the tablet market, in particular, is looking at a rough year according to technology analysts Telsyte.

Looking at the results of their annual Tablet Computer Market Study, Telsyte found sales were down 3 percent in the second half of 2019 and forecast continued declines in 2020 because of coronavirus affects on the supply chain.

Staggeringly, it’s predicted the market could drop by up to 13 percent in the first half of this year.

Apple is the clear market leader, with 48.4% of the market, well ahead of Windows on 31.7% and Android at 18.1%.

Interestingly, Telsyte classifies a 2-in-1 as any device that can operate in tablet form, which means those flip around laptops count, thus the high Windows market share (of course on top of the Surface tablets which are very popular).

75 percent of the market is covered by Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, showing just how popular that Surface is, and how Samsung’s dominance hits at their enormous share of the Android tablet market.

The other thing that makes sales in this space hard is the replacement cycle. Now up to four years, people are very happy hanging onto older tablets – they do the job!

Maybe if the Netflix App suddenly only worked on 2-year-old devices things would change:)

Since 2018 only two of the six iPads released did NOT have a smart keyboard connectivity option – that’s critical for Apple in selling that keyboard accessory, but also in driving sales and being a clear “PC replacement” option.

Last year’s 10.2 inch iPad was the most popular model sold in the second half – which is no surprise as it was slated as the new entry level.

But the fight isn’t over, Telsyte reckon iPad can continue to penetrate the traditional laptop market as they improve features like iPadOS to make it more capable.