Apple eats the meat, Android drinks the soup, has the tablet market entered the end game ahead of time?

Not long ago, the well-known market analysis organization IDC released sales, market share and other data for the global and Chinese tablet computer markets in the first quarter of 2021.

Whether looking at global market data or just looking at Chinese market data, Apple ranks highest in two key indicators: absolute sales and market share.

Although the global tablet computer market saw a significant increase in shipments in the first quarter, up 55.2% year-on-year, data showing that Apple sold 12.7 million tablet computers worldwide in the first quarter, up 64.3% year-on-year, proves that Apple ultimately took up most of the tablet computer market's demand growth dividend amid the epidemic.

Samsung, a representative of the Android camp, sold only 8 million tablets in the first quarter, and Lenovo, the number one in the PC market, sold only 3.8 million tablets. The combined sales of their tablets are not as much as Apple's.

Obviously, relying on low prices to seize the market has become an impossible task for the Android camp. In fact, the fate of Android tablets has already been decided by the market in advance.

The long-term slump in the Android tablet market

"Depressed" is the best description of the state of the Android tablet market before the epidemic.

The Chinese tablet computer market has been declining since 2015. Although Apple iPad shipments have also plummeted in line with market trends, the higher average order value compared to Android tablets has given Apple the motivation to continue updating and maintaining its tablet computer product line.

However, the operating conditions of the Android tablet computer camp are completely different from those of Apple's iPad. The best-selling Android tablet computers on the market are generally priced below 2,000 yuan. The low price and the not-so-low cost have made Android tablet manufacturers not very active in the research and development of new products and the updating of old products.

Take Xiaomi as an example. Since the launch of the Xiaomi Tablet 4 in 2018, which abandoned the productivity market and turned to projection, audio and entertainment, it has ceased operations and has not launched any tablet products until now.

Tablet products from small companies such as Teclast are still common on the market. Compared with the iPad, their biggest advantage is that they are more than half as cheap. However, due to the low price, many consumers do not want to buy them again after buying them once. Over time, Android tablets have been labeled as "low-end" in their minds.

By 2019, China's tablet computer market ended four years of decline and finally achieved growth. However, during the years of overall decline, Android tablets, which were not valued by manufacturers, have entered a vicious cycle of "low sales-poor ecology". Even if the market scale expands, compared with the more complete Apple iPad OS ecosystem, the poor software quality of Android tablets makes it further and further away from being a "good-to-use tablet system."

The online education market is booming, and Apple has the last laugh

Over the past year, the pandemic has brought considerable changes to the education industry. According to official UN data, 1.7 billion students were forced to suspend classes last year due to the pandemic. With offline education models blocked, the online education market has begun to grow dramatically. In 2020, the number of related companies surged to 705,800, with a scale exceeding 250 billion.

Along with this comes the massive demand for educational equipment from students. The market for educational tablets that used to focus on built-in educational resources was booming, with shipments increasing by 29.9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2020. However, its own defects also paved the way for ordinary tablets to erode its market.

Compared with ordinary tablets, the advantage of educational tablets is the rich built-in learning resources, which makes up for the problem of insufficient Internet learning resources in the past. However, the disadvantages are also obvious. First, the price is relatively high. The price of flagship educational tablets is basically above 3,000 yuan, and the price of mass-produced products is also around 2,000 yuan. Secondly, the configuration is backward. Many flagship educational tablets in the same price range as ordinary tablets even use Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processors from 4 years ago, and the running speed is difficult to guarantee completely smooth.

Therefore, in the third quarter, ordinary tablet manufacturers represented by Huawei began to embed educational resources such as education centers in their products, and also equipped them with stricter parental control functions to help parents limit the content and usage time of their children. In this quarter, the sales of ordinary tablets with educational resources accounted for as much as 28% of the total sales of ordinary tablets.

With the same price, educational resources, and faster and smoother user experience, ordinary Android tablets have captured a considerable share of the tablet market. However, the good times did not last long. Apple followed up with a cheap iPad launched in the third quarter and began to reap the tablet market.

At Apple's press conference last September, it announced an iPad 10.2-inch 2020 model with increased performance but no price increase. Its processor was upgraded from A10 to A12 processor, which has stronger single-core performance than the 2020 Android flagship processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. There is a 15% performance difference between the two, but the price remains the same as the iPad 10.2-inch 2019 model.

At the same time, Android tablets of the same price are only equipped with mid-range processors such as the Snapdragon 730G, which are completely powerless against the powerful performance of the A12. This is undoubtedly a unilateral performance crushing of Android tablets by Apple.

In terms of content, the iPad does not have a built-in education center, but due to the explosive growth of the online education market, high-quality education resources on the Internet are now abundant to the point where they can be found almost everywhere. Taking the listing of educational applications in the App Store as an example, there were 2,701 applications listed in January 2020, and the number of newly listed applications rose to 3,098 in January this year, which has a scale advantage over the built-in education resources of tablets that are updated more slowly.

Secondly, iPadOS's comprehensive parental control function can also help parents control the applications and time their children use the iPad, and the effect is no different from the parental control function of other tablets.

After the launch of the cheap iPad with such a remarkable cost-effectiveness, the market response was quite enthusiastic. In the fourth quarter, Apple iPad global shipments reached 1.9 million units, a year-on-year increase of 19.5%. The good result has shown that Apple has once again become the winner in the tablet computer market.

Android tablets that are standing still and iPads that are all-round

Although IDC data shows that the tablet market share of manufacturers such as Samsung and Lenovo has increased significantly, the product dimensions of Android tablets have been "framed".

Unlike Apple, which has super high chip design capabilities, most tablet manufacturers (including Samsung) can only choose Qualcomm's flagship chips if they want to give their products the most powerful performance. However, even Qualcomm's most powerful Snapdragon 888 chip is 28.5% behind the A13 in performance, which can be regarded as more than one and a half generations behind, not to mention the more powerful AX series and M series processors equipped in the iPad Pro series.

Such a huge generational performance gap makes Android tablets unable to join the ARM VS X86 war. The product positioning has been limited to the fields of entertainment and audio-visual and light office, while the high-end iPad Pro has begun to enter productivity fields such as video editing that have extremely high performance requirements.

Compared with the consumer market, manufacturers can obtain higher profits in the commercial market, but the latter also places higher demands on the quality of their products. Apple, with years of self-development efforts, finally made the iPad Pro a tablet with almost no shortcomings, which also made the iPad Pro worthy of the strict requirements of the commercial market, built a moat against competitors from the product strength level, and stood firm in the high-end business market.

However, Apple has not abandoned the consumer market. The "increased quantity without increasing price" iPad and the newly designed iPad Air 4 launched last year, and the sudden update in 2019 of the iPad mini product line that was rumored to have been cancelled many times, fully demonstrate the iPad's ambition to develop an all-round layout, with the goal of occupying the entire tablet market.

Unfortunately, Android tablets do not have many trump cards to deal with the fierce offensive of iPad. With their upward channels blocked and the performance of products in the same level lagging behind, the only remaining position in the market is low-profit, low-quality tablets priced below 2,000 yuan, which ultimately creates the embarrassing situation of "Apple eats meat and Android drinks soup."

This situation is not only extremely unfavorable for Android manufacturers, but also for consumers, who lose the opportunity to see interesting and high-end Android tablets. Finally, I sincerely hope that Android manufacturers and chip manufacturers can catch up and let "a hundred flowers bloom" become the final situation of the tablet market.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.