Tablets are far from being dead. Any look at television reporters in the field will show most of them reading from, or consulting, some kind of tablet.
Ditto for a lot of consumption of e-books, PDFs, etc.
This said, the OS for a tablet doesn't matter much anymore. I bought an iPad 1, then upgraded a few years ago to the iPad Retina, whatever model number that was. (Probably a 3, before the Airs or Minis or Mini Airs, etc.). It suits my purposes. I have a rather large collection of PDF papers and books, a lot of EPUB books, and some MOBI books. The iPad is a convenient viewer, at very high resolution, of this large library.
But a friend lent me one of her Amazon Kindle Fire devices a couple of years ago, and it was similarly excellent for movies, books (in her subscription). The night she lent it to me, a winter storm had closed access to my road. I ended up camped out in my car watching "Sons of Anarchy" episodes on her Fire and reading a couple of books on it till 7 a.m. when the road got reopened.
So, seen as a display device, the iPad is just one of many. (I got mine with 64 GB of SSD. The better to carry around tens of thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of PDF papers. As others have noted, Apple charges a higher premium for SSD. I expect market forces will drive tablets down to the approximate cost of "display plus SSD," as this is all they really are.)
Anyway, I use my Macs for serious work, my iPhone 5S for constant carry (as primarily a small Web access device, as my phone needs are pretty rare), and my iPad 3 for casual reading of documents in bed, in the bathroom, in my briefcase, etc. A 5-inch iPhone might be attractive, but would still not be my go-to device for reading ebooks and PDFs.
(And I just got a Mac Pro, the cylinder. But that's another topic.)
So I'm not at all surprised that iPad sales are dipping. That market is pretty much now based on "display plus SSD" and a lot of the customers have minimal SSD requirements.....they just don't store a lot of books or papers on their devices. The display price is the center of the calculation. So the Asus, Samsung, Kindle Fire, and other such devices do the job.
I do have a bunch of apps which run on both the iPhone and iPad (and with close analogs on the Mac) and which are quite good. But Android is getting most of the same ones, even from the same companies. The gap has closed to nearly zero now.
(BTW, the same calculus applies to Windows versions of tablets. Probably most users are using them as display devices for content, movies, news stories, music, videos, and maybe some e-books. So the vaunted connection to Window qua Windows, as with Mac qua Mac, is less important than it once was.)
From an Intel stock perspective, the fact that Mac sales are up, as are x86 sales in general for PC and other users, is encouraging. Unless ARM gets some big enterprise/server sales, it may be chased into the mobile-only niche.
--Tim May
