Why iPad plateaued: tablets are eroding the PC market, but the smartphone is the transformative new category
iPads and tablet growth — Apple's revenue has pretty much stopped growing. This chart shows the quarterly revenue the company has reported - a series of ever larger spikes upward around …
Context & Ripple Effects
Evans' argument lands on an arc that has been building for months: analysts flagged a consumer-saturation slowdown in tablet growth in January 2014 and again in March, and this piece gives it a sharper frame — Apple's quarterly revenue has stopped growing, which reads as the iPad hitting a plateau rather than pausing between refreshes.
What makes the piece travel is the reframing: back in January 2011, Canalys was folding iPads into PC shipments to show Apple 'growing' the PC market 241 percent, and by mid-2012 Strategy Analytics still had Apple at over 68% of a 24.9M-unit quarter. The syndication footprint here — TechCrunch, Fortune, Business Insider, The Atlantic, AVC and others all picking it up on or about April 26 — suggests the plateau reading hit a nerve precisely because it demotes the tablet from successor-to-the-PC to one device among several.
First-order effects
- Apple's investor narrative loses its second growth engine: with iPad revenue flat, the company's growth story now rests almost entirely on the iPhone upgrade cycle that GigaOM profiled in July 2013.
- PC makers catch no relief — the confirmed erosion of traditional PC sales by tablets continues even though tablet unit growth itself is decelerating.
Second-order effects
- Android tablet vendors chasing share against Apple's dominant install base face the same saturation wall, pushing competition toward price and low-end segments rather than premium differentiation.
- Analyst models built on the 2011-era framing — tablets counted as PC replacements driving a fresh multi-year upgrade supercycle — get repriced, shifting attention to how much revenue Apple extracts per active device rather than per quarter's shipments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry stops treating any single slate device as the next PC: computing consolidates around the smartphone as the primary platform, with tablets positioned as companion screens whose sales track saturation rather than transformation.
- That reordering pressures the whole analyst-and-vendor apparatus around 'post-PC' categories — measurement conventions like Canalys' iPad-inclusive PC stats become contested ground as the boundaries between phone, tablet, and PC blur commercially.
The trend: Tablets are settling into a mature, PC-adjacent replacement cycle far sooner than expected, leaving the smartphone as the category where platform competition and growth are actually decided.