At last Thursday’s Apple event in Cupertino, California, CEO Tim Cook unveiled the newest generation of iPads — the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3. These tablets boast slightly faster processors and an improved camera, but Apple failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

In the era of big-screen smartphones, do we really even need a new iPad?

The new trend of supersized smartphones, or “phablets” as they’re sometimes referred to, may be causing consumers to question if it’s worth spending hundreds of dollars on a tablet at this point.

Rather than raising excitement, the iPad announcement reinforced that if you already own a big screen smartphone, there’s really no need to purchase a new iPad. The iPad Air 2 is 18 percent thinner than last year’s model and both the Air 2 and the Mini 3 come with Touch ID, Apple’s fingerprint sensor technology. The features were definite improvements from last year’s model, but nothing groundbreaking like we normally expect from Apple.

It seems that Apple is resigned to the fact that the iPad is nothing more than a niche luxury item made for travel and family gatherings. Instead of pushing the envelope, the new iPad only made minor upgrades to things that already worked well enough.
Tablets have always been in a gray area in terms of necessity. They aren’t small enough to carry around with you everywhere, nor do they pack enough storage or processing power to handle all the work that a laptop can. Tablets that double as laptops, like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, serve multiple purposes and were the type of innovation we were anticipating from Apple.

A faster processor is great, but there were very few complaints of slow iPads in the first place. An improved camera is nice, but smartphones are more efficient at taking photos without blocking the person’s view behind you. And when a company doesn’t even care enough to improve the battery life from one year to the next, you know the development team’s focus is elsewhere.

According to an Oct. 16 Business Insider article, Apple sold just 13.3 million iPads in the June quarter, a 9.9 percent drop year-over-year. The lack of creativity in the tablet line, combined with larger smartphones, implies that Apple might have foreseen the decline in iPad sales.

Ironically, Apple’s release of the iPhone 6 Plus only adds to the iPad’s demise. People are beginning to realize that the large-screen phones on the market, like the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, are plenty big enough for Internet browsing and the camera quality is actually better than the iPad’s.

Tablet sales across all manufacturers are starting to level off, not just Apple’s. Shipments of all tablets skyrocketed from 18 million in 2010 to 207 million in 2013, but are expected to increase only 11 percent this year, according to an Oct. 16 New York Times article. It’s reasonable to expect a company’s growth rates to dip the year following a new product launch, but the slowdown in growth is alarming for the future of tablets.
Last week’s event felt like Apple was waving the white flag on iPad innovation. This should serve as a warning to tablet manufacturers that “phablets” could soon overtake their market.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on October 23, 2014 at 12:01 am