Shipments of Chromebooks outpaced Macs in the US for the first time in Q1 2016, that’s according to data from IDC shared during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference today.

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Market intelligence company IDC predicts that the worldwide tablet market will continue to decline, with the category as a whole falling 8.1% over the course of this year – and Android seeing the greatest drop in share over the next few years. Android will, however, remain the market leader through 2019.

The greatest growth, it suggests, will come in the so-called ‘detachables’ segment – tablets with detachable keyboards – where Windows is predicted to see substantial growth …

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Vice president of market research firm IDC Bryan Ma speaking to CNBC last week after Samsung’s unveiling of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+:

If you look at the rest of the Android space, admittedly even the stuff they announced last night, it kinda just blends in with the rest of the market. I don’t know if there was that much that differentiated it from the rest of the pack aside from some minor features. And that’s what’s hitting other players like HTC… It’s really just the case where a lot of these products are becoming a lot of the same thing.

I’m not trying to be a negative nancy here, but to prove Ma’s statements here look no further than the “leak” of a purported new HTC phone that spread around the blogosphere this morning (mockup turned out to be one that popular leaker @evleaks created back in 2013). 6-inch display, 4GB RAM, 3,500mAh battery capacity, water-resistance, extremely thin bezel, similar rear design to every other flagship HTC smartphone from the past few years — nothing outlandish, nothing hard to believe.

And that’s kind of the point. It’s so easy to make up a spec sheet like this out of thin air, and there wouldn’t be many around to doubt that HTC might make another phone with just marginal changes. I could have made up a spec sheet in real-time as I wrote the post about it and mine would’ve been similar to the one that spread around this morning.

Not that this lack of annual user-facing revolutionary hardware changes is a bad thing…. expand full story

While Apple’s iPad continues to lead the tablet market, according to new data from IDC, its marketshare has dropped a few points year-over-year, and the overall market for tablets saw negative growth, based on units shipped globally. That’s according to second quarter 2015 unit shipments and marketshare over the same quarter a year ago, as Apple shipped 10.9 million units versus 13.3 million units during the second quarter of 2014. While the iPad continues to lead in the tablet space, IDC’s data shows Apple’s market share dropping nearly 3 points from 27.7% to 24.5%.

Samsung, the number two player in the tablet space, similarly saw declines in both units shipped and market share from Q2 2014 to Q2 2015. The Korean company slipped by a million tablets during the quarter year-over-year, falling from 8.6 million units to 7.6 million units, while its market share dropped a point from 18% to 17% … expand full story