Apple no longer dominates the tablet market it created

By Matt Rosoff

When the iPad first came out in spring 2010, tablets were a rarity. Of course, Microsoft and some of its PC partners had experimented with PCs in a touch-screen slate format, but those tablets never took off.

A year later, Apple was selling about 10 million iPads per quarter, and other manufacturers raced to capitalize on the trend. For a couple years, Apple was the tablet market.

As this chart from Statista based on IDC data shows, things have changed.

Samsung has come close to matching the iPad's market share for the last year, and nearly 60 per cent of tablets sold now come from a group of smaller players, with nobody consistently dominating that group. ( Lenovo is currently the biggest of that group with about 6 per cent share.) Meanwhile, the overall tablet market has been in decline for the last couple years - earlier this week, IDC reported that Q2 tablet sales were down 7 per cent from a year ago.