Engineers reassigned to the development of laptops

Jun 21, 2019 06:58 GMT  ·  By

Google has reportedly abandoned the development of tablets, and the company killed of two different models that were under development.

According to a report from CW, the decision to ditch tablets was shared by Google with its employees in an internal meeting on Wednesday, with the company telling the team working on these devices they would be transferred to the laptop development unit.

The most recent tablet released by Google is the Pixel Slate back in 2018, and people with knowledge of the matter said the search giant was also working on two different tablets with smaller displays.

While the company hasn’t shared any info as to why it decided to abandon tablets, Google wants to continue the development of laptops that would help its Chrome OS push to move forward.

Meanwhile, the Chrome tablet market will live on thanks to third-party manufacturers, albeit it remains to be seen how many companies would continue to invest in such devices given that Google itself is stepping away.

The Pixel Slate will continue to be supported until June 2024, and software updates will still be released with improvements for tablets as part of the Chrome OS updates.

Tablet market to decline

And even if Google didn’t provide a reason for waving goodbye to tablets, the decision seems to be a clever one.

A forecast released by market research firm IDC predicts that the tablet market (2-in-1s not included) would decline by 4.4 percent until 2023. Shipments are expected to drop from the estimated 2019 total of 114.7 million units to 95.6 million units, and leaders Samsung and Apple are likely to account for the biggest part.

The market share of tablets in the “personal computing” device category would drop from 29.3% to 25.7%, mostly because customers seem to be more interested in detachable models and notebooks.