While Apple drove the tablet sector in Calendar Q4 (Apple's Fiscal Q1 2023), overall worldwide tablet shipments only posted 0.3% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q22), totaling 45.7 million units. Lenovo's tablet shipments fell 49.9% and Amazon was close behind falling 31.1%. Beyond Apple's stellar quarter, only Samsung showed growth at 7.1% for the quarter.
IDC noted that "Tablets, which were once used mainly for entertainment, have gained momentum in a range commercial applications. Faced with a looming economic downturn and market saturation, vendors will need to focus on the commercial segment to drive sales in the coming years."
For Calendar Year 2022, Apple was the clear leader with 38% market share growing 7% year-over-year. Samsung was in second place with 18.6% market share and negative growth at 0.8% for the year as presented in the IDC chart below.
Meanwhile, for Chromebooks that were once challeging the iPad during the COVID pandemic, continued to contract in 4Q22 with shipments totaling 3.6 million units for a year-over-year decline of 24.3%. Shipments. For the full year Chromebook shipments were down 48% in 2022. In 2021, at the peek of the COVID pandemic, Chromebooks had registered an astounding 180.5% growth.
In Q4 2022, only HP delivered growth with an outstanding 116.7% growth. The over four vendors, Acer, Lenovo, Dell and Samsung were in negative territory. Dell fell 50.7%; Samsung fell 52.4%; Acer fell 43.4%; and Lenovo fell 24.6%.