Apple’s iPad Just Killed Google’s Entire Tablet Division

Google is giving up on its tablet efforts in the face of stiff competition from more popular tablet makers like Apple and Samsung.

The move was confirmed by a Google spokesperson, who told Business Insider today that the company would no longer pursue making its own first-party tablets. The Mountain View-based company is canceling two unreleased tablet devices in the process.

That means that Google’s last tablet (at least for the foreseeable future) will be the Pixel Slate, which has released back in October and saw a lukewarm reception among critics and consumers.

In addition to stopping production of those unannounced Slate successors, Google said that it would shift resources and focus its attention on its Pixelbook lineup.

“For Google’s first-party hardware efforts, we’ll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate,” the Google spokesperson said.

The two now-canceled future products were reportedly devices smaller than the 12.3-inch Pixelbook Slate. Before Google scrapped the project, those new tablets were supposed to launch sometime “after 2019.” After quality control testers found that the products didn’t meet Google’s standards, the company went scorched-earth and scrapped the devices and its tablet efforts in general.

Google’s tablet business has had a fairly bumpy road over the years. The company’s first tablet, the Pixel C, received mediocre reviews when it launched in 2015. It’s hard to pinpoint why this has been the case, but it’s likely because there really aren’t that many tablet-focused Android and Chrome OS apps.

The move also illustrates that it’s hard to keep up with the giants in this sphere. Apple, for its part, is by and far the largest tablet market globally with a lion’s share of the market.

According to Strategy Analytics, Apple’s iPads took the largest share of the global tablet market with a 27.1 percent slice of the pie in Q1 2019. Samsung came in second place with 13.1 percent. Google, for its part, didn’t make the top 5 list.

Google said it is shifting its tablet engineers over to its Pixelbook teams. Speaking of which, the company says it expects to debut new first-party laptops sometime this year.