If you’re looking for more evidence that tablet sales are shrinking, you don’t need to look far. Hours after IDC reported that the tablet market contracted in December for the first time since 2010, fellow market research firm Canalys issued its own gloomy prospectus on the shaky state of slates.

Worldwide tablet sales decreased by 12 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2014, Canalys reported Tuesday. That’s a bleaker take on the global market than this week’s report from IDC, which recorded a 3.2 percent fourth-quarter decline in tablet sales from the same period in 2013, though IDC lumped 2-in-1s together with slates in its findings.

However you define the market, client computer sales were down as 2014 came to a close, Canalys found. Taken together, worldwide shipments of desktops, laptops, and tablets fell 6 percent year over year in the fourth quarter, though full-year PC shipments of 528 million units were up 3 percent as compared with 2013.

IDC, looking only at tablets and 2-in-1s, found that global shipments for all of 2014 increased 4.4 percent from the prior year, to 229.6 million units moved.

A worrisome finding for market watchers is that Apple, while maintaining its market lead in tablet sales in the fourth quarter, saw an 18 percent decline in iPad shipments compared with the 2013 holiday period, according to Canalys. Second-place Samsung saw its year-over-over unit shipment numbers slip by 24 percent, the research firm said.

“Despite a strong sequential uplift in tablet shipments, the total market contracted for the first time in Q4, as expected,” Canalys senior analyst Tim Coulling said in a statement(Opens in a new window). “It was always going to be tough for Apple to repeat its stellar performance of Q4 2013, when it introduced the iPad Air. With an iterative product refresh this year, the drive to upgrade iPads was muted. But Apple accounted for over 30 percent of the market in Q4 and the strength of its ecosystem is helping it weather the storm in an increasingly competitive market.”

What’s still unclear from the Canalys and IDC reports is whether the standalone consumer tablet form factor is finally reaching a saturation point in terms of demand, or if the entrance of slate-laptop hybrids like Microsoft’s Surface has simply made it more difficult for market researchers to easily define the market.

Per Canalys, global desktop shipments slipped in the fourth quarter, but laptops held steady, in fact growing 1 percent in terms of unit shipments from the same period in 2013. It’s probably not wise to blindly blend the Canalys and IDC numbers looking for answers, but could there be something to the discrepancy in the two research firms’ reports? Tentative conclusion—hybrid systems that function as laptops as well as tablets actually did pretty well in 2014 all the way through the fourth quarter, while the boom years of the standalone consumer slate may well be over.