Growth has been increasingly hard to come by for the likes of Apple's (AAPL 0.86%) highly popular iPad tablet.
Apple received plenty of scrutiny when it issued a surprise drop in iPad shipments in its most recently reported quarter, although the decline wasn't actually as ugly as the surface-level number.
Source: Apple.
However, there's still the undeniable truth that the tablet market as a whole is careening toward maturity, and that growth for the entire category will likely be harder to come by across the board in the future.
And keeping that in mind, Apple's iPad recently received a key defeat in an important market at the hands of the likes of Microsoft and Google.
LAUSD says "so long" to Apple's iPad
Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District underwent a massive overhaul of its tablet program, one with which Apple had secured contracts worth upward of $650 million alone. However, LAUSD administrators recently underwent a change of heart and will no longer support Apple's iPad in as many as 27 different schools. Instead, they'll be providing six new options, including the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 and two different Google Chromebooks.
More broadly, though, this marks a symbolic defeat in the education market Apple heavily markets its iPad toward and raises even more questions about the growth underpinning Apple's tablet going forward. In the following video, tech and telecom specialist Andrew Tonner examines the news of Apple's tablet defeat in greater detail.
