I think the thing people are missing is that tablets tend to get replaced less than smartphones. They're less likely to get broken, lost, or stolen due to the fact that we aren't as careless with them as phones, in part because they're bigger, in part because they're useless for drunk texting, and in part because we take our phones with us everywhere and kind of forget it's not literally attached to us.
While much of the demand for new smartphones is without doubt driven by the perpetual improvements, much of it is also driven by theft/loss/breakage. A tablet from 3 years ago serves much of the same purpose as a tablet today, so is less likely to get replaced. There may very well be as many working tablets in circulation as smartphones.
Yep. It's just one data point but I picked up an iPad 2 when they first came out since I was going to be taking a fairly long trip around southeast Asia (from the US) and I couldn't see myself toting my laptop across all of those flights and several towns/cities. It wasn't a cheap purchase and it was definitely a bit of a luxury since I already owned a desktop, a laptop, and a smart phone.
Since then it's become pretty slow and a bit scuffed up with age (and even has a crack in one corner of the glass) but I can still use it as an ebook reader and to try out iOS-only apps as it's my only iOS device. For everything else, my other devices are more suitable. Phone is faster and more portable. Laptop is more powerful for more demanding mobile computing. Desktop is more capable still for media production and gaming. The tablet remains an "also ran" in my lineup. It still gets some use but not enough that I'm gonna shell out another $250-750 on a new tablet anytime soon.
Having been one of the first netbook owners, my guess is that the form factor novelty wore off.
It was great having something that portable, but the something that affected me maybe monthly at the most. Having a decent keyboard and screen is something that will affect you every day. Needless to say I am back using a normal sized laptop these days.
They looked cool. Everyone thought they'd have so much fun owning one. I mean, just look at all those young happy people in the commericals jumping up and down with their new Surface/iPad. So they got them.
Realized they are just oversized smart phones that can't make cell phone calls, can't be held easily with one hand, but can't be used for creating content like a laptop, or typing emails, and they look silly when used for taking pictures.
Eventually they end up on the nightstand, and used for reading news and looking at pictures in bed at night, before falling asleep or given to kids as babysitting devices.
I waited a long time to buy a tablet, because I had a phone, a netbook, a Kindle, and a laptop. I couldn't figure out where it fit into that equation.
But, since getting a Nexus 7 on sale (partly because I wanted to tinker with making mobile apps and wanted to have a tablet sized device to test on) I've found a number of use cases that I didn't realize I had.
The best, most useful, thing is that I use it to work on my Spanish language learning. For the first time in my life, I practice my Spanish every day; for a few minutes before sleep, for a few minutes after waking up, and it replaces my Kindle for restroom visits. I've found my reading comprehension is better than it's ever been, even better than when I spent two years in Spanish class in high school and when I spent more than a month traveling deep in Mexico (where nobody speaks English) after just a short time. Duolingo and Memrise are great tools...so great that in a few more months, when I'm confident in my Spanish, I plan to focus on French. You can use both tools on a laptop, but I don't take my laptop to bed or to the restroom. And, the phone is just a little too small to be effective for this purpose, IMHO.
Likewise, I've found more time for doing online classes...the screen is big enough for videos, but switching between tabs or apps is tedious enough that I don't get distracted the way I do on my laptop or desktop. Again, a use case I discovered after getting the tablet.
I am a bit slow to adopt new stuff like this (but an early adopter of other things; I had a pager for years after everyone else has switched to cell phones, but then got a Sidekick very early in the smart phone story, because there was finally a thing I would want to use a phone for: Browsing the Internet and reading mail), so I dunno what that means for the general case, but I really like my tablet. It gets more use than my phone (because I literally hate phone calls, so my tablet does everything the phone does only better, except fit in my pocket and work without wifi).
"Eventually they end up on the nightstand, and used for reading news and looking at pictures in bed at night, before falling asleep"
Which is a pretty good use case, too. I won't buy a new Kindle when my current one dies (if it ever dies...my first Kindle lasted five+ years before I dropped it on the tile bathroom floor one too many times and cracked the screen), because a tablet works just as well for that use case and has many other uses.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but Kindles are way better for just reading. Besides the eInk, which is much easier on one's eyes, it's the lack of distractions that lets you actually lose yourself in a book. No notifications and beeping and "maybe I'll check twitter".
I kinda agree about the e-ink, but I've turned off every possible notification on my tablet. My least favorite thing about phones and tablets is how insistent they can be. Facebook chat heads make me wanna burn facebook to the ground so they can do no more harm to the world. So, on the distraction front my tablet is only slightly more difficult to focus with than the Kindle. And, I find it handles books with images much better (travel books, books with maps, art and design books, etc.), tech books with screen shots, etc.
I have actually delegated my Kindle and my Nexus 7 to specific roles. The Kindle is for reading literature, exclusively. The Nexus is for everything else. It even helps me distinguish between leisure time and work/study time (kinda like that rule for addressing insomnia of "don't do anything in bed other than sleep and sex").
Yep, but if someone's argument is "tablets are worse than kindle for reading books because I get distracted" then is it really a fault of a tablet that it allows you to do many things at once, or yours that you can't concentrate on one thing? I am not a saint, I get very easily distracted too,but I would not make such an argument.
It's like the difference between trying to work with your kids running around and working in an office. Theoretically they're both just places. In practice, one is much more conducive to certain activities.
The eInk is a technical problem. I'd be sluggish in replacing a tablet, and might not ever; I haven't powered mine on in months. I'd replace my kindle immediately.
It took them a while to get there, but modern phones are converging on the same size as the Nexus 7; a 4" screen was too small for many things but I really don't think there's a lot that you can do on a Nexus 7 that you can't do on a Nexus 6 / Note 4 / Iphone 6+. (I also hate phone calls but you can turn them off if that's really the issue). That inch-or-so difference doesn't seem worth bothering with an extra device for, IMO.
I convinced dad to buy a Surface Pro 3 in place of a new laptop. He finds it far more useful - he can use it in more places than the laptop, and generally more comfortably.
I honestly think the issue is that mobile OSes are not useful in a tablet form factor. Microsoft, although not getting the delivery perfect with Windows 8, were at least pushing in the right direction.
Well, in fairness, a Surface Pro is more like an ultrabook "plus". It's got relatively high specs for a consumer laptop and runs a full laptop OS in a fairly compact form factor. Add on the touch screen and digitizer/pen and you've added most of the features of a tablet to your notebook (the exceptions being that it's a bit larger/heavier than an iPad or a Nexus tablet and the battery life is more in line with a laptop than a mobile-grade tablet).
Still, the tradeoff is worth it for many people depending on what's more important to them--battery/weight or power/flexibility.
I'm amazed at the 'tablet are consuming devices'. Apple may have built a nice walled garden as a platform turning iPads into such. But seriously it's all a software problem. The hardware is far more than capable.
Great to hear that; what kind, and through what apps ?
I'm amazed at the loss we're facing. Something is odd. In the 80s game developers created their own tools from scratch. Now it seems people lost the desire to take advantage of computers. If it's not a desktop then you can't edit a video or compose music, etc, etc ...
Mostly written stuff - I'm a computational epidemiologist, so not heartbreaking works of art or the like. But for me, and actually "doing work", the iPad has the following really nice features:
- For whatever reason, the iPad does not do the thing normal computer screens do when reading papers, which is to make my eyes slide right off them. So while not content creation, it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this.
- I use either iA Writer or Pages to actually write content, and cut away all the distractions of working on a laptop (like say, Hacker News...). Usually commentaries, discussion sections, introductions - things that need more writing and less clever table formatting. I also use this to write posts for my blog (www.variancehammer.com) which is about Warhammer 40K and my mostly data-driven musings on the game.
- iSSH for SSH access to the cluster, and the sweet, sweet computational power that follows. There's something thrilling about launching cluster jobs from my bedside.
- Keynote for presentations
- PythonMath and Textastic for some musing and prototyping.
- TouchDraw for brainstorming model flow diagrams and the like and having them on-hand later.
> ...it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this....
I also like Papers on the iPad.
My reading mode for academic papers, using the dedicated app on the iPad, is different than on my laptop (or the laptop tethered to the big monitor). I'm better able to deeply read on the iPad because it's dedicated to that one task.
I probably spend about equal clock-time reading papers on both platforms -- on the laptop I read 2 pages from each of 20 papers, and on the iPad I read 15 pages from each of 4 papers.
But I have to note: I don't create content there, I consume it.
Have you tried using a touch-pad to rotate or move something lately? Twist your wrist in all kinds of unnatural directions, slide your fingers at unintuitive rates, and maintain the perfect amount of pressure as you drag something without dropping it in a location you can't easily 'undo' from...
It's a software issue, it tooks a few years for people to develop desktop widgets, plus a few more for highend software to find better paradigms. I think people just dropped the ball on tablets because the money is made on other apps.
That's a valuable point. That said, let's not underestimate the capabilities nature built in us; our hands didn't evolve to play piano or guitar either.
I won't ask people to grow internal and external skills as refined as actual musicianship, but with proper understanding of human memory and tactile sense, I'm sure one can find an interaction paradigm that will turn a tablet into another kind of bicycle for the mind.
This argument may have been true 3 years ago but they're all vastly easier to carry around in one hand without getting fatigued now. The iPad Air is incredibly light for its size and I was able to use it for hours at a time without wanting to put it down like the older iPads. The retina Mini I have is even lighter.
I agree with everything else you say though. They're great for consuming web content, but I barely use mine for anything else now. If I actually got a phablet like the iPhone 6 Plus, I would probably end up selling my mini altogether because everything I do on my iPad I could do on my iPhone with a larger screen.
My Samsung tablet is a pain to hold because it's got buttons on the sides, and buttons on the bezel. I'm always trying to find a way to hold it that doesn't press a button.
On one hand, I'm honestly surprised that this is still an issue these days.
That's the issue I had with tablets back in the early 2000's when MS was pushing them, every time I picked one up I turned something on or off, drove me batty.
I may be missing something here (it's really late) but I'm able to quite easily hold and type on my iPad quite easily, in fact its happening right now.
I've found that I moved most things to the iPad mini when I first got it. Dropbox + editorial (Python scripting!) + workflow and an updated IFTTT has me rarely reaching for my MacBook pro or heading to the iMac or Mac Pro.
Also Procreate (absolutely awesome app) has me sketching and painting again, now that I don't have to carve out space in my life for an easel and paint gear.
Hmm, this I guess has expanded beyond your comment and into being a bit of a reply to the no content creation mantra in a comment below, but there it is.
With 6" phones with great batteries, I just didn't have any more of a tablet use case. I'd have loved to have a Nexus 7 phone, but Google send intent on blocking that. So a Chinese 6" Android and it handles a surprising number if scenarios. I just wish it were another inch bigger.
The 2013 N7 was pretty ideal. It won't fit in my shirt pocket, but it fits in my pants pocket. Or jacket. There aren't that many times when I really need something that fits into stylish clothing pockets (I made a conscious effort to notice).
The N7 is easier to type on, and the one arcade game I play (emulator called Pinball Arcade) works so much better on the slightly larger device. So now I just play pinball a lot less.
VoIP isn't a real option. For instance, yesterday I had to reactivate one SIM at the airport, and could only do it by making a real phone call on the SIM. Google intentionally disabled this on the N7, and even people that hacked up the ROM couldn't get it working. And many times when I want a phone/SMS, for "emergencies", I don't want to hope my data is working well enough.
Same story for me. I owned a 2012 Nexus 7 because phones weren't big enough to use for much. Now I have an Xperia Z Ultra and couldn't be happier. It's so good it has replaced my desktop for a lot of web browsing and media at home.
A phablet with a big battery plus not-ultraHD screen would solve the abysmal battery life problems of modern phones... it's likely thinness suffers though?
Huawei Mate 2 ($300). It has a 4000 mAh battery, and I get 30-40+ hours out of it. I couldn't ever go back to having a "day long charge" requiring seeking out power within 24h.
The problem is that Huawei ships a terrible, messed up version of 4.3. Complete with a button to accidentally force close all programs (and boast about memory "freed"). And a shiny button bar, instead of just black. And bits of Engrish, which would otherwise be endearing, on the custom apps. It sucks. But if I could run Cyanogen on it, it'd be the best phone ever.
There's also the Blu Energy with a 5000mAh battery, but I don't know how good the phone is yet (it's only $150). Blu seems to ship mostly stock Android. The problem is they have many dozens of models (most under $200, a few around the $100 point), so it's hard to figure out what's what. They seem to be targeting Latam with cheap-but-nice devices, like Vivo Air. If they'd focus on a couple of top models, they could easily become the dev phone of choice. Not sure what the unlocking situation is.
I wrote a novel using Word on a Thinkpad Tablet 2. It's a 10-inch Windows 8 tablet with an Intel Atom CPU.
I know I'm in the minority, but I don't mind writing long texts on a touchscreen. For me, the Windows 8 keyboard worked much better than the iPad keyboard though -- I'm not exactly sure why, but the layout and visual style were more suitable for my habits.
I think part of the reason why I like to write fiction on a tablet is that it's a different typing experience from my day job. It switches off the code-typing habit and forces me to write differently.
What's falling is the price of tablets. They're below $50 now on Amazon, with a 1-year warranty.[1] Low-end tablets are already starting to replace restaurant menus and TV remotes.
Phones are personal devices. Tablets are more place-oriented; they'll be in office conference rooms, hotel rooms, and restaurants for whomever needs to use them. They'll be too cheap to steal, and tied to a local WiFi key so they're useless elsewhere.
The main problem is keeping them charged. Phones have individual humans slaved to them to tend to their needs, but place-oriented tablets do not.
The wireless charging industry needs to get their act together, unify their three competing standards (Qi, Powermat, and A4WP), and get a charging unit into every business hotel room and airline tray table, then start on conference room tables.
What do you think of the Jolla/Sailfish tablet? It raised almost 5X of their target and pre-order demand has been so strong that they reopened the crowdfunding campaign. Sailfish is a descendant of Nokia Maemo/Meego, with Android compatibility.
Strong demand for a crowdfunding campaign perhaps. However it's really a drop in the ocean if you compare their 18k funders to the estimated 259 million tablets that'll be sold in 2016.
Edit: I jumped a year ahead. A better comparison would be to the 233.4 million that are estimated for 2015.
It's indeed a mere droplet among total tablet sales. But given the obscurity of Jolla, it's surprisingly strong demand for something not being provided by other tablets. This could mean that slowing demand may due to current tablets, not the tablet market itself.
If we assume that there are at least 2 million Linux enthusiasts in the world, 10% of them have heard of Jolla, and 10% of those are willing to spend disposable income on a new kind of Linux device... That gives you a market of 20k people.
So I'm not convinced that Jolla really offers anything compelling to anyone else except a subset of Linux fans.
Their top feature being promoted is "privacy". That's a property of their business model rather than technology, one which could be of interest to more than a subset of Linux fans. Time will tell if Jolla can keep Linux invisible to users.
In theory, Sailfish could sandbox/isolate native app data from the compatibility layer which runs Android apps. Whether they will expose a sufficiently granular policy/management API is an open question.
I think the overall failure, one that will be familiar to ecologists, is that things with a logistic growth curve look very much like exponentially growing things for quite some time - and then hit a wall.
If you build your expectations based on that exponential bit, and then you hit market saturation/carrying capacity, well, you get exactly the narrative currently surrounding tablets.
I used to do ecological modeling. So many theories and models break down once you put logistic constraints. I suspect that even with this current trend of "big data", we will hit limits of what is storable.
Lets not kid ourselves about Web apps. We get control, but working with JS, limited APIs as well as rewriting everything that an OS would provide in God knows what ever framework of the day is horrific. As someone who splits time between .NET, iOS + OS X and JS, I weep every time I have to touch JS.
An app store is actually a really good way to curate content. Sure we always hear about the 15% of devs who have issues with it, but for the other 85%, they are doing just fine. It's more good than bad.
Tablets are going to be consumption devices. I think mobile phones are seeing the same sort of stagnancy as PCs/laptops did a few years back. We no longer want faster hardware as we did say, 7-10 years back on a laptop. Mobiles have gotten to being pretty fast but there's nothing extraordinary happening there. Large screen, better resolution, faster processors, fine. We wanted that from PCs and laptops, and they've become that. Improved batteries and cooler phones will be an improvement, but they will not be a game changer. Tablets are seeing the same trend.
I think the big game changing, market capturing products will be smartwatches, VR glasses, electric cars, practical (faster, affordable, standardized) 3D printers and anything else that I've missed out. We're craving to see something completely different and experience them at least once, even if they fail so we're waiting for the right products.
I think tablets would be great for specific tasks. Police could make reports in the field, picking and checking off orders in a warehouse or a waiter could take orders on it. But as it is now, both Apples and Googles ecosystem are so tightly coupled with the owner of the device, it's hard to use them in an shared environment.
And also as they function as multipurpose devices, the user have so many ways of screwing things up.
There should be a manufacturer of generic tablets that are made to boot right into a single purpose application. There would be countless appliances for such a device!
> both Apples and Googles ecosystem are so tightly coupled with the owner of the device, it's hard to use them in an shared environment
I don't know about Google's devices but Apple's Configurator allows businesses to manage devices that are shared between multiple users. The iPad can be put into "kiosk mode" in which it boots to a single application. In this mode it's not possible for the user to exit the application or run any other application.
I work on a point-of-sale iPad application for agents in stores and it's working out very well for our customers.
It's a till. With the pen and paper system, you eventually need to key it in to the till anyway, so why not bring the till with you? If you have one of these: http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/mobile/payware-mob... you can take payments on it as well.
It also sends the order through to the kitchen immediately, so the waiter is now free to serve other customers rather than going back and forth to the kitchen. A small time saving, but everything adds up if you're busy.
Once an order is in the system, it can be retrieved by any staff or manager from any till or handheld.
It's targeted more at the chain restaurant where the till is the tip of a large reporting and logistics iceberg, rather than mom-and-pop small restaurants.
Most likely reason is the same reason I haven't bought a new tablet for some time: tablets have a longer life span. The things it could do several years ago are the same things I'm having it do now. Nothing has changed. So why spend money on a new tablet that will be used for something my existing tablet does now?
Are they falling out of favor, or do people just not need to buy a new one every year or two?
I use a tablet every day for half an hour. My biggest use case is for reading magazines, blogs, sites, news, etc while i eat breakfast or while i sit on the couch.
This is very similar to how I use my tablet. I don't do that every day as a routine, though, as I'm in front of a computer all day.
Tablets are "cool" but I think we're still discovering how we really use them and this is not necessarily in the same way that the advertisement or the salespeople describe.
I use my Nexus 7 for two hours a day, every week day. One hour on transit to work reading Reddit, News, etc and one hour on transit home watching Netflix.
I'm soon to be looking to upgrading to a slightly larger and faster tablet for the same 2-hour-a-day job.
The problem is that outside of certain niche uses, tablets objectively blow goats. No one really likes poking at a touch screen for serious work, especially for typing stuff in; for that the keyboard and pointer have served us well and will continue to. If the tablet is to survive as a general purpose device it will be as thr CPU/display component of a more complete computer system, which can be plugged into, or wirelessly pair with, the other peripherals in a console or laptop form factor. I think Asus had the right idea with their Transformer line and if you take something like that and put a regular OS on it, you have a compelling portable device.
I don't know if I'd call them niche. They cover the basis of what most people do outside of work. Texting, browsing, watching videos and playing games. Granted I do not currently own one because I do not consume much content outside of going through Flipboard every day. However I will buy an iPad because I can access my virtual desktop and I'll just use a bluetooth keyboard and trackpad and utilize it just like my desktop at work.
Stage 1 after the iPad came out was a boom of epic proportions. This was great in some ways because it helped finance the development of new hardware technologies, especially in regards to mobile cpus, batteries, and high resolution screens. But there's a dark side to this boom. It was actually too easy to make a huge profit, which led to laziness and a lack of true innovation. Thinner/lighter/higher-res/faster is great but that's only half, at best, of the end user experience. Tablets more or less languished as little more than what they started out as: glorified content consumption devices.
But tablets and the general "space" around the tablet idea have so much greater potential than the iPad-like experience we've mostly had so far. But because there wasn't much pressure to do more, and money was still raining from the sky, that sort of thing hasn't been much explored. As the tablet market experiences hardship and contraction we'll see that innovation come forward (because it'll be the best way to make the most money in that market) and we'll see a renaissance in tablets over the next couple of years (I hope).
I don't understand why tablets haven't grown. Here we are 5 years after the release of the original ipad, and they're still mostly 10" or smaller. With phones now encroaching on tablet screen sizes, I think it's time for someone to trot out and ultra-thin/light 14" or 15" tablet. Sure, it sounds crazy, but then so did a phone with a 5" screen when the original Note came out. For tablets to really take off, I think they need to define a category that sets them apart from phones - and to me, that means bigger screens, real multitasking, and increased potential for productivity. Everybody says that tablets are going to destroy the laptop market. That may be the case, but first I think that they need to be able to actually function as decent laptops replacements. So there are both hardware (screen size, input, thickness, and weight) and software problems to crack.
That being said, I think that the case for a tablet over a laptop of similar size/weight is a pretty tough sell, and long-term, convertibles will reign supreme ... and so, my final conclusion from this is that even though I rather dislike the 'tablet' interface baked into Windows 8, once the appropriate hardware exists to support it, I think that Microsoft's concept of a convertible OS is actually a pretty solid one ... although I firmly believe that the UI for 'desktop mode' cannot be the same as the UI for 'tablet mode', even though combining them seems to be Microsoft's ultimate goal. I think that a better goal would be an application framework that allows a single application to shift between modes, without losing state, without restarting. I am looking forward to the day that somebody solves both the hardware and software problems in a single machine.
My tablet has been replaced by my Chromebook for everyday usage. I like my keyboard and not having to "set up" the screen for viewing. With a tablet you have to hold it in your hands or get a fancy case or prop it up against something. And I cannot escape my love for the tactile keyboard! Does anyone actually enjoy writing and editing emails or comments on a tablet versus a keyboard?
Touchscreens have one big win over keyboards: they can work with any language. Never great, but always better than the wrong keyboard. For instance I'm currently writing on a Japanese keyboard: I cannot write in French with it because I cannot input accents in an acceptable manner.
I could get away with either an American or a French keyboard, but I have none at hand (well, technically there is one, but an accident involving a cup of coffee makes it only useful to write text without the letters 'u', 'i', 'o' and 'p'). So when I need to write French I write it on my iPhone and email it to myself, then copy-paste...
Sure, I write most of my HN comments on my iPhone or iPad. It'll work better when Apple fixes that completion bug. My girlfriend no longer even uses her Mac, she just reaches for the iPad.
Anyway, we could exchange anecdotal stories all day. A quarter of a billion tablets is still pretty good. They sell 50 million more PCs? It's really only a matter of time. If Apple doesn't evolve the tablet, Microsoft will.
I still love my iPad 2. I read flipboard, ibooks and kindle on it in bed. That said, its still an iPad 2, I don't need to upgrade it for 4-5 years (which makes me due for an upgrade soon).
I'd be more interested in a bigger iPad Pro if it could retain the design and lightness of the iPad air.
Give me a break. In ten years everyone is going to have a tablet on every table. Once they become available in large formats, super thin and semi-flexible with great battery life, and at a cost anyone can afford, paper will have finally met its match. Maybe then we can talk about a slow down in the market. The current dip is just a typical market ebb.
I've noticed this too, most iPad owners I know simply do not renew it, because they don't need the extra power. I've updated an iPad 2 because its screen is cracked, but I still use it from time to time. The iPad Air 2 is of course much faster, the screen is much better, and it's lighter; but for casual browsing the iPad 2 is still mostly good enough.
If you look at the App store market, there have been no killer apps for the ipad for a long while. I mean, when was the last app as awesome as Paper by 53? The inability to make a living from the App Store has put the development of killer apps to a halt.
And on android, since there's less distinction between tablet and phone apps as there is on ios, there's very few tablet-only apps, so nothing really takes full advantage of the interactivity that is possible on a bigger screen.
Last nail in the coffin is ever-bigger phones.
I'm an ios developer by day, and i'm seeing less interest in ipad apps by clients. Most are now happy to simply scale up the phone version.
I'm still not convinced on a bigger phone eating the iPad's lunch. The canvas on iPad has awesome potential, maybe one day someone will take advantage of it.
You're right, it has awesome potential, and said potential has been realised in the past with apps such as Paper and Cook. But due to the race to the bottom in app prices, nobody can make a living out of the App Store any more (besides cheesy games) and thus we're seeing very few great apps any more.
Perhaps they can cooperate with a company like Wacom to allow the screen to be used as a drawing canvas for styluses with pressure/angle sensitivity etc.
I have a tablet and I haven't used it since I got a chromebook. It's light, cheap, and the keyboard makes a good stand. Plus I can switch between linux easily and its got a x86-64 which means I can run any programs I want.
As the article says, there is little reason to ever replace tablets. Consider that Apple is still selling the first-gen iPad mini, which is on par with the iPad 2 from 2011! And if someone bought an Android tablet in 2011, it probably still makes for a good mobile movie player.
> Not long ago, we were assured the iPad and its ilk were destined to dominate our everyday lives.
I find it really hard to estimate how much people do use tablets since most tablets (I assume) only have Wi-Fi and are left at home. All we have as a proxy are sales numbers and web statistics. My iPad certainly has its spot in my everyday life.
I've always found them to be almost totally redondant with my laptop. They're barely less cumbersome than a small laptop, and don't offer new functionalities. In some occasions, they may be slightly more convenient than a laptop, but they can't replace it for very long. And it's an additional device to take care of (charging, syncing, updating and so on...). It may sound extreme, but honestly I think that even if there were free, I'm not sure I would have one as it would mainly be extra clutter.
It's weird that most of the comments are about whether tablets are useful or not, rather than tablets simply starting to saturate the market for them. For example, everyone (rhetorical everyone) needs a phone, but not every member of the family needs a tablet. Or that it's useful for a tradesperson to wear a phone while working, but not a tablet. Tablets were never going to be as widespread as phones.
Many people used Blackberries as content creation devices, even when they were hampered by restrictive carrier policy. What excuse do tablet manufacturers have for creating restricted-use devices? It's not like tablet OEMs make money from media companies that mandate consumption-only use cases.
"The iPhone 6 Plus is two-thirds of the height of the iPad Mini 3 and has a higher resolution screen." - well, that's simply not true, no? Ip6 Plus has a FullHD screen, while the iPad Mini 3 has a Retina Screen(2048×1536 px).
Blame the short-sighted greed of Verizon and AT&T, for jacking up the price of wireless data beyond reason after Steve Jobs died. My iPhone is essential while my iPad is "nice to have" because my iPhone is always connected and always has a high speed, unlimited data connection to the Internet. I pay full price for iPhone upgrades to keep my unlimited data plan (although each time it reminds me how dearly I'd love to ditch Verizon forever). My iPhone goes everywhere with me, but my iPad typically stays at home because of its lack of wireless. I will never buy a metered data plan, nor does it seem reasonable to me to pay separately for an extra device, which is functionally for me just a bigger screen. If my iPad had always on, unlimited wireless broadband, I'd take it with me almost everywhere, too.
If that were true, then other countries might see more use, as they seem to have more sane options. But even in the US, you can walk into a grocery store and get a SIM with "unlimited" (3GB at real speed) for $50 a month. Maybe less for data only. I'm trying NET10 now and they seem fine. And I see adverts everywhere talking about shared plans. Maybe your problem is looking at Verizon, which is notoriously hostile.
Ultimately cost is always at least part of the problem. You want to compare a niche, point solution to a general solution (always connected, first option for mobile everything).
People are wondering why iPad sales have seemingly topped out, while iPhone sales are soaring. Like it's inexplicable magic or beyond the limits of comprehension.
The iPhone delivers greater value at a lower cost. Whoa. Crazy.
The wireless carrier business is nearly a duopoly in the US, and both are essentially legacy businesses whose pricing models are inconsistent with modern Internet usage. Once a viable modern carrier at scale enters the market (think wireless analog of Google Fiber, deployed everywhere), I'm done with AT&T and Verizon forever.
Wireless data prices are too high to interest me, and I'm sure they are much higher than the incremental costs the carriers have, but I don't think it is obvious that they can offer real unlimited data for reasonable fees.
There are countless many unmet needs and wants in the economy; and countless solutions which badly fit the problems that people actually have.
Steve Jobs strong armed the carriers into offering unlimited data for $30/month. With Steve Jobs out of the way, the carriers see 2GB a month as being equal to unlimited. They just fundamentally do not get it. This is by far one of the largest markets awaiting disruption.
I'm still wondering how such a disruption could take place (though I guess that's the whole point) due to the cost needed to compete with incumbents.
Even smaller networks (TMo with $30/mo for 5GB LTE and unlimited low-speed after, Sprint with unlimited voice/text/data for $50/60/mo) and the various MVNOs with similar plans are considered non-starters to many people because they can lack nationwide coverage.
I'm lucky enough that I spend 99% of my time in metro areas so I can get away with paying $30/mo for data and a handful of minutes that I rarely use anymore. But clearly the "big guys" are leveraging their legacy and reach to charge more for something others can't afford to offer.
I wonder what other sorts of ways there could be to offer nationwide voice and data coverage (or even just data) that enough people could access that it's considered comparable to the services offered by the bastard children of the "Baby Bells".
Honestly, I think that the iPad people will want (full-size, latest) is too expensive and that Android tablets are nowhere as near good as the iPad. There is more than enough time for all of us to split into X amount of devices. I sat down with a fresh iPad today, and I have to say it is incredibly well done. Apple put their heart and soul into it to create a superb experience.
I still believe mobile devices are the future. In the future most people will not have a traditional computer. And by most people, I don't mean wealthy, white and western, I mean most human beings, it is probably a true statement today, it will be even truer tomorrow.
The only people I see using tablets are older. Everyone I know without reading glasses uses their cell phones instead. Guess I'll age into a tablet but if I need a device too large for my pocket I'm bringing a laptop. All those blogs from three years ago proclaimed a tablet based productivity revolution that never materialized from my perspective. Tablets are just another consumption display for AARP members.
While much of the demand for new smartphones is without doubt driven by the perpetual improvements, much of it is also driven by theft/loss/breakage. A tablet from 3 years ago serves much of the same purpose as a tablet today, so is less likely to get replaced. There may very well be as many working tablets in circulation as smartphones.