Personally, I use a tablet for media (ebooks, tv, movies, etc), but as a programmer I need a real physical keyboard and acces to the programmer stack (vim, git, ssh, grep/awk, etc)... But honestly unless you're a student or business doing data entry I don't see the need for a full blown computer, though recent instability in the Android OS has made me wish linux tablets would get to the US market sooner rather than later.
John Gruber had a good observation about the charts published in Quartz (specifically the last one): "Apple has sold more iPads in its first 57 months than they sold iPhones in its first 57 months."
If Apple pumped out over 250 million iPads, a great majority of which is probably still in use, with the usual Android and Windows numbers the whole tablet population must be in the neighborhood of one billion.
I believe the "slower update cycle" explanation, and I'd guess many are waiting for wireless battery charging, nowadays the obviously missing hardware feature.
First of all, Gruber is absolutely right that there are still a whole lot of tablets being sold.
That said, sales have plateaued at best and there are probably a lot of contributors:
- Slow upgrade cycle as you suggest. I have a 2nd or 3rd gen iPad and I have absolutely zero reason to upgrade at this point.
- They are probably being squeezed to a certain degree. I find that, even with just an iPhone 6 rather than a Plus, I'm often more inclined to just read on my phone than go grab my tablet.
- I've probably become more quick to grab a Chromebook or some other laptop I have laying around than do anything half-way complicated on my tablet. So there may be some realization that tablets are sometimes more trouble than they're worth even for more complex mostly-consumption tasks.
- I suspect that we may end up with some sort of tablet and laptop reconvergence even though tablets took off in large part because the convergence between the two devices was broken.
Nah, tablets will be huge again. The key will be making them a better input device. Voice recognition, stylus, haptics, keyboards, touchless gestures: http://youtu.be/qKQCjwMDiPM
At the very least, sliding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse next to your tablet then having it turn into "laptop mode" would solve the problem.
>At the very least, sliding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse next to your tablet then having it turn into "laptop mode" would solve the problem.
I don't really disagree. This might well be what the reconvergence looks like--in combination with software changes that better bridge different modes of operation.
That said, you may also be right that enhancements to interfaces could make a tablet-type device qualitatively better than today while also pushing it in directions that are fundamentally different from the type of device needed to do the types of tasks we mostly use laptops for today.
I haven't done more than play with one but from what I've seen Microsoft has definitely done the best job of a (re)converged device today. Bu, for whatever reason, I think it would be hard to call it a really successful device so far.
The Surface probably needs another rev or two. Microsoft is doing a lot with Cortana. How long before I can sit down and write a small document with it, for instance, with the ability to make significant edits? It's also laptop heavy.
Microsoft is approaching the tablet by scaling down a laptop. I like it but it needs more work.
> I suspect that we may end up with some sort of tablet and laptop reconvergence even though tablets took off in large part because the convergence between the two devices was broken.
I tend to agree. The only tablet I own and use is a Surface Pro 3 (and not because of Windows, rather in spite of it--it's a great Photoshop machine for the money, and happens to be pretty good at some other stuff on top of that). I've got Visual Studio on it too, though I don't use it for development much because the Type Cover is crap. If I could get a stiff-hinge keyboard dock for the thing, it would probably be my primary game development machine (I use C# for that, day job stuff and web stuff is on my Mac). As-is, Photoshop and light browsing are what it's good for. And I think that's the basic point of overlap for bringing tablets into "work" modes - the transformable tablet/laptop, only actually good.
I'm a subscriber of the slower update cycle explanation as well. Everyone I know who owns a tablet is happy with what it does for a longer period of time. Have a look at iPhone refreshes versus iPad refreshes and you'll notice that the iPad follows the iPhone, so it should be no surprise where the iPad falls in the growth trajectory of the company.
Following that same line of examination (looking at refreshes), consider the impact of each refresh. What does a new iPad include?
Thinner and lighter? That's a nice to have, but is it cost-of-upgrade nicer?
Touch ID? How important is Touch ID to users who use the iPad casually. With an iPhone you're frequently operating the device with one hand, so Touch ID simplifies the authentication process. When you're using your device for payments, Touch ID is pretty damned incredible. Neither of these apply to the iPad. I'd love to have Touch ID on my iPad, but it's not worth the cost of an upgrade.
Better camera? I'm an outlier here — almost everyone I know uses their iPad as a camera, except me — but I'm just not sure this alone is enough to push people to upgrade. In the iPhone environment, all of these new features act cumulatively to make an iPhone upgrade worthwhile.
Larger size? Oh, wait. That's iPhone only, and it's probably one of the biggest drivers of iPhone 6/6+ sales. It's irrelevant to the iPad.
Tablets, as a product, involve a slower upgrade cycle because they're actually the more traditional product when compared to a device like the iPhone.
Yeah, I believe the slower update cycle too. I have two iPad 1's and an iPad 2, and while I'm definitely due for an upgrade, it doesn't get the same type of price reduction as a phone, so it'll just have to happen in its own time.
As for use - they are constantly getting used for games, movies, books, and web browsing. That is what they are good at. You want a clear use case - its that. My computer stays on the desk most of the time.
>If Apple pumped out over 250 million iPads, a great majority of which is probably still in use, with the usual Android and Windows numbers the whole tablet population must be in the neighborhood of one billion.
How so? Android and Windows tablets never sold as much as iPads and still don't. It might be 50-50 now, but not 3 times as much by any means.
I was guessing, but looking it up ... Gartner are talking over 200 million tablets per year, of which only 50 or 60 are iPads (according to the Quartz charts), so I'd say it's in the ballpark. (I'd expect the Androids to decay faster, though ;-)
I use my iPad all the time, but primarily for reading and watching movies and TV shows. My three-year-old iPad does these things great and there's simply no reason to upgrade.
My observation has always been, tablets; specifically iPads; are too expensive for what they are doing. That and just because its an Apple tablet doesn't mean I need to pair it up against an apple laptop. Hence cost comparison is done against other laptops which are priced even lower than the iPad at times.
Its hard to get excited by technology when every price point is four hundred and up. How many items do they want me to have now? phone, watch, tablet, and laptop? Far too many redundancies
I'm not going to deny they are expensive, which slightly taints my take on it, but I see tablets as the ideal consumer device and a terrible retailer device. Once you purchase a sufficiently powerful device there is no need to upgrade it in anything like the sales cycle that people like Apple are hoping for.
A yearly product update is useless for a device that is primarily used to view the internet, check email and watch Netflix or whatever. If it does that when you buy it, it will do it for 4 or 5 years. It lives on the couch or on the bed meaning general wear and tear don't exist much so replacement from damage is a low possibility too.
Apple even help out here because the App Store makes getting old versions of the apps that are supported on your version of the device (where available) transparent, thus the feeling of becoming out-dated is kind of non-existent unless you are a tablet gamer.
For example until last month both me and my partner used a Gen 1 iPad probably for 2 or 3 hours a day every day. I upgraded to a newer version mostly because JS heavy pages like the Guardian and Facebook had started to crash regularly. The latest iterations are so much more powerful that I don't see this being an issue for another 5 years at least.
Sales can be flat even though consumers can be happy with the tech.
While I agree with this, the unfortunate reality is that with the iPad specifically, older versions become useless as Apple pushes OSes that demand more from the hardware, and performance becomes a huge issue. And if it's not performance, it's storage space.
And opting out of the upgrade isn't much of an option, due to app upgrades that require the latest OS. And I guess you can also opt out of app upgrades, but then you're left with a 2-year-old+ device and 2-year-old+ software.
Maybe this is intentional. But for me, at least, rather than upgrading, I've learned to just move on to using a combination of my iPhone and MPB, and my iPad (3rd gen) mostly collects dust now.
I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised at how far the Netflix app had come when I installed it on the new device. It honestly didn't even cross my mind that we weren't getting the latest version and just assumed they had kept it kinda crappy. Still played videos though so it wasn't all bad.
This is what happened to me as well. I fought off the push to buy a tablet despite a lot of friends showing me theirs (and admitting that they were cool).
At the same time, I had a desktop for "heavy lifting" like graphic design and 3d animation, storing a big media library, playing games, etc. I also kept a cheap, portable laptop for the occasional times I needed to travel and wanted some semblance of computing from a hotel room or an event. For all of the other lightweight tasks, I had been using smart phones since the early Treo days so that was fine for email and looking up info.
But then I was planning a longer trip from the US to Southeast Asia for several weeks and it was going to involve a lot of hopping from town to town. Suddenly even my laptop was too much to carry when I already had everything on my back. I caved and bought an iPad 2 for a good deal more than I wanted to spend. They were still hard to find so I could only find the larger capacity models and the only Android tablet worth considering (Xoom) was not as capable and still cost about the same.
That iPad was pretty cool and I used it for a year or two before it just got to be a pain in the ass. Updates were de facto mandatory as you mentioned. Staying on old OS versions meant unsupported apps and constant nagging. But each OS update made the thing perform worse and worse. The hardware cycle was much faster than that of desktop/laptop computers at that point so I couldn't assume the normal 5+ years of usefulness I'd get from a laptop and there's no option to just install a lightweight Linux distro or downgrade. Even after I jailbroke it I couldn't really do much to speed it up. At this point, doing more than opening a single browser tab or lightweight application will make the thing lag and stutter and generall suck.
I think now it gets powered on a few times a year for me to check on updates and see if there's anything worth checking out. Haven't bothered selling it since it's my only iOS device and I figure there may be a point where I want to try some iOS exclusive so I keep it around for that.
And I guess you can also opt out of app upgrades, but then you're left with a 2-year-old+ device and 2-year-old+ software.
But what is the actual problem with that, if you use the tablet primarily as a convenient web browser, Facebook checker, e-mail sender, Netflix watcher, and maybe occasional casual gamer?
Apple has tried to force this kind of stuff onto its user base, but if my experience with family and friends is even remotely representative, the most common result is damaging their customer relations and making a lot of those customers buy exactly one Apple device ever.
The only people I know who have definitely had more than one iPhone or iPad either got a new device via work, got a newer phone "free" when they got a new contract with their network, or had much older versions with pre-Retina screens, much lower storage capacity, and other practical limitations compared to today's devices. To my knowledge, I don't know a single person who has actively and at significant cost paid for, say, a new iPad to replace their 3rd generation one.
In contrast, I know several people who have got some or even all of their money refunded as a direct result of app or iOS updates breaking things. That includes cases like taking a brand new iPad back to the store for a full refund the day after they bought it because they hated it that much (and then buying an Android tablet somewhere else instead) and taking an older iPad back to a store for a significant refund after arguing that the recommend iOS update had made it unfit to use and no mechanism to go back was provided (which was an argument that, to their credit, the store accepted, and they agreed on a modest refund given that the device had been in use for a number of years at that point but had had its useful lifetime abruptly cut off).
> For example until last month both me and my partner used a Gen 1 iPad probably for 2 or 3 hours a day every day.
Was it still holding a reasonable charge? That's what finally got me to ditch my gen 2 ipad. A plugged in laptop is one thing, but an ipad doesn't want to be tethered.
> Its hard to get excited by technology when every price point is four hundred and up.
Apple products have always been obscenely overpriced, this it a bit easier to digest when you move outside of the Apple ecosphere and new technologies do not have such a financial impact.
I think tablets are appropriately prices for what they do. A $399 iPad is a much better device than a $299 or $399 laptop. Better screen, longer battery life, doesn't get viruses, easier to use...
Plus, an iPad is 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost of an Apple laptop.
I was thinking of replacing my 3-year old iPad right until I saw the iPhone 6+. It's just big enough to where I can use it for everything I was using my iPad for - reading, browsing, email while relaxing in front of the TV. No need for iPad anymore.
I am in a similar situation. My wife and I have stopped using full size iPad 3 after buying an iPhone 6+. It is way easier to read stuff on the phone and do everything else. Also more and more websites are becoming mobile friendly, obviating the need for a large format screen to do stuff.
I bought a Galaxy Note 4, a similar sized phone, and I thought the same thing. In the end, I really missed having a tablet - a good 9-10" tablet is so much better to browse the web or play games on than even a phablet. I still love my Note 4, but when I'm home I'm typically on my tablet.
I always doubted tablets, and then I got an iPad (3? the first retina one) for the kids and for development purposes. That was a while ago now, and it never really caught on here. It just kind of sits there, sometimes going months between uses.
I think an average user has only so much time in the day to commit to "screen time" or some time spent in front of a screen for work or leisure purposes. Between my phone, computer, laptop and TV I am already spending 60-80% of my day staring at some type of a screen. The tablet doesn't help me do my work or leisure activities better than any of those devices.
The only reason I ever spend any time with my tablet is because I love to draw and I have the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with a built in Wacom digitizer (and even then I sometimes prefer to just pull out a sketchbook and a pencil).
My Nexus 7 is basically a glorified Reddit + YouTube device. It works quite well for that, but I've never really seen the appeal for using it instead of a laptop for most of what I do.
The iPad is a strange beast from an upgrade cycle. We were upgrading pretty fast at the start (upgrade ours, give our to others) particularly because of the iOS compatibility problems with older iPads. That changed in the last 18 months, we don't upgrade as aggressively and it seems like we can keep using our older hardware longer. The iPhone is an every two years item (buy, skip next, buy), and that doesn't seem to be changing.
I would bet on a bump with a bigger screen model which will put some distance from the phablet iPhones. I really see no reason for both an iPod touch and iPad mini.
Tablets are content consumption devices first, and productivity devices second. I love my iPad, but I see very little reason to upgrade it considering its perfectly suitable for reading books, browsing the web and watching the occasional movie / show on Amazon video, Fios etc...
I am also very jaded by how much performance degrades with every iOS update and refuse to get caught up in the "upgrade every year" Apple cycle.
>I am also very jaded by how much performance degrades with every iOS update and refuse to get caught up in the "upgrade every year" Apple cycle.
I haven't noticed any of this ever, except in the cases of bugs (stealing cpu for some apps etc) that eventually get corrected. And I update my iPad the first day any new OS version comes out.
I even still use my 2nd gen iPad update to the brim.
I still don't "get" tablets. What are they good for again? If I need/want to code (or type anything longer than a text message), I want (at least) a laptop. If I want to consume media while on the go, I care more about portability than anything else, so I use my smartphone -- it fits in my pocket so I always have it with me (unlike a tablet). If I want to sit up in bed (or on the couch) and read a novel, I use an e-reader. It's MUCH easier on the eyes (and I think I spend enough time staring at LCDs as it is).
There's nothing I want to do these days that would be better served by a tablet than a more specialized device. I bought a Gen1 iPad when they were new. It sat unused 99% of the time, until my kids got a little older (they love tablets, huh).
I'm similarly anomalous, for whatever that's worth. I prefer a feature phone and sometimes a tablet as well when I'm out but wanting some basic tools and connectivity. I use high-spec desktop workstations for most real work, proper servers for shared facilities and larger-scale storage, and a mid-range laptop for things like meetings or on-site client visits.
I don't really see the attraction of smartphones given the alternative devices you can use today -- they're sort of half-OK at lots of things but not really great at anything, and a lot of them seem to have worse stability, security and privacy problems than every other device I use put together.
Tables are great for consuming content. Think eReader for websites and YouTube. There also nice for phone games at home on a couch etc. The built in keyboards are good enough for a short HN comment, but not a novel. IMO, if you’re doing serious work then you want a laptop/desktop with a real keyboard not an Ultrabook.
What's important to remember is they don't really have moving parts and are unlikely to be dropped. So, they probably have fairly long update cycles after their 'good enough'. For example, I use my 2 or 3 year old iPad every day and other than wishing it was lighter I really see no need for an upgrade.
Me too, I agree with everything there. Bought an ipad mini in 2013, kids use it now for games (good for them ;) and I never use. Phone (that barely fits in my pocket) and laptop are enough.
I use iPad Air to read tons of technical papers, books, and magazines - and no - phone - just will not do for it, let alone lugging stacks of paper. I occasionally read fiction on an iPhone 6, but anything that has charts, formulae, source code, or good typography and photos (as in magazine articles) is a pain to read on a phone.
I also watch TV shows, videos and movies on iPad when I feel like doing it on a couch, as laptop is a bit too heavy and bulky and I just do not bother buying a TV set.
Reading papers on it was the killer app for me. Nothing else had a decent screen size/aspect ratio. If there was a huge e-reader that could handle pdfs properly I'd have gotten that, but there wasn't so I shelled out way too much money on an ipad. Very happy with it.
A lot of people do little more than web browsing, youtube, facebook, some other instant messaging (though that is more commonly done on phones instead), and maybe a bit of email. For that a tablet does rather well and can be more convenient to carry around than a laptop. That seems to be the most common use for ~10 inch tablets in my experience, I know many people who use them quite a lot that way.
If you have relatively large pockets a 7 inch tablet is quite carryable and does noticeably better for video and text reading IMO due to the larger screen unless you have a huge phone (though huge phones are getting more and more common - I use a tablet a less now I have a 5" phone screen).
You sound like you need at least one step more than that though, at which point yes you will probably find a tablet frustrating as it nearly does what you want but is far enough away to not be practical. Something like a transformer might work, but they tend to be pretty expensive. I have a "poor man's" version of that: an 8 inch tablet (both my winter and summer coats have large inner pockets!) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and a simple stand for when I need/want to use it more like a laptop. The tablet was less than 100ukp so the who kit cost a chunk less than a laptop or a transformer-style hybrid. It runs full Windows too which is a bonus for me (it means I can run anything I do at home rather than being limited to tablet apps) though the Windows desktop interface can be a bit fiddly at that size unless you drop the DPI a bit. There are similar 10 inch devices too if you want something with a bigger screen.
Of course a tablet may just not cover your use cases at all. Different strokes for different folks!
There is a lot of one-up-man-ship in tablet owning of course especially in the case of iDevices in my experience - in some circles having the latest of those is a style statement, and some people just get bought them as presents, though I'll stick to talking about more practical reasons for ownership!
I use mine almost exclusively for reading. I don't want an e reader because they don't have color and also because as far as I know you can't read pdf's on them
Not seen it mentioned yet but the 4g iPads make for a fantastic GPS replacement. £579 for 64gb 10 inch nav that is streets ahead of any manufacturers' system.
Another data point on upgrade cycle: I dropped my Asus Transformer and cracked the screen recently. While trying to make a repair-or-replace decision, I looked around for options with a similar rigid hinge detachable keyboard and came up unimpressed. All far too expensive; much easier to spend £20 and a couple of (slightly nervewracking and fiddly) hours replacing the touchscreen.
I suspect a large driver of phone replacement is more frequent accidents, loss, and theft.
A problem is that a lot of people who might get a computer, and use it to do/write stuff, get a tablet, and use it to watch/read stuff. Because it has no keyboard.
THIS! Who is paying these jackanapes to spew absurdities? The same people making money spouting prophecies of "tablets will kill desktop computing" are now being paid to spew prophecies of "tablets are dead".
The original author is a bit of a fool to discount the tablet upgrade cycle, IMO. Why tech forecasters always ignore the facts is beyond me. But then again, very few economist-marketing types have any idea what an externality is.
Here is a hint: "desktop sales are declining" is a natural consequence of "tablet sales are increasing", just as "stagnating tablet sales" is a natural consequence of "current generation tablet saturation".
I'd mind less if I weren't so frequently in conversations where I have to politely pretend that the person I'm speaking to came up with the latest Gruber article they're reciting to me.
Tablets are also better for non-technical users as their primary computing device. This is entirely a software issue and has nothing to do with tablet form factor except that is where this software philosophy became mainstream.
I don't agree. Apple and Microsoft have been entirely about making computers easier to use and bringing them to the masses for a long time. To the extent tablets are easier to use it's because they don't support multitasking.
You don't seem to disagree! Yes, they don't support multitasking. They're also very restrictive with limited application interaction modes. The primary interface is a full screen of evenly spaced product icons. All of these things are why they're good for non-technical users.
These restrictions also make them very malware proof. They're products which just work and don't much, if any, support or maintenance.
Microsoft and Apple could have never brought out a desktop or laptop with these kind of limitations before tablets became popular.
I think most smartphone users would disagree that no keyboard equals minimal text entry. Phones are hardly used for calls now.
But I also know a lot of people with keyboards for their iPads.
But really I think that most non-technical users aren't using their keyboard enough to really need one. If you are hunt-a-peck typer, a physical keyboard isn't that much of a necessity.
I hardly use my phone for calls either, but I'd still call the amount of text I can stand to enter into a touchscreen "minimal". A couple of sentences at a time, maybe.
I think the fact that I have been touch-typing since I was eight or nine actually makes it much more difficult to put up with touchscreen keyboards, because it's so difficult to make myself look at the keys instead of the text.
I honestly think that Apple will be able to reinvigorate iPad sales when they offer some new capability. The iPhone has (almost) always had a compelling reason to upgrade. My wife's iPad 3 Retina doesn't seem to perform better than my non-retina iPad 2. While I'm itching to replace the iPad (it's getting slow, app crashing, etc.) I'll be moving to a Surface Pro 4 (or 3 if I can't wait that long) or a $200-300 Android tablet depending on how I see my use cases playing out. I really like the idea of a 4-5" Android phone + an i5/i7 surface eliminating the need for a tablet and a desktop.
If there was a compelling new iPad coming out, we'd be on the hook for at least 1, and I imagine that many of the 250m iPad users would be ready to upgrade ASAP.
Then the question becomes, what would be compelling enough to upgrade?
- Possibly size, but probably not. A $600+ iPad in 10-12" would be hard to justify over a Surface.
- New sensors? Adding the PrimeSense 3d sensor (maker of the original Kinect, now owned by Apple) would enable a TON of new use cases.
- Multitasking?
- Ability to run OSX software?
Thinking about device types is backwards. The choice should be what cloud services from Google, Microsoft, Github, Bitbucket, etc. that we need to use and make sure that access to our working and entertainment data assets is simple on all device types.
As much as I like my iPad for web browsing, my Note 4 phone is much more part of my digital life because it can access my data assets and is almost always with me.
Microsoft seems to have hit a sweet spot with the Surface 3's and I wonder if Apple would ever offer an iPad with the same kind of cover/keyboard when you need it.
I don't know what happened, but in the last six months, the number of Surfaces I've seen has absolutely exploded, they're almost everywhere now.
I think there's been a push in some corporations to start offering it as a truly mobile device in lieu of less portable, and not as useful Dell machines and the folks I've talked to about them absolutely love them.
The idea of having a tablet you can easily show documents and presentations off of, and when you have to type the cover is the keyboard, drop it in a dock and you've got a large screen with mouse and traditional keyboard, grab it and you're immediately on the run. Great battery life, runs all the important applications without fuss, decent specs.
I've definitely felt some envy for the beautiful doc, especially when I'm struggling with all the various cables and dongles and crap I have to plug in and out of my Mac to make it a useful desktop machine. Maybe the new Mac Books will solve this with USB-C?
sidenote I have a Note, and it's easily the best portable computer I've ever owned. I've easily gotten through an entire day's worth of meetings using nothing but my phone to deal with emails (while listening to music or podcasts), get directions, make some calls (often while surfing the web), and then when I'm there, scribble pages of notes (which I can then email out to participants before we've left the room). A couple places I go even have Chrome casts and I can just mirror the screen and present right off of my phone.
It's kind of a magic portable office device, and I don't think I've ever drained the battery on it. I know other phones offer all of that, but there's something about the Note devices that clicks (once you get rid of all the crapware on it). It might also help I have one of those fold-over covers that makes it look kind of like an oversized Moleskine.
But it's reduced the amount of stuff I have to haul around to meetings to something I'm already carrying.
Since I got an iPhone six I find myself using my iPad far less for anything but drawing.
I bought it entirely to do drawing during skype tutoring sessions. Now I'm also using it with Astropad to make drawings for screencasts.
When I had an iPhone 4, I started doing a few other tasks on the iPad as well. But now that I have a larger, faster phone, I have no desire to be on the iPad apart from the things I can only do on the iPad.
What's a trend? It'd be awesome if the market shifted this way but I think it's going to take a few product cycles to really happen. Have you seen any market research that's pointing to it happening sooner? To my eye, it looks like the manufacturer answer is to have large phones plus an additional "smart watch".
Personally, I would love a revamped "Droid 1". I'm really craving the rugged metal chassis, h/w slide keyboard, and small size. Unfortunately, each of those is exactly what drives up cost. Premium materials, moving parts, and miniaturization/layout are where the money goes.
your choice of the biggest smart phone is a personal choice, makes a tablet unnecessary for you, not OBSOLETE. You're going to find devices spread out more rather than consolidate. despite what people think, things get more complex, not less and the market for products grows a longer tail rather than things disappearing.
> Something needs to happen to break it free, but what that is, I don’t know. It has to take advantage of the form factor in a way that cannot be replicated on the smartphone, and do it better than a small, ultra-light laptop.
This is where "perceptual computing" and in particular 3D sensing comes in. Both smartphones (too small for a decent sensor, battery life and screen issues) and laptops (too bulky to handle) have sub-optimal form factors for this but tablets are perfect.
Take a look at Google Tango [1] for instance or -- shameless plug -- my own company DotProduct [2]. We have been doing this for a while and have tried many different platforms for 3D capture and what we found is that tablets just feel by far the most natural in this environment.
The 12-13" iPad Pro could be a big deal, assuming it comes with a real multitasking interface in the OS. We've amply covered the market with portable 7-10" tablets, but I think there's space for a device that stays at home or in the office and does more.
Personally, I just want a bigger screen for reading large-format books. Tilting a laptop sideways is not a good solution for that.
Whenever this topic comes up, I'm reminded of a line from the BBC drama "Micro Men", referring to a slump in sales of home computers:
"In December 1983, every child wanted one for Christmas; By December 1984, every child who wanted one had one."
PC sales have been steadily declining for years, because there are few new users and existing users see little reason to upgrade. Tablets have reached a similar point of market saturation and sales are starting to stall. Smartphones are the exception, because of natural churn - smartphones are far more likely to be lost or damaged, and they are "free" at the point of purchase.
My two cents on the slow upgrade cycle: tablet users just don't care.
Phone users upgrade for two reasons. Status symbol, and phones get abused. You need the new iPhone. You drop your existing iPhone. You lose it. People are more careful with tablets. At the coffee shop nobody gives a crap if you have the iPad or the iPad Air.
Not to mention that tablet users aren't as techy as laptop users or even phone users. Seniors love iPads. They don't see what the hubbub is all about with the new models. They can't see well enough to care about Retina screens. They don't like change and they don't see any point in spending $400 every 2 years on the latest stuff.
I think this is fairly self explanatory. Since iPad 1 launched, phones got bigger-better and the median laptop got more portable (weight, battery..). If you take a bag, your little laptop can come. If not, phones fit in pockets and need to come anyway. The space between the two got smaller, I agree.
My 3 years old Ipad's job is mostly watching movies on planes. It does that job well enough and I won't replace it unless it breaks. I just don't need any more from a tablet.
Honestly, I think iPad's will almost go the way of the ipod, but with tougher competition. Good enough.
OTOH, if I was king of the apple…. I think a good idea for a new product category is a ~€500 iOS laptop. Chrome OS is selling well, and I think Apple would probably do a better job in that general space. Iphone apps could run as 'widgets" which would automatically tick a lot of boxes (Skype, VLC.. whatever your non negotiable apps are).
There's still a poorly served market here. Home users who don't like computers much, don't want to spend a lot and need something simple that works.
I don't know if you still call that an iPad, but I reckon it'd sell.
I disagree. What I do with the iPad is different than what I do with a laptop, and I would guess most of the people who opt for an iPad instead of a notebook uses it like that too. After starting with the iPad reading anything on the computer sees intolerable, and this reading web pages/pdfs/etc use case by itself for me validates the iPad.
Now, I understand other people may prefer to carry a notebook all the times, but if Apple replaced the iPad with an iOS laptop I would have absolutely no reason to buy it. Everything I like in the iPad is related to its form - size, weight, no keyboard, can be rotated etc.
at my workplace there're many fans of the surface pro 3.. enough muscle to run a few VMs in vmware workstation and portable..easier to carry around to different customers' sites.. but i guess most tablets aren't like that.
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If Apple pumped out over 250 million iPads, a great majority of which is probably still in use, with the usual Android and Windows numbers the whole tablet population must be in the neighborhood of one billion.
I believe the "slower update cycle" explanation, and I'd guess many are waiting for wireless battery charging, nowadays the obviously missing hardware feature.
That said, sales have plateaued at best and there are probably a lot of contributors:
- Slow upgrade cycle as you suggest. I have a 2nd or 3rd gen iPad and I have absolutely zero reason to upgrade at this point.
- They are probably being squeezed to a certain degree. I find that, even with just an iPhone 6 rather than a Plus, I'm often more inclined to just read on my phone than go grab my tablet.
- I've probably become more quick to grab a Chromebook or some other laptop I have laying around than do anything half-way complicated on my tablet. So there may be some realization that tablets are sometimes more trouble than they're worth even for more complex mostly-consumption tasks.
- I suspect that we may end up with some sort of tablet and laptop reconvergence even though tablets took off in large part because the convergence between the two devices was broken.
At the very least, sliding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse next to your tablet then having it turn into "laptop mode" would solve the problem.
I don't really disagree. This might well be what the reconvergence looks like--in combination with software changes that better bridge different modes of operation.
That said, you may also be right that enhancements to interfaces could make a tablet-type device qualitatively better than today while also pushing it in directions that are fundamentally different from the type of device needed to do the types of tasks we mostly use laptops for today.
Microsoft is approaching the tablet by scaling down a laptop. I like it but it needs more work.
I tend to agree. The only tablet I own and use is a Surface Pro 3 (and not because of Windows, rather in spite of it--it's a great Photoshop machine for the money, and happens to be pretty good at some other stuff on top of that). I've got Visual Studio on it too, though I don't use it for development much because the Type Cover is crap. If I could get a stiff-hinge keyboard dock for the thing, it would probably be my primary game development machine (I use C# for that, day job stuff and web stuff is on my Mac). As-is, Photoshop and light browsing are what it's good for. And I think that's the basic point of overlap for bringing tablets into "work" modes - the transformable tablet/laptop, only actually good.
The 2nd gen (non-Retina) iPads make my eyes bleed. They are terrible devices.
I had a 3rd gen and after a year, websites became more complicated and it just felt 'slow', so I sold it and got the Retina Mini.
Following that same line of examination (looking at refreshes), consider the impact of each refresh. What does a new iPad include?
Thinner and lighter? That's a nice to have, but is it cost-of-upgrade nicer?
Touch ID? How important is Touch ID to users who use the iPad casually. With an iPhone you're frequently operating the device with one hand, so Touch ID simplifies the authentication process. When you're using your device for payments, Touch ID is pretty damned incredible. Neither of these apply to the iPad. I'd love to have Touch ID on my iPad, but it's not worth the cost of an upgrade.
Better camera? I'm an outlier here — almost everyone I know uses their iPad as a camera, except me — but I'm just not sure this alone is enough to push people to upgrade. In the iPhone environment, all of these new features act cumulatively to make an iPhone upgrade worthwhile.
Larger size? Oh, wait. That's iPhone only, and it's probably one of the biggest drivers of iPhone 6/6+ sales. It's irrelevant to the iPad.
Tablets, as a product, involve a slower upgrade cycle because they're actually the more traditional product when compared to a device like the iPhone.
As for use - they are constantly getting used for games, movies, books, and web browsing. That is what they are good at. You want a clear use case - its that. My computer stays on the desk most of the time.
How so? Android and Windows tablets never sold as much as iPads and still don't. It might be 50-50 now, but not 3 times as much by any means.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2954317
The last numbers I've seen were from around 2012, when no Android tablet had made any dents yet, and that version of a Surface was a failure.
I use my iPad all the time, but primarily for reading and watching movies and TV shows. My three-year-old iPad does these things great and there's simply no reason to upgrade.
Its hard to get excited by technology when every price point is four hundred and up. How many items do they want me to have now? phone, watch, tablet, and laptop? Far too many redundancies
A yearly product update is useless for a device that is primarily used to view the internet, check email and watch Netflix or whatever. If it does that when you buy it, it will do it for 4 or 5 years. It lives on the couch or on the bed meaning general wear and tear don't exist much so replacement from damage is a low possibility too.
Apple even help out here because the App Store makes getting old versions of the apps that are supported on your version of the device (where available) transparent, thus the feeling of becoming out-dated is kind of non-existent unless you are a tablet gamer.
For example until last month both me and my partner used a Gen 1 iPad probably for 2 or 3 hours a day every day. I upgraded to a newer version mostly because JS heavy pages like the Guardian and Facebook had started to crash regularly. The latest iterations are so much more powerful that I don't see this being an issue for another 5 years at least.
Sales can be flat even though consumers can be happy with the tech.
And opting out of the upgrade isn't much of an option, due to app upgrades that require the latest OS. And I guess you can also opt out of app upgrades, but then you're left with a 2-year-old+ device and 2-year-old+ software.
Maybe this is intentional. But for me, at least, rather than upgrading, I've learned to just move on to using a combination of my iPhone and MPB, and my iPad (3rd gen) mostly collects dust now.
At the same time, I had a desktop for "heavy lifting" like graphic design and 3d animation, storing a big media library, playing games, etc. I also kept a cheap, portable laptop for the occasional times I needed to travel and wanted some semblance of computing from a hotel room or an event. For all of the other lightweight tasks, I had been using smart phones since the early Treo days so that was fine for email and looking up info.
But then I was planning a longer trip from the US to Southeast Asia for several weeks and it was going to involve a lot of hopping from town to town. Suddenly even my laptop was too much to carry when I already had everything on my back. I caved and bought an iPad 2 for a good deal more than I wanted to spend. They were still hard to find so I could only find the larger capacity models and the only Android tablet worth considering (Xoom) was not as capable and still cost about the same.
That iPad was pretty cool and I used it for a year or two before it just got to be a pain in the ass. Updates were de facto mandatory as you mentioned. Staying on old OS versions meant unsupported apps and constant nagging. But each OS update made the thing perform worse and worse. The hardware cycle was much faster than that of desktop/laptop computers at that point so I couldn't assume the normal 5+ years of usefulness I'd get from a laptop and there's no option to just install a lightweight Linux distro or downgrade. Even after I jailbroke it I couldn't really do much to speed it up. At this point, doing more than opening a single browser tab or lightweight application will make the thing lag and stutter and generall suck.
I think now it gets powered on a few times a year for me to check on updates and see if there's anything worth checking out. Haven't bothered selling it since it's my only iOS device and I figure there may be a point where I want to try some iOS exclusive so I keep it around for that.
But what is the actual problem with that, if you use the tablet primarily as a convenient web browser, Facebook checker, e-mail sender, Netflix watcher, and maybe occasional casual gamer?
Apple has tried to force this kind of stuff onto its user base, but if my experience with family and friends is even remotely representative, the most common result is damaging their customer relations and making a lot of those customers buy exactly one Apple device ever.
The only people I know who have definitely had more than one iPhone or iPad either got a new device via work, got a newer phone "free" when they got a new contract with their network, or had much older versions with pre-Retina screens, much lower storage capacity, and other practical limitations compared to today's devices. To my knowledge, I don't know a single person who has actively and at significant cost paid for, say, a new iPad to replace their 3rd generation one.
In contrast, I know several people who have got some or even all of their money refunded as a direct result of app or iOS updates breaking things. That includes cases like taking a brand new iPad back to the store for a full refund the day after they bought it because they hated it that much (and then buying an Android tablet somewhere else instead) and taking an older iPad back to a store for a significant refund after arguing that the recommend iOS update had made it unfit to use and no mechanism to go back was provided (which was an argument that, to their credit, the store accepted, and they agreed on a modest refund given that the device had been in use for a number of years at that point but had had its useful lifetime abruptly cut off).
Was it still holding a reasonable charge? That's what finally got me to ditch my gen 2 ipad. A plugged in laptop is one thing, but an ipad doesn't want to be tethered.
Apple products have always been obscenely overpriced, this it a bit easier to digest when you move outside of the Apple ecosphere and new technologies do not have such a financial impact.
Plus, an iPad is 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost of an Apple laptop.
YMMV, of course.
The only reason I ever spend any time with my tablet is because I love to draw and I have the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with a built in Wacom digitizer (and even then I sometimes prefer to just pull out a sketchbook and a pencil).
I would bet on a bump with a bigger screen model which will put some distance from the phablet iPhones. I really see no reason for both an iPod touch and iPad mini.
I am also very jaded by how much performance degrades with every iOS update and refuse to get caught up in the "upgrade every year" Apple cycle.
I haven't noticed any of this ever, except in the cases of bugs (stealing cpu for some apps etc) that eventually get corrected. And I update my iPad the first day any new OS version comes out.
I even still use my 2nd gen iPad update to the brim.
There's nothing I want to do these days that would be better served by a tablet than a more specialized device. I bought a Gen1 iPad when they were new. It sat unused 99% of the time, until my kids got a little older (they love tablets, huh).
I may be an anomaly, I do not like having a smartphone, and am looking forward to the day when my device set will be watch, tablet & desktop.
I don't really see the attraction of smartphones given the alternative devices you can use today -- they're sort of half-OK at lots of things but not really great at anything, and a lot of them seem to have worse stability, security and privacy problems than every other device I use put together.
What's important to remember is they don't really have moving parts and are unlikely to be dropped. So, they probably have fairly long update cycles after their 'good enough'. For example, I use my 2 or 3 year old iPad every day and other than wishing it was lighter I really see no need for an upgrade.
I also watch TV shows, videos and movies on iPad when I feel like doing it on a couch, as laptop is a bit too heavy and bulky and I just do not bother buying a TV set.
If you have relatively large pockets a 7 inch tablet is quite carryable and does noticeably better for video and text reading IMO due to the larger screen unless you have a huge phone (though huge phones are getting more and more common - I use a tablet a less now I have a 5" phone screen).
You sound like you need at least one step more than that though, at which point yes you will probably find a tablet frustrating as it nearly does what you want but is far enough away to not be practical. Something like a transformer might work, but they tend to be pretty expensive. I have a "poor man's" version of that: an 8 inch tablet (both my winter and summer coats have large inner pockets!) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and a simple stand for when I need/want to use it more like a laptop. The tablet was less than 100ukp so the who kit cost a chunk less than a laptop or a transformer-style hybrid. It runs full Windows too which is a bonus for me (it means I can run anything I do at home rather than being limited to tablet apps) though the Windows desktop interface can be a bit fiddly at that size unless you drop the DPI a bit. There are similar 10 inch devices too if you want something with a bigger screen.
Of course a tablet may just not cover your use cases at all. Different strokes for different folks!
There is a lot of one-up-man-ship in tablet owning of course especially in the case of iDevices in my experience - in some circles having the latest of those is a style statement, and some people just get bought them as presents, though I'll stick to talking about more practical reasons for ownership!
- light, but extended, web browsing. Usually long-form articles
- comics
- tv, movies while lying in bed or on a couch in a room without a tv or just resting somewhere.
I suspect a large driver of phone replacement is more frequent accidents, loss, and theft.
That said, tablets are a little bit better for reading, or for "computing in bed" and those sorts of things.
The original author is a bit of a fool to discount the tablet upgrade cycle, IMO. Why tech forecasters always ignore the facts is beyond me. But then again, very few economist-marketing types have any idea what an externality is.
Here is a hint: "desktop sales are declining" is a natural consequence of "tablet sales are increasing", just as "stagnating tablet sales" is a natural consequence of "current generation tablet saturation".
These restrictions also make them very malware proof. They're products which just work and don't much, if any, support or maintenance.
Microsoft and Apple could have never brought out a desktop or laptop with these kind of limitations before tablets became popular.
But I also know a lot of people with keyboards for their iPads.
But really I think that most non-technical users aren't using their keyboard enough to really need one. If you are hunt-a-peck typer, a physical keyboard isn't that much of a necessity.
I think the fact that I have been touch-typing since I was eight or nine actually makes it much more difficult to put up with touchscreen keyboards, because it's so difficult to make myself look at the keys instead of the text.
If there was a compelling new iPad coming out, we'd be on the hook for at least 1, and I imagine that many of the 250m iPad users would be ready to upgrade ASAP.
Then the question becomes, what would be compelling enough to upgrade?
- Possibly size, but probably not. A $600+ iPad in 10-12" would be hard to justify over a Surface. - New sensors? Adding the PrimeSense 3d sensor (maker of the original Kinect, now owned by Apple) would enable a TON of new use cases. - Multitasking? - Ability to run OSX software?
As much as I like my iPad for web browsing, my Note 4 phone is much more part of my digital life because it can access my data assets and is almost always with me.
Microsoft seems to have hit a sweet spot with the Surface 3's and I wonder if Apple would ever offer an iPad with the same kind of cover/keyboard when you need it.
I think there's been a push in some corporations to start offering it as a truly mobile device in lieu of less portable, and not as useful Dell machines and the folks I've talked to about them absolutely love them.
The idea of having a tablet you can easily show documents and presentations off of, and when you have to type the cover is the keyboard, drop it in a dock and you've got a large screen with mouse and traditional keyboard, grab it and you're immediately on the run. Great battery life, runs all the important applications without fuss, decent specs.
I've definitely felt some envy for the beautiful doc, especially when I'm struggling with all the various cables and dongles and crap I have to plug in and out of my Mac to make it a useful desktop machine. Maybe the new Mac Books will solve this with USB-C?
sidenote I have a Note, and it's easily the best portable computer I've ever owned. I've easily gotten through an entire day's worth of meetings using nothing but my phone to deal with emails (while listening to music or podcasts), get directions, make some calls (often while surfing the web), and then when I'm there, scribble pages of notes (which I can then email out to participants before we've left the room). A couple places I go even have Chrome casts and I can just mirror the screen and present right off of my phone.
It's kind of a magic portable office device, and I don't think I've ever drained the battery on it. I know other phones offer all of that, but there's something about the Note devices that clicks (once you get rid of all the crapware on it). It might also help I have one of those fold-over covers that makes it look kind of like an oversized Moleskine.
But it's reduced the amount of stuff I have to haul around to meetings to something I'm already carrying.
I bought it entirely to do drawing during skype tutoring sessions. Now I'm also using it with Astropad to make drawings for screencasts.
When I had an iPhone 4, I started doing a few other tasks on the iPad as well. But now that I have a larger, faster phone, I have no desire to be on the iPad apart from the things I can only do on the iPad.
I see a trend where people want smaller phones. The current phone are getting too big and people are getting fed up.
Secondly, I bought my wife a tablet 6 months ago, and she haven't used the laptop since.
Tablets have clearly peaked, but I don't think they will be going away anytime soon.
Personally, I would love a revamped "Droid 1". I'm really craving the rugged metal chassis, h/w slide keyboard, and small size. Unfortunately, each of those is exactly what drives up cost. Premium materials, moving parts, and miniaturization/layout are where the money goes.
Smartphones are getting bigger and tablets are getting obsolete.
I have a 6.1" Smartphone and stopped using my tablet with this. Before that I had a tiny phone and a tablet.
This is where "perceptual computing" and in particular 3D sensing comes in. Both smartphones (too small for a decent sensor, battery life and screen issues) and laptops (too bulky to handle) have sub-optimal form factors for this but tablets are perfect.
Take a look at Google Tango [1] for instance or -- shameless plug -- my own company DotProduct [2]. We have been doing this for a while and have tried many different platforms for 3D capture and what we found is that tablets just feel by far the most natural in this environment.
[1] https://www.google.com/atap/project-tango/ [2] http://dotproduct3d.com/
Personally, I just want a bigger screen for reading large-format books. Tilting a laptop sideways is not a good solution for that.
"In December 1983, every child wanted one for Christmas; By December 1984, every child who wanted one had one."
PC sales have been steadily declining for years, because there are few new users and existing users see little reason to upgrade. Tablets have reached a similar point of market saturation and sales are starting to stall. Smartphones are the exception, because of natural churn - smartphones are far more likely to be lost or damaged, and they are "free" at the point of purchase.
Phone users upgrade for two reasons. Status symbol, and phones get abused. You need the new iPhone. You drop your existing iPhone. You lose it. People are more careful with tablets. At the coffee shop nobody gives a crap if you have the iPad or the iPad Air.
Not to mention that tablet users aren't as techy as laptop users or even phone users. Seniors love iPads. They don't see what the hubbub is all about with the new models. They can't see well enough to care about Retina screens. They don't like change and they don't see any point in spending $400 every 2 years on the latest stuff.
My 3 years old Ipad's job is mostly watching movies on planes. It does that job well enough and I won't replace it unless it breaks. I just don't need any more from a tablet.
Honestly, I think iPad's will almost go the way of the ipod, but with tougher competition. Good enough.
OTOH, if I was king of the apple…. I think a good idea for a new product category is a ~€500 iOS laptop. Chrome OS is selling well, and I think Apple would probably do a better job in that general space. Iphone apps could run as 'widgets" which would automatically tick a lot of boxes (Skype, VLC.. whatever your non negotiable apps are).
There's still a poorly served market here. Home users who don't like computers much, don't want to spend a lot and need something simple that works.
I don't know if you still call that an iPad, but I reckon it'd sell.