I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices. My 11" Macbook Air is just about as portable as an iPad, but is way easier to use, not just for streaming, but even for coding, etc. Of course, I've been wrong about things before and I'm not really a typical consumer user, but I just can't imagine a future for tablets with phones getting as good as they are, and small laptops being as slim and powerful as they are.
It's mind-blowing to see a 3 year old use one better than their parents.
I don't think tablets will ever replace laptops, but that's not the point of consumption is it. They'd rather you buy a laptop for "work" a tablet for "consumption" and a phone, and...
I got my mum one a couple of years ago and she's hooked. She literally doesn't leave the house without it if she's going anywhere that involves some manner of waiting. Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input. Granted, I still have to occasionally show her how to perform certain actions on the device, but save for the first few weeks, that's now quite rare.
I think the thing with tablets is that they function for some adults as a replacement for casual use--browsing, e-mail, videos, etc; a consumption device, as you stated--but not for content creation. My mum still uses her computer to send e-mail, for instance, but everything else she does on her tablet. Maybe it's because she's a touch typist, but I suspect there's something about a keyboard that's a very difficult thing to replace.
>Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input
I would imagine most people find touch input more intuitive than mouse input, if only for the reason that it accomplishes the same thing but better(at least on an intuitive level).
A mouse is like a pair of chopsticks. Sure, after a while, you can coordinate it pretty well, but it's still a lot easier to build a house of cards directly with your hands than with chopsticks.
I desperately want every screen to be a touch screen. There is no more direct way of the "indicate something on a screen " action than touching it. Even precision issues due to fingers being pretty big usually get solved through decent heuristics or new gestures.
The only place that's still iffy is text editing. But even there some things (rapidly , but roughly, going to a spot in your text) that could be a great help.
With enough of a screen, text editing is not bad either. I didn't realize how terribly I wanted a touch screen for work until I worked with excel on a touch screen with a keyboard. It was unbelievably fast. With my left hand I could poke cells, the equation and scream around doing that. Meanwhile, my right hand was typing letters and numbers. It was like the first time I heard the Beatles. I was laughing to myself while working on the departmental budget.
It was so good that I sit at my desk at work now and just grump at the damned stupid screen.
Interesting. I'd never considered spreadsheet use, but that sounds like an area worth exploring for touch-based interaction. For some things, reaching out and "grabbing" (for lack of a better term) seems to be a more natural gesture than trying to isolate whether the UI expects left click, right click, or some permutation of drag + clicking.
I wonder now how much cross over will eventually occur between keyboard + touch interaction. One for input, one for manipulation. In essence, that merges the best of both worlds.
I've considered this. Multi-touch would be great for this. Pinch horizontally to shrink the selection, anti-pinch (I've never really though about what that motion of moving your fingers apart would be called) to expand the selection. Pinch vertically to be able to drag it around and drop it where you want.
I can't wait for a 28" touchscreen at my desk with some software to make the touch interface and excel, CSS and other random statistics programs work together a little better. It will genuinely make work easier, and make me more productive.
On the other hand a mouse is more efficient for pointing at things than anything else I tried - touching the screen, touchpad, etc... it's why when I'm working on my laptop, even though being on a MacBook I have a pretty good touchpad, I'm still attaching a mouse.
Same goes for the keyboard - no matter how big the screen real-estate is, it doesn't beat a physical keyboard, because a physical keyboard gives a tactile feel to your fingers and thus you can do touch-typing. My wife doesn't do touch-typing, she's just an ordinary user, but even she complains that things are hard to type on her 11 inch iPad.
Indeed there are applications that are more productive with a touchscreen, coupled with the possibility of carrying them around and looking at the screen while walking, it's a good combination - but for very different things.
It's not only the touch input, but the simplified model of how apps work in general. "One app running at the time and filling the whole screen." That matches the mental model of the most people. Traditional multitasking window GUI can be really confusing for people who have not grown with it,
I agree. I think that even for people who have some exposure to multitasking GUIs, a simplified UI can alleviate much of the mental overhead if they have a very specific goal in mind. In my mum's case, she has quite a lot of previous experience with computers, so her tablet is mostly for reading, looking up things of interest, watching videos or movies, etc. But as a consequence, her computer is relegated mostly to content creation.
I think that's a fantastic use case for tablets, too. Older users (60+) can benefit tremendously from their relatively small form factor and simplified UI; it's just a shame that they're largely neglected and under-served when you examine most of the advertising...
Yes it is, but as you said, a 3 year old isn't trying to get work done. What we need to see is how the kids first using phones from 7 years ago are doing with tablets and their ilk now in school. That's your earliest cohort of 10 year olds first exposed to the iPhone.
Yes, and watching tv or reading a book you are also not getting any work doen. What's the point? Computers are no longer just about getting work doen. For many, computers are more about entertainment and communication, than about work.
I've long argued that we, as tech folks, are not the target for tablets. The target for tablets are the Facebook Messenger folks. the people who want to watch videos and surf the web, chat with others, etc.
You know, the same folks Dell was able to con into paying $600 for a computer that needed GeekSquad to fix it every six months because computers are so unfriendly to non-technical people.
Tablets, especially ones with curated app stores, solve that problem. And people who are not techies love that.
True. Many of the comments nearby (personal testimonials) are missing the point.
If we're talking about the tablet market, we do need to talk about kids, grandma, and average people who want to be entertained. Not nerd hobbyists who are frustrated by the shortcomings of tablets relative to general-purpose computers.
These feelings matter to us, but in a discussion of the market, they are irrelevant.
I have a 3 year old, he likes my iPad, but I don't get the fascination of people with children that are "using one better than their parents".
Are they using it for anything useful? Are they reading emails? Are they browsing websites? Can they search YouTube for their favorite cartoons or songs? So what the hell are we talking about anyway? Moving stuff around the screen and opening their favorite game? I don't see how that's in any way fascinating.
My son likes to draw on the iPad btw. But he's way more happy when we draw things pencil on paper. Just something to consider - being able to use a device, doesn't make it useful.
My 6 year old daughter has an iPad 1 which she appropriated from mum. She has taught me gestures that I didn't know about, and that you can click the button twice to get a menu of running apps and shut down ones that are slowing things down. She figured out on her own, that the URLs announced on the kids TV channels can be typed into the browser and she works her way through these sites, saves high scores, wins prizes (pages to print and colour) and so on.
Just yesterday something new came up on one channel and she grabbed her iPad to look up that channel's schedule page to see if it was a schedule change or just a short that they sometimes play between programs.
And she draws all kinds of stuff in a kind of story mode, kind of like the way the Olympics opening ceremony unfolds a story. And she plays some games (only free ones and I decide what to install). These aren't drawings that she saves, because she is continually erasing and redrawing, but sometimes she does draw things and saves them into the gallery. I downloaded a selection of free drawing apps based on review sites that list stuff like X Great Apps for Kids.
She sets up reminders for events in her life including school field trips. Personally I never use calendaring programs so she just figured this out on her own. And she worked her way through Settings experimenting and asking questions about anything that she did not understand.
What drawing apps have you installed that you can recommend?
The one I found for my son is terrible - sluggish and shows an annoying top banner serving ads completely unrelated to kids or drawings.
Two weeks ago, I went to a birthday party for a kid we know. His dad works for google and there are a lot of tablets in the house. I was outside eating barbeque, then went inside, and not hearing any noise, went into the kids playroom thinking they were all asleep. All five were sitting on the sofa playing the same game of minecraft. There was a nexus 7 on the floor that had evidently been drained of battery. My son had plugged his in (I carry a micro-usb cord and converter in my pocket for events like this). Their ages: 5 to 9.
They played for an hour solid, only speaking to each other to discuss in-game stuff, like: how do you make arrows, or who has strings...
For me the form factor is better for any situation where I don't have a table to set a laptop on and my primary task is consuming data. In public transit, in bed, etc.
If I have to enter data tablets are pretty much always out as I hate on screen keyboards and getting an extra one means you might as well just get an ultraportable laptop and if I have a tablet to set something on the benefit to form factor doesn't come into play since I'm not holding the device.
>I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices.
Surfing and reading on the crapper. No need for input devices.
Well, and tons of other stuff besides, depending on your age and interests. Almost every niche, from astronomy geeks to musicians has lots of great apps for tablets.
Entry to mid-level director? Tons of filming assistance can happen on a tablet, from storyboards to digital clappers.
Musician? Guitar tuner, practice accompaniment, guitar amp emulation (with a small adapter), audio recording, synth engine, notation display and tons of other stuff.
Graphic designer? Tons of high quality drawing apps, from bitmap to vector to natural style brushes.
Photographer? Tethered shooting, library management and rating your shots post-shoot, etc.
The list goes on depending on your interests, work and hobbies. Those are just areas relevant to mine.
And of course the core utilities for everyone: writing, snapping photos, web surfing, reading books, reading comics, doing calculations, keeping notes, watching movies, office apps, etc etc.
Are the D/A converters of tablets really that good? Honest question since I have no idea. From my limited experience, there is a huge difference between inbuilt ones and something external that sends the converted signal to the 'puter via USB or firewire... or is that just because desktops have a lot more interference? GPU, CPU, the fact that it's plugged into an electrical socket etc... but I imagine a tablet with everything crammed real close together might have similar problems... ?
> Photographer? Tethered shooting, library management and rating your shots post-shoot, etc.
For tethered shooting I can see how portable instant feedback for persons you're photographing, or things you're photographing for other people, would be super nice. But full-blown library management? Again, I never tried it, but I just can't imagine doing it without a keyboard and mouse, since I need to be able to tweak the RAW conversion settings; pretty much all photos look bad straight out of the camera, so to know if something might be a keeper I need to make at least rough adjustments. That is also a lot more fun (read: less horrible) with a decent CPU... of course, if you're on the road it would be way better than nothing, but for most of my use, I'd rather wait until I get home and then do it better and quicker.
You can get external A/D/A converters, some of which are designed to just plug in to a tablet via a USB or proprietary connector, some of which are designed to house the tablet entirely, eg http://www.alesis.com/iodock
That said, even cheap converters are pretty good. Bear in mind that state-of-the-art analog tape recording only delivers about 12 bits of fidelity.
The average consumer is not posting on a website talking about their spending behavior. The lot of us may be "average" with things like, say, automotive purchases and whatnot, but given that this website has a tech slant, it's fair to say he's not the average consumer, at least not when it comes to consumer electronics.
What I really should have said was that whenever I use myself as an example of the "typical consumer", I'm inevitably making a wrong decision based on some idiosyncrasy.
Most laptops are not macbook airs. Purely from a lack of required maintenance point of view, an iPad is a huge step up from an equivalently priced PC for someone who just needs email Facebook and web.
iPads are particularly big tablets; your Air certainly isn't as portable as my Nexus 7. I can carry it on my pocket (which means I take it everywhere), take it out on the train for reading or watching a video without losing the details of the picture, do a quick SSH to a server without needing to sit at a table or scroll endlessly, etc.
They don't replace my laptop, but for my family members, a tablet per person plus a single home desktop is enough to replace a laptop per person.
