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5 Reasons Tablets Suck, and You Won't Buy One
Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."
The thing is, it's not about the widget. It's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. A tablet that plays 10 hours of hi-def video and audio on one battery charge definitely has its niche. One that does so on a screen that you can actually use with Citrix or RDP over wireless or cellular wireless? Another niche. Ebooks too? You can use it to carry your reference materials? And you can keep up with your social media at the same time? What about navi? Will it find me the closest theatre that's playing the movie I want to see, even if I'm in a strange town, give me showtimes and navigate me to it?
Yeah, a full OS on a tablet platform isn't going to fly - until the tablet is powerful enough and the OS light enough to do enough niche things that it has broad utility. That would be right about... now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's a heck of a lot of Microsoft pushing for one little article.
That said, I agree fully. Tablets have always sucked, and the iPad is just another iteration of the same game. Maybe it'll bring some fresh ideas to usability, and maybe not. For the few folks who actually have a use for a tablet, it's an exciting time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Breaking news!
I own a tablet PC.
It kicks ass.
And runs Windows 7.
Which kicks ass too.
Now continue with the program.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
1. Tablets Are Niche Devices
2. Full OSes Were Always There, Yet Those Who Complained That The iPad Doesn't Have One Still Never Bought One
3. High-End Hardware Specs Sometimes Don't Matter
4. Interface, Interface, Interface
5. Lack Of Tablet Apps
I agree with the article. Their reasons are pretty good.
I've owned a couple of tablets (bought from friends who grew tired of them), and worked on a few more. Generally, they do suck. Like it or not, you'll get to a point where you need to type something out, and voila, you wish you had a laptop. Most of the tablets could switch to laptop mode, but who wants to keep flipping their computer around just to be able to type. Eventually, the stylus is stuck in it's holder, and you now have a very expensive, and usually slower, laptop.
I'm working on a piece of embedded equipment right now, with a touch screen. The interface is absolutely perfect, as long as you're giving a selection of large buttons to push. We even have provisions in our interface for a full QWERTY keyboard for the portions that require that kind of input.
800x600 on a 8" screen is cute, and wonderful for a 10-key (0-9), but those fun and games go away if I switch away from the specific application. We have a keyboard and mouse attached too. The touch screen is all fun and games, unless you want to do something serious.
I tried out the PDA fad once upon a time too. You don't realize how much typing is required until you try to send a real email, or ssh to a server. No number of aliased commands made up it. Even from my crackberry, I may send a few paragraphs, since it has a qwerty keyboard, but writing something like this, I wait until I'm at a real computer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Windows is not and never has been a tablet OS. a Tablet isn't a desktop, you can't use the two in the same fashion. the pointers are different(fingers/stylus, vs a mouse pointer) You can't just graph touch inputs into a desktop GUI, and expect everything to work right. MSFT has made one decent touch based app, That is why tablets have thus failed. Everyone tries to treat them as notebooks with touch screens, not as tablets with their own gui designs.
Apple with their sometimes annoying closed systems, are breaking MSFT out of their bad habits. It took 3-4 years but MSFT fianlly realized that putting a desktop Interface on their phones was a bad idea that limited usability. With the Ipad maybe in 5 years MSFT will make a real windows tablet OS, that ditches a wide bar that eats up valuable real estate and come up with a new way to work with tablets. I would say linux might get their first, but Linux devs while innovative seem to have no luck in advertising to manufacturers.
typing this on my mac, with my Iphone nearby i will say i won't get an ipad, my purpose of a small tablet will be primarily for browsing and unfortunately that will require flash. though someone finally taking a stand against flash is refreshing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
There's a class of devices which are mostly-output. Game machines, e-readers, and smartphones without keyboards fall into this category. Their primary function is to display content created elsewhere. Input requirements are minimal.
Think of Apple's "iPad" as a big e-reader, with color and video, and it makes more sense.
Jesse Schell, in his famous DICE talk, explained why the iPhone succeeded and the iPad will flop. Paraphrased:
Convergence doesn't happen. Technologies diverge, for the most part. The PVR diverged from the desktop computer which diverged from the game console. The only reason why the iPhone, a case of convergence, was so successful was what he called the "pocket exception" - things that go in your pocket converge with each other.
The Swiss Army knife is an example of convergence: it has scissors, tweezers, knives, files, screwdrivers, etc. It does nothing perfectly and everything adequately. The iPhone is like that. But if someone got you a "Swiss Army" kitchen utensil, with a spatula and a ladle and tongs and a couple knives in a single sheath, you would think it was the stupidest thing in the world. "And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
"Within five years, I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America. It will come with a full 640 KB of RAM which should be enough for anybody. We will continue to out-innovate Apple. Then we're going to fscking kill Google."
I have no intention of getting an iPad, but all the reasons the article points out why tablets suck actually point to the possibility that the iPad might actually succeed.
Unlike the other tablets, the iPad is designed with an interface done correctly for a tablet. It's not trying to be a full OS because the interface wouldn't work correctly. It's going with the iPhone OS which is a touch-centric OS.
The biggest reason tablets have never succeeded more is because they've always been expensive. I've seen some tablets I'd love to own, but they're in the $2,000 - $2,500 range, which is way more than I'll spend on a tablet. Now that we're reaching the point where costs are low enough that they can make decently powered tablets in the $500-$700 range, which is where the typical laptop is (I said laptop, not netbook), I think that they'll sell a lot more.
Go throughout history and you see plenty of innovations that never catch on until a decade or so later when the prices drop significantly to where people don't view buying one as a major investment.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Is that it's not an open platform. It doesn't matter that much to me that it isn't the sake as a desktop OS X install, I am OK with that.
My issues are:
Just got a Hp Tm2. Capacitive multitouch screen + Wacom pressure-sensitive digitiser screen + huge multitouch trackpad. I added a 3-button scrolling trackball for my own UI preference. 10 watt CULV dual-core CPU. Dual boot Ubuntu and Win7, with each virtualising the physical partition of the other on-demand, and virtual XP and OSx86 just for kicks. Yes, the basic screen UIs such as Gnome and Win7 File Explorer are less than optimal for finger manipulation. But there are so many replacement apps and shells that this is not really an issue. And the ability to avoid the mouse/trackball unless absolutely necessary and directly interact with the objects on screen is both amazing and liberating. I suspect that many of the people who diss on TabletPCs simply haven't really used one, or have not yet found a compelling reason to use one or haven't really looked very much. Personally, I use wanted a tablet for the immediacy of interacting directly on the screen, and the amazingly convenient comic book/ebook/media viewer it enables. I'm no stranger to mechanically disintermediated UIs -- was using a light pen in the early 1980s and a mouse since the Mac came out in the mid-80s -- but after a few years of a touchscreen phone/PDA I simply knew my next PC had to have touch. The irony is that with some deep discounting and some coupons, my TabletPC cost less than the higher-end iPad will cost, *and* it can easily run 1080p from both MKV/AVC and Flash with ease.
Da Blog
Okay, we get it. Windows tablets never took off the way Microsoft thought they would. The iPad is a failure, even though it hasn't been released yet and we have no idea how well or poorly it will sell. Anyone who is excited about the iPad is a Mac Fanboi. Everyone who trashes the iPad is a Windows Zealot. Your opinion is silly and unsupportable because it differs from mine.
There, I saved you some reading.
#DeleteChrome
There's niches and there's niches. It would be possible to create a device that's useful for only one task, and if only a few million people in the world are interested in that task, then you've got a really limited market.
Tablet devices have long been billed as fully functional computes with a new form-factor, but in some ways, they've been the worst of both worlds. As others have pointed out, the form-factor is typically tacked onto the OS, rather than both being designed to work flawlessly together. And they've historically been underpowered systems which would never replace a desktop.
What's interesting about the iPad is that it answers a different question than other tablets have. Rather than asking, "what sort of device would computer users want to buy?", it seems to me that Apple has asked, "What sort of device would appeal to people who hate computers?"
That question leads to others, like, "What tasks do people want to do without having to boot up a computer?" Reading, watching movies, web browsing, playing games. Sure, there are more things you can do with an iPad--they wouldn't have migrated iWork to the platform if they didn't think some people would want to use it for work--but I think the main thing they've done is build something that is indeed a computer, but that a lot of people who don't like computers don't have to see as one.
Like Apple or not, they've done a great job with interface design on the iPhone, and the lessons learned there transfer well to the iPad. Will it succeed or fail? I don't know; it depends on your definition, I guess. I doubt iPad sales will ever quite catch up with the iPhone's, but of course, that's a pretty high bar to shoot for. They've set their target at 10 million this year. Again, like Apple or not, it's been a while since they fell short of sales estimates, even on completely new products.
In fact, they've made some big wins on products which everyone thought would fail. The original iPod was going to be just another MP3 player. They killed the iPod Mini, their most successful model, at its sales peak and replaced it with the Nano, a complete redesign, and got a huge sales bump. They made the screen-less shuffle, providing fewer features than the competitors that Jobs referred to as crap, and outselling those competitors by a mile. They released the iPhone for $599, no SDK, no MMS, no cut and paste, and all sorts of other things wrong with it according to the chatter on the Internet, and yet, here we are.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot of new tablets released in short order, some of which might be even better than Apple's in some ways or others. But I'm not sure it's time to bet against Apple in terms of long term success for the product.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Also, the iPhone had a huge advantage simply in that most people already owned phones, and so the iPhone was really just a cool upgrade from what they had, and can cost as little as $99 upfront. For the iPad to succeed, Apple will have to convince people that now they need to go out and buy a tablet computer for ~$500. At best, I see them dominating the eBook-reader and netbook markets, which are in themselves relatively small. Sales will never be on the same order of magnitude as the iPhone.
Convergence happens all the time. My home phone has an intercom and answering machine built in. By refrigerator has a built-in water dispenser. A typical TV is the convergence of a monitor, sound system, and receiver. Some even have built-in DVD players. How many all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier devices are on the market? I have a stereo with a CD turntable and tape deck built in (yes, I'm old but not old enough to have a record player on top of it). My desk has a filing cabinet built into it. How many microwave ovens have vents to help vent fumes from the range they are positioned above? In short, convergence happens when it makes sense.
The only reason why the iPhone, a case of convergence, was so successful was what he called the "pocket exception" - things that go in your pocket converge with each other..."And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
Um, no.
The personal computer is a stereo, a TV, a typewriter, a calculator, and serves infinite other random functions. But I mean, who would want one of those? Oh sorry I guess you keep yours in your pocket.
The Swiss Army knife is an example of convergence: it has scissors, tweezers, knives, files, screwdrivers, etc. It does nothing perfectly and everything adequately. The iPhone is like that. But if someone got you a "Swiss Army" kitchen utensil, with a spatula and a ladle and tongs and a couple knives in a single sheath, you would think it was the stupidest thing in the world. "And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
The problem is, Mr. Schell is trying to apply rules but doesn't really understand them at the heart of the matter. It's not just things that fit in our pockets that we want to converge, but items we carry in our daily lives, when we have limited space. Cars and stereo systems don't fit in our pockets, but for some reason cars all have built in stereos. We could all just bring boom boxes with us in the car, but we don't because the benefit of having the stereo there all the time outweighs the duplication and the fact that car stereos are usually not as high of quality due to space and cost concerns.
Ask college students if they want all their textbooks to converge into a single device, if it can be done so without increasing cost or removing important features. Items like backpacks, luggage, sunglasses, clothing, personal transport, etc. are instances where convergence is desired by the general public. When was the last time you saw a student carrying a laptop case and a separate bag for their books? Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
Now I don't plan on buying an iPad anytime soon, nor would I venture to guess how successful of a product it is going to be without trying one out. But this sort of overgeneralization as a method of prediction is weak tea.
...unfortunately apple is one of the only companies that is willing to invest in creating new interfaces for new devices instead of slapping windows on there and expecting that it will be useful.
Hence the iPhone for 2 years was one of the only devices with an interface allowing the best use of the hardware. Tons of other phones had great hardware features but crappy interfaces that made the overall device cumbersome.
Apple's tablet is different from other tablets so far:
1. it does not have a user interface that follows the desktop metaphor, which is not appropriate for a tablet.
2. it has a multitouch interface, unlike other tablets.
3. it has quite a low price.
4. it boots way faster than other devices.
5. it is lighter than other devices.
For me, the only reason not considering an iPad is lack of Flash support and lack of openness. I think it's on the right path, and if these two are solved, I'll consider buying one.
Yet most people do not use PC to watch TV. And most people nowdays will just buy a console rather than build a gaming PC.
That's what grandparent was talking about.
Let me start by saying that the only Apple device I own right now is an Ipod touch. I'm typing this on a Windows notebook and my big machine is a Windows desktop. I don't have any love for Apple or their policies - they do some things right and some things very, very wrong.
That said, there's some changes in "books" coming. We've had Kindle and Sony reader for a while and now others are jumping on the bandwagon. As limited as those devices are, they're selling in very large numbers. Kindle is Amazon's number one selling product - that says something, right? As the number of e-readers becomes larger and larger there's more incentive for the publishing houses to make their books available electronically. Between that and the large public domain book libraries available online there's a strong case for electronic books.
But sitting in a chair at a desktop computer to read books online is awkward - and trying to do it on a notebook is even worse. The Ipod touch is a little better but the screen is too darned small. We like to be able to hold the book and sit / slouch / lay wherever so a tablet-like e-reader is probably the best solution. Unfortunately, the attempts at tablet machines up to this point have been ill-conceived botches. Windows isn't made to be a tablet operating system - its touchscreen support is primitive and incomplete. This and the need of designers to add just one more feature has resulted in fragile yet heavy machines with short battery life - not worth their price.
Some say that the Ipad is limited - but if what I do is read email, browse the web and play an occasional game or two then it does 99.9% of what I need. Add in music and videos and that slick multi-touch interface and it meets my needs very well. Yes, I know - and when I need to do some serious typing, write some code, etc. I'll sit down at that Windows desktop and go to work. Apple did one more very nice thing - they made a case for the Ipad that opens like a book. This allows you to hold it like a book; same approximate size and weight, just like you're used to.
I've been watching this electronic book stuff for a while now - and I feel it's time for me to jump. I'll give away / donate my home library (thousands of dusty books) and replace them with an Ipad. Even if it did nothing else it'd be worth the price for just this one function.
Jesse Schell, known mostly to his friends and colleagues as a game designer, spoke at "DICE", where maybe a few hundred people heard him, and said the iPad, which has not yet been released, will not succeed. He then went on to explain his theories regarding what makes a successful product, based on his experience in designing things that have unit sales measured in millions.
Then, some guy on Slashdot quoted him, which sent Apple's stock into a nose dive as everyone who read it decided not to buy an iPad because *the* Jesse Schell said they won't want to.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
He is not trying to use tablets as tablets, but trying to using them as desktop PCs or notebooks. They are different kind of devices, better or more comfortable than PCs for some tasks, worse for others. Better than say why they suck as desktop computers, would be better to list for which tasks something like a tablet is good, for which ones regular, and for which will suck. And then see if what is or was offered fit into that (regarding price, features, form factor, etc)
Yes, but look at consoles... What could a typical console from 1990 do? It could play games. What can an XBox or a PS3 do? It can play games, browse the net, play movies from disks, act as a storage server for your games and movies, play TV over the internet... In fact, one could call a typical games console these days the convergence of a old-word console, a DVD player, a TV receiver, a simple computer for browsing amongst probably many other functions that I don't use daily.
You're right, most people *don't* use their PC for watching TV, but I would bet that in 10 years time most people *will* use their PC to watch TV. That's because that particular convergence is still in the process of happening.
The bottom line is that devices both converge and diverge, to suggest that one dominates the other is idiotic, what's ultimately happening is that devices are *evolving* to provide more functionality in less complexity and more usability.
The iPad will succeed because it does this – it makes a substantial group of tasks possible, and another group significantly easier than previous devices made them.
Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
*parry* No, but they are in and of themselves oversized pockets, or in other words, a space where weight and size are more important than pure functionality.
I notice you neglect my other examples, but that's okay they serve only to show that convergence happens for all sorts of things that don't fit in a pocket. Rather, items that people carry with them or use when they have limited space. Can we agree upon that?
If I'm carrying a netbook around already...
Who says you are? More importantly, who says the average consumer is?
...then the iPad needs to be either lighter, smaller, or much more useful than the netbook in order to be worth the space.
Or cheaper or easier to use for the average person or easier to hold in one hand while walking or less cumbersome as a book reader. Or it could provide functionality in the form of accessible content, just as the iPod did when it took over the digital music player market.
If my phone has most or all of the same functionality as the iPad, just scaled down, and my netbook covers much of the rest, scaled up, then the iPad is not a device to fit in the "pocket convergence" area.
Again you assume most people carry both a smartphone and a netbook, but that is likely not the case. The idea of "pocket convergence" is flawed in and of itself, as I pointed out. Whether or not the iPad will succeed and whether or not it actually is a convergence of e-book readers and umm PDAs (was that your theory) has nothing to do with whether or not it will fit in a pocket.
I have a lot of friends who absolutely love their netbooks, many have netbooks, laptops and desktop pcs. I own one 2 laptops atm but never saw the point of a netbook, it is too big to be realistically more portable than my Macbook pro. This is where the iPad fits and where others failed to do their homework. It has all the features that most people actually use on their netbooks.
At best, I see them dominating the eBook-reader and netbook markets
There is a comment, just above, doubting iPad's impact in eBook market. I also see it this way, given that Kindle or Sony or B&N readers cost half that much, and 3G is included for free. There is also that eternal debate about eInk vs. backlit screens... and certainly battery life of an eInk device is infinitely better than anything that iPad has to offer.
But netbook market, IMO, is not going to curl up and die either. A netbook is a fully functioning portable computer. You can consume information with it, and you can equally well create information with it. This is important for people with urge to post every 5 minutes what they are doing (mostly "updating my Facebook page", apparently :-) iPad, on the other hand, is a consumption device - you can browse the Web, somewhat (without Flash) and you can watch movies, but you can't do much else. Posting a comment like this on /. would be painful, and writing a larger text would be foolish. Netbooks, with their keyboards, however small, are still better suited to the bidirectional exchange of information, and all that comes in a single package - you open it and you are good to go. No need to carry separate adapters, separate dock, separate keyboard.
I personally see iPad productively used only as a supplementary, generic Web browser. It won't have any plugins (like MS Media Player) that many Web sites use to stream music. It won't have any of the software that you know how to operate. Everything will be new, and everything will have to be bought. This will result in few apps sold, certainly less than those for iPhone. Who, outside of a few fanbois, is going to "accessorize" a computer that you rarely use and hardly ever carry with you? Especially when you already have that functionality working just fine, usually for free, on your laptop - the device that is the real competitor of iPad.
Your phone probably has more compute power than the cluster of computers that saw men to the moon. Display now really is the problem because processor watts have been beaten by ARM, and storage watts have been beaten by SSD. All that's left is the watts that drive the display. Roughly a billion people need a platform that's online and delivers the ability to participate in the digital economy. The iPad delivers it, at admittedly too high a price for them - but it's a start. We're on our way to welcoming the slumdogs into the online discourse. I, for one, can't wait to hear what they have to say.
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