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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.
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
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.
...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.
That's not what I got from it at all. What I read was "the iPad is the first potentially viable tablet computing device, and other computer makers need to get with the program so that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the market".
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.
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.