The iPad Is 5 Years Old This Week, But You Still Don't Need One

HughPickens.com writes: Five years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and insisted that it would do many things better than either a laptop or a smartphone. Will Oremus writes at Future Tense that by most standards, the iPad has been a success, and the tablet has indeed emerged as a third category of computing device. But there's another way of looking at the iPad. According to Oremus, Jobs was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands.

But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar Jobs set for it, which was to be "far better" at some key tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. The iPad may have been "far better" when it was first released, but smartphones have come a long way. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and their Android equivalents are now convenient enough for most mobile computing tasks that there's no need to carry around a tablet as well. That helps explain why iPad sales have plateaued, rather than continuing to ascend to the stratospheric levels of the iPhone. "The iPad remains an impressive machine. But it also remains a luxury item rather than a necessity," concludes Oremus. "Again, by most standards, it is a major success. Just not by the high standards that Jobs himself set for it five years ago."

Comments

iPad is a luxury?

[OzPeter]

How come an iPad is a luxury, but a $700 smart phone isn't?

I make perfectly fine phone calls on my old RAZR 3

Re: You probably have one, though...

[ganjadude]

occupy was protesting.... well everything. there was no one thing that was the focus. You had groups wanting the government to wipe out all student loan debt. you had groups who wanted wall street people hung in the streets, and you had dirty hippies having a giant party.

I spent a number of days there, and frankly it was a disaster by any measure possible

Need? No. Useful? Yes.

[fractalus]

I have an Android tablet (which I'm using right now to enter this post) and an iPad. I've had both for years and I've done some development for them.

People DO use these things to be productive, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Part of the challenge is that even five years in our whole thinking about what an application should be has been shaped by thirty years of desktop and laptop devices. Anything that truly needs a keyboard (like writing this post) becomes cumbersome, even with something like Swype or SwiftKey. Pens suck, unless you're using a tablet with proper pen support (Note devices are great for this) but even then, most people don't currently need a pen.

It's not just the touch thing, though. It's really, really hard to build a good UI for a powerful app, even on a LARGE screen. To do so on a small screen without eliminating "power" features is almost impossible. And those power features are what people really need for productive work. They might only need 10% of them, but if the one they need is missing, that work has to wait until they can get to a larger device.

I don't think this is incurable, but it's hard to argue that writing a long essay on a 10" touch screen with no hardware keyboard is fun. I know people who use an 11" MacBook Air as their primary coding platform, but I know that I'm far more productive sitting at a desk with a properly-sized monitor and keyboard. (My MacBook Pro plugs in to those things if I have to use it for any extended period.)

Productivity is all about removing obstacles to task completion. From that perspective, tablets satisfy a very narrow slice of uses and fail miserably at the rest.

For non-productive tasks, though... I can sit on the couch and look up stuff while watching TV (for those few things I still watch on TV) and the tablet is far more portable for movie-watching, news reading, and light emailing than a laptop, without being as constricting as even the biggest phones are. I don't carry one everywhere but it's definitely one of the things I think of as I'm walking out the door. My kids love tablets (so I regulate their time on them) and being able to video chat with family is a slam dunk.

You don't NEED a tablet but they are useful. They make excellent primary computing devices for people who ONLY have light computing needs. My late 87-year-old grandmother-in-law couldn't use a computer all that well but she rocked on her iPad.

That's not what she said.

[BLToday]

My wife loves her iPad. She doesn't get on her laptop now unless she needs Firefox to access her work's website. For everything else, she uses the iPad. Shopping, watching movies, trip planning, and so on.

My parents can only use their iPads because they've never use a computer in their life. My mother will try to pinch and zoom on my computer monitor to make pictures bigger.

Do they need the latest iPad every time Apple comes out with a new one? Hell no. My father is perfectly happy on his iPad 3, he gets his news, Netflix, and DirecTV app. My mother is happy on her iPad 4 because she can watch Youtube, music, and looking up new recipes. My wife is fine with her iPad Air, and she's not getting a new one because I just bought that last year.

Only person without an iPad is me. I have no need for them, I get things done on my laptop or desktop. I don't need trimmed down apps, I do need full applications and a real keyboard.