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The Great Tablet Gold Rush Is Over (mashable.com)
Earlier this month, Dell announced that it will no longer sell Android tablets. The company added that slate tablet market is "over-saturated" and is "experiencing declining demand from consumers." The company says it will focus more on 2-in-1 -- otherwise known as hybrid laptops -- devices moving forward. Dell is right. According to IDC, tablet sales have fallen greatly in the last few years. Mashable goes on to say that the "great tablet gold rush is over." From an article: Pretty much every major tablet maker's growth fell year-over-year. Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tabs, the two most popular brands of tablets, were down 18.8% and 28.1%, respectively. [...] In the beginning, the pitch was: The tablet is the future of computing. It'll replace your phone and your laptop. Then it became: A small tablet will replace your smartphone. Today, the pitch: It's good enough to replace your laptop. But only for some people, and only if you're willing to get by with a mobile OS. Long story short: Tablets are a complete mess right now. We can't seem to decide if we want them to replace all of our devices or only a few of them.
Maybe the people at Apple will get off their asses and finally update their computers.
Will the 2016 Mac minis be as pathetic as the 2014 models? Not only do we need to be able to upgrade the RAM and HDDs/SSDs but a socketed CPU would be a welcome addition.
Tablets were never going to replace anything, they're a flawed compromise between everything else. Manufacturers pushed them in the hopes that they could expand the relevance of the new mobile walled gardens, and the media fueled the hype because blind consumerism. Tablet OEMs who started designing keyboards into new tablets were ahead of the curve.
Tablets are for consumption, not production. Only now are people realizing this, so their tablet upgrades are laptops or nothing. If you don't need a video clipboard, you don't need a tablet.
Yep, manufacturers overestimated the market capacity for Tablets. In the end they're a fairly niche product, and everybody who wanted one pretty much has one at this point. They aren't useless, but they aren't compelling for most people either. You get a device that's the size of a small laptop, but less capable because it's crippled with a phone OS and no keyboard. I use mine somewhat regularly, but only for a handful of tasks:
1. Reading full color comics. The Kindle sucks for this.
2. Watching video on the go. Much better experience than the phone, but this is only for long car rides and is used to keep the kids entertained.
3. Playing games. My phone is an iPhone, so all of my Android gaming has to be done on the tablet. This is a very niche use, and it really only came about from me looking for a reason to even turn the thing on in the first place. Were it not for the Humble Bundle I don't think this would even make the list.
Web browsing and email are also possible, but the experience is decidedly worse than a laptop so I don't usually do it. Especially if I have to reply to an email.
The big advantages with phones is portability. They're always in the pocket ready to go. Tablets don't have that, yet they're stuck with the same drawbacks that phones have like touch controls and a locked down OS.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's also different people wanting vastly different things. I commented on this when the Dell news hit. Some are fine with a smart phone and the now rather larger screens on those for all their mobile needs. Other want something bigger, but tend to opt towards a laptop (especially the newer small form laptops and 'slates'). Personally I still want a viable replacement for my Asus Transformer Prime TF-201. It was every bit as viable as a laptop, while running the Android OS instead of being burdened with windows. This gave it battery life over 8 hours on it's own and with the keyboard battery it nearly had 18 hours of charge. It's downfall was horribly bad advertising on the part of Asus and it's price of around $500 which makes it compete with low end laptops. Personally I thought it was way better than any low end laptop I ever used, but most people looking at it purely by price would think the laptop might be the way to go.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise