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Google Quits Selling Tablets (techcrunch.com)
Google has quietly crept out of the tablet business, removing the "tablets" heading from its Android page. It was there yesterday, but it's gone today. TechCrunch reports: Google in particular has struggled to make Android a convincing alternative to iOS in the tablet realm, and with this move has clearly indicated its preference for the Chrome OS side of things, where it has inherited the questionable (but lucrative) legacy of netbooks. They've also been working on broadening Android compatibility with that OS. So it shouldn't come as much surprise that the company is bowing out.
Sales have dropped considerably, since few people see any reason to upgrade a device that was originally sold for its simplicity and ease of use, not its specs. Google's exit doesn't mean Android tablets are done for, of course. They'll still get made, primarily by Samsung, Amazon and a couple of others, and there will probably even be some nice ones. But if Google isn't selling them, it probably isn't prioritizing them as far as features and support. Android Police was first to break the news.
Sales have dropped considerably, since few people see any reason to upgrade a device that was originally sold for its simplicity and ease of use, not its specs. Google's exit doesn't mean Android tablets are done for, of course. They'll still get made, primarily by Samsung, Amazon and a couple of others, and there will probably even be some nice ones. But if Google isn't selling them, it probably isn't prioritizing them as far as features and support. Android Police was first to break the news.
Google does something, makes something and then drops it unceremoniously after a time, leaving everyone hanging. I long ago left the Google world for Fastmail and an iPhone. A much saner environment. OpenBSD for an OS, iPhone for comms, Fastmail for email and calendar. Not looking back.
They had Nexus 7 releases in 2012 and 2013. Reviewed well. Sold well. People left anxiously awaiting an upgraded model. Zippo.
Amazon sells tablets fine with the major complaint being that they lack the Google Play store and standard Google apps. The market was there. All Google had to do was match the specs of Amazon devices and make it Google specific instead of Amazon specific.
... it's gonna be a Surface. Those crippled video game playing things are just toys. I want to be able to run actual programs on my tablet, not just "apps".
I don't respond to AC's.
Tablet sales worldwide are down year over year, and have been for several years. Most people just don't have a need for a device between their phone and their computer. Not surprising that it isn't Google's priority.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I loved my Nexus 7. Google support lasted only a couple of years. I still use SketchUp, which Google sold off several years ago. Google has a long history of creating interesting technology, and then dumping it.
Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Apple did the iPad pro and its sales of tablets went up. Android tablet sales also far outsell Google Chrome OS devices, and Microsoft has been doing 2 in 1s, which are really just tablets with keyboards and selling well.
So lets be clear here, this is not the market speaking. It isn't that everyone wants Android devices that are 6 inches, but not 8 inches.
The problem here is the head of Chrome OS, was Sundar Pichai, and he became CEO, and he decided that they would make ChromeOS their major OS puch on large devices. Android has been under seige ever since.
So Android is getting worse and worse with each iteration, targetting phone markets that don't exist with 512MB RAM and tiny screens, and the push to bigger tablet devices has been ChromeOS.
ChromeOS gets a sort of hacky Android support, which is supposed to please Android users, but is crap. And Android was supposed to help sell ChromeOS.
You can have a large tablet, it could fit 3 phone apps side by side in landscape.... but Android can't do that and ChromeOS just adds an awful legacy windowing interface, and lots of multitasing problems, to that mess.
What needs to happen here, is someone on Google board, thanks Pichai for his service, and Google needs to get serious about Android.
Instead iPads are littered with free to play psycho addictive junk just like the mobile store. Non-free to play development on mobile is essentially dead. I think its the failing of the store and lack of curation. Even a lack of basic features like being able to play a demo of a game or get an automated refund of something you don't like if you've played it for less than 30 minutes.
To put it in perspective, Samsung *alone* sells 25 million Android tablets each year, and that's despite Android's issues* on the tablet.
* e.g. it forces you to turn the tablet portrait if the app says portrait, instead of running the app in a portrait window. It does this even if a keyboard is attached.
Apps are supposed to use the full screen using two confusing different interfaces for tablet and phone, and for landscape tablet and portrait tablet... why?
Multitasking sucks, Google has been crippling Android for years now to be single tasking. Apps get stopped or closed arbitrarily.
Notifications bar at the top and softkeys at the bottom turning the screen into a ridiculous narrow letterbox.
The current target is to reduce ram usage as if customers give a fook about how much ram an app is using. As a result you flip between apps and wait.
No 'exit' on apps.
etc etc.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/
See the little red sliver of a line that isn't expanding? That's ChromeOS. Nobody wants ChromeOS, yet Google are pushing it and undermining Android on the top devices at the same time.
Is that sort of analogous to a decade ago when Apple stopped selling servers? Meaning, practically speaking, they already weren’t selling them but finally admitted it to themselves?
#DeleteChrome
Young folk are crossing their eyes inward and squinting their way to near blindness.There's other blindness too, one of the tech articles actually says, "due to lacking developer support and no proper optimizations for the OS on the big screen" Like it's rocket science. To me it's like saying, "Google tried (and failed) to make the Android OS -- which scaled up to read and use comfortably on a tablet, to their great astonishment and horror -- to be as vision-destroying and glare sensitive as smartphones displays riddled with car-key scratches. Which are now the 'gold standard', go figure."
Like bigger type is a bad thing. Weird.
Isn't this ridiculous to say, even to claim when trying to divine some grand corporate purpose? Let's take a real trip back in time, say 600 years to the 'golden age' of illuminated manuscripts, even early moveable type. People were not struggling to make type smaller, they were trying to communicate to a wide audience. This includes people over 30. People over 40 have some other interesting personal habits too that help them to dismiss the 'disadvantages' of tablets... such as women carrying purses and men with briefcases, which they don't lose track of. These weird people would think nothing of toting a piece of electronics around that held as many books as a library, or gave them that actual 'videophone' or even 'speakerphone' and 'electronic book' that was PROMISED decades ago in sci-fi literature.
But instead of just scaling up the smartphone by improving its sound quality (real speaker, low distortion, loud, anyone? Anyone?) and marketing it to the people who don't mind carrying large things around (yes 9" x 12" is large), they reproduced the worst sound the smartphone could make and crippled its cell phone capability, like a mean afterthought. It was a mechanism to force you to consume cell data plans. In order to achieve this we must discourage its ability to conveniently make voice calls.
Which is one of the reasons the elderly are starting prefer basic phones now. They have the smarts to use them but not the vision to see them, and don't need the aggravation and expense. With a direct campaign and decent product that easily and effectively replaces a cell phone they could have been convinced.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Not a convincing alternative? https://www.statista.com/stati...
One of my need buddies says for him there's no space between a phone and a Subnotebooks, but I really like tablets. They're lightweight, have long battery time, easy to handle, fast, ideal for media consumption and this semester I've seen more people at college use surface tablets with styluses (stylii??) than I actually can count.
I've gotten a cheap 8"Asus for reading notes and surfing recently, after giving my daughter my yoga 2 10" for her traveling. She loves the 18 hours of battery and the fact that it's basically a performance notebook without an attached keyboard. She uses a thin Bluetooth on if she needs one, which isn't that often.
Bottom line: there is a solid market for tablets and Google shouldn't drop it off it IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's what mothers give their kids to distract them when in a Stroller at the supermarket. Or anywhere. Or any time.
But why do they quit selling google tablets? it was an amazing product.... love to hear when they are back again...
I have been struggling to find a decent 7" tablet for years. The giant Zach Morris phone brigade fucking ruined this entire market. Those assholes are too cheap to buy a decent tablet, so they'd rather buy a giant McPhone and then they can't figure out what a tablet is for.
I would give $1000 for a decent octacore Android tablet. The market is there, but it can't support all these poverty-stricken assholes driving the whole market into producing the cheapest shittiest devices they can come up with.
One thing is certain. Apple doesn't want ChromeOS, because it undermines their thick juicy margins.
So Apple is willing to sponsor shills to go out and badmouth ChromeOS, and push their religion so zealots stuck in stockholm syndrome limo will shill for free.
Their 'very poor laptop from the 90s' owns the education market, with a strong multi-vendor platform. It sucks to be Apple, and we all benefit. Except Apple.
Google simply does not have access to CPUs that can compete with Apple's on mobile. To sell a tablet they would be trying to sell something that is the same price as a new Apple tablet but the same speed as a 3 year old Apple tablet. That's like trying to sell a car that is 10 years old for the same price as a new car. Until Qualcomm is able to come up with something remotely competitive with Apple chips there are not going to be any successful Google/Android/Chrome tablets. At the current time 3 year old Apple chips as are as fast as the newest Qualcomm chips. What happened?
I believe the data shows that the honeymoon is over for iPads as well as other devices.
I think the problem with tablets as a business market is that the use case is such that any old device can pretty much do what people want out of a tablet (read static content, play videos), there's no carrierd pushing for 'new free device every two years' and this means ultimately people aren't upgrading their tablets.
The tablet is an awkward middle. Too bulky and large to be on your person at all times, which means that novel sensors and applications aren't applicable to them. The size is also too big for comfortable game playing. On the flip side, it's smaller than a TV or a monitor and a good 'tablet' is touchscreen focused, and that's just too limited for content creation or higher end gaming.
It's a shame because particularly for reading comics and similar, it really is an awesome form factor. Windows tablets tend to be a tad big, but more critically, there are much better applications in android for this sort of media. Given that is pretty much the only use case that I go to my tablet for now, that's not a particularly exciting market to sell to.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I don't trust Samsung or Amazon, and have no interest in being locked into their ecosystem and don't consider them trustworthy.
I'm surprised that you don't trust Samsung, but *do* trust* Google. Or maybe you are saying with respect to getting timely updates?
I personally am concerned about Samsung's market share, and I'm concerned that broadly, *no* other brand of Android device *consistently* has a track record of timely updates. Currently Motorola is occasionally with the program (e.g. the Moto X4 has had a pretty good track record so far, but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
we all benefit
Of course, it does lock people into the Google story. Multiple hardware vendors is nice and all, but the software and services lock in is far more insidious than hardware lock in.
That's the shame of the market, you have to pick which of the three scary corporations you want to lock yourself into (google, microsoft, or apple). The only areas of computing where this isn't the case are large enterprises (that can roll their own stuff) and hobbyists/enthusiasts (that can use a rather untethered linux distro).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I half agree with you.
It's shit.
My personal opinion is the same. My experience has been a generally glitchy platform.
It runs Android slower.
I don't know, but I would wonder if that is the case, is it because of how many ChromeOS systems are Intel versus ARM. The Android ecosystem is heavily ARM centric and Intel platforms can run it, but I just don't think they get the same attention.
It runs in landscape only,
At least our families lenovo chromebook does portrait
it has the fixed keyboard attached.
That is currently the choice of the hardware makers at the moment. Chromebooks that fold back (our family has a 'thinkpad' yoga chromebook, which has a crappy pointing device and no trackpoint, not very thinkpad-y) exist today to be tablet-like, though they don't commit to being totally keyboard free, which makes them pretty heavy compared to how it could be.
It has a windowing interface that is terrible to use with fingers on a touch device.
I concur, but I haven't seen a windowing interface that wasn't terrible to use on a touch device, and Android's windowing system is worse. Unless you mean to say a windowing system doesn't belong on such a form factor, in which case I understand and yes Android fits that sentiment well. I would agree with not having a windowing system prominent in a touch oriented device if that's your stance.
I will say I also don't get Google's obsession with ChromeOS. From a business perspective it doesn't do all that great. From a brand strength perspective, Android is the *much* stronger brand. In education ChromeOS has found something of a niche success, but they would probably do just as well or better transitioning that market to "new, Android with windowing support that works well on laptop form factor" platform with full compatibility for the google services that really drive the education market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I already had to reluctantly replace my Nexus 7 with an iPad. The screen cracked (my kid dropped it), and there just wasn't another Android tablet that I could find that is as good.
Besides, Google stopped pushing Android updates to it about a year ago, so you can't keep it patched without 3rd party software.
I bought a nice little Nexus 7 through the Google online store several years ago. It's been great. It has an HD screen, decent sound, and perfect size for reading the web and carrying around. Maybe the fact it's been this reliable is why they didn't sell more... Either that or few others like these things, but I'm not sure what's not to like.
An even simpler solution.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have a LG android tablet and an iPad. I actually really liked the LG tablet, but it was a bit underpowered after awhile. For the past two years, there are no fast android tablets. Most at best are using mid range cell phone processors. For android tablets to work, then needed faster ARM chips. It has to be better than your phone or there is no point. It's a bigger form factor with larger batteries, bump up the CPU specs!
Both Apple and Microsoft have better tablets not because of superior software, but because they have fast enough processors in them.
That said, Google can't make a working email client for android.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I don't know what the heck is "questionable" about a netbook. ChromeBooks and similar Windows machines are simply cheap laptops. The only difference is that netbooks are supposed to sub-10 inch devices.
I think Netbooks took the big industry players by surprise. Where the likes of Microsoft are used to trying to dictate the market, netbooks were the opposite. Companies like Asus, MSI, and Acer started making cheap (sub $400), compact sub-notebooks. Which performance was limited, and you couldn't play Crysis on them, consumers liked how they could get a cheap portable computing device that was good enough for checking email, and watching movies on the go.
Microsoft and Intel were trying to push the likes of "Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC)" and "Ultrabooks" and couldn't understand why consumers were flocking to cheap $300 Netbooks instead of these $1200 ultraportables. Microsoft was caught so off-guard they had to reserect Windows XP to satisfy the market.
If nothing else Netbooks highlighted the potential market for cheap, small computing devices, which is now largely (but not entirely) satisfied with Smartphones and tablets, as well as Chromebooks.
So, phones in the US generally have a lifespan of about two years, as that's what carriers subsidize. (After two years, you can just get a new phone.)
Which means operating systems running on those phones generally have a two-year outlook.
Hardware older than two years running a mobile OS... isn't as competitive as new hardware running the same mobile OS.
Google put out hardware, and let it sit for more than two years without a replacement. And usually didn't drop their price much after the first year, either.
So they wound up repeatedly selling tablets slower than Apple's, running an OS and apps that really weren't tweaked for them.
The experience of a Google-branded Android tablet was flawless for the first year, so-so for the second, and then left you wondering when the hell they'd announce a replacement. Again. And again. While friends with iPads had longer-term OS support by default, and new hardware was available Every Year if you were willing to part with the loot.
I finally gave up last year. I miss the apps on that side, though.