My love affair with touch screens is over. What a coincidence.
Well, aside from tablets and phones, touch screens are useless.
You're not gonna hold your hand straight in the air for more than a 10 minute stretch.
Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
61–70 of 201 posts
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#62I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices. My 11" Macbook Air is just about as portable as an iPad, but is way easier to use, not just for streaming, but even for coding, etc. Of course, I've been wrong about things before and I'm not really a typical consumer user, but I just can't imagine a future for tablets with phones getting as good as they are, and sma…
Most laptops are not macbook airs. Purely from a lack of required maintenance point of view, an iPad is a huge step up from an equivalently priced PC for someone who just needs email Facebook and web.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#63My love affair with the tablet isn't over: I love how it lets me browse the web, read books and magazines, and watch videos in bed after a long day. That's probably how most people use their tablets — secondary devices, mainly for entertainment. After a working day, I don't want to use a PC, and the tablet lets me use the web and other media comfortably, but I wouldn't try to actually use it for work beyond initially…
This is exactly how I use my tablet too. I use my computer all day writing code, so when its time to relax with some Netflix, or an ebook I grab my tablet instead. Its perfect for laying on the couch or in bed. A phone definitely works in that case as well, but the tiny screen isn't as nice for reading and watching video. Not to mention by the end of the day my phone is usually mostly dead and its time to put it on t…
I dunno. I put in pretty long coding days, pretty much every day. The first thing I do when I get home is, turn on my desktop.
I loved my iPad when I first got it, but now it's relegated to an overly expensive kindle. I actually like to do things on my computing devices. Play (non-casual) games, do some stupid cat Photoshop, start a hobby project(right now it's a tower defense engine in the now defunct XNA). Tables can't support any of that.
Overall, I agree with the article.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#64My love affair with the tablet isn't over: I love how it lets me browse the web, read books and magazines, and watch videos in bed after a long day. That's probably how most people use their tablets — secondary devices, mainly for entertainment. After a working day, I don't want to use a PC, and the tablet lets me use the web and other media comfortably, but I wouldn't try to actually use it for work beyond initially…
In order to argue the author's point you would also need to be carrying around a 5" phone. He is pointing out the trend of more people using their phones for what they used to use their tablets for. I'd be interested to know if you have a 5" phone and whether or not you think it replaces the features of your tablet in any way.
Speaking for myself, no, my smartphone does not replace my tablet. The amount of screen realestate lost when going from 11" to 5" is just too much. It makes reading hard (particularly with less than perfect eyesight), movies too small, and all of the real time communication that comes with a phone is vying for my attention all the time.
Now then, if I could make calls over a bluetooth headset connected to my iPad, I'd drop my phone in a heartbeat...
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#65Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more concretely, I should only have one e-mail application, one web browser, one IM client, one media player, and all of my devices—wired, wireless, wifi, cellular, and everything in between—should be views upon those singular applications and nothing more.
So although I have three tablets because I am a technology addict, I simultaneously do not want them because I do not want additional first-class computing devices in my life.
If each additional tablet I purchased were just another input and output device—an additional view—added to my arsenal, I would buy as many as I see worthwhile to have scattered throughout my house and office. But as it is, each additional tablet (or phone or computer) is a first-class device with first-class expectations for my attention. Every device wants to be babied with application installations, updates, configuration, local data, and the works. Today's plain cloud is a meager, sticky, and altogether phony solution to this problem.
It's interesting to see this and an article about decentralizing the Internet (mischaracterized as "the web") as the top two articles at HN presently. I recently ranted [2] that Mr. Nadella should seize the opportunity to take Microsoft into a fundamentally different direction than what everyone is telling him, including himself ("mobile first, cloud first"), rather focusing on users and applications first. Particular views of applications, such as mobile or desktop or living room, are secondary matters.
I'd like to see Microsoft step up and become the only tech titan to stop following today's mobile-first, cloud-first model and swing the pendulum back to self-control with technology serving users, not companies.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#66The article's right that most people want one small device and one big one. It's just wrong that the big one most people want is a laptop or PC.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a Linux user and very much addicted to the CLI. For any kind of work, a tablet isn't really right for me. I'm getting by okay with two laptops at the office: An MBP that weighs at least 7 lbs and a 2.2 lb ThinkPad. All my work stuff is on my MBP which stays on my desk. I take my ThinkPad to meetings, and if I need to reference something off the MBP I simply ssh into it. That would be a pain without a keyboard. So…
If you're addicted to the CLI why the MBP? A MBA would serve you just as well, and be lighter.
Probably because until recently, only the MBP was retina - and that's a big advantage (to me).
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#68I was an early adopter of the iPad too, but now get more use out of a very tiny MacBook Air. The laptop slimmed down to meet it, rather than the phone moving up. For me the key has been the ability to type.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#69My love affair with the tablet isn't over: I love how it lets me browse the web, read books and magazines, and watch videos in bed after a long day. That's probably how most people use their tablets — secondary devices, mainly for entertainment. After a working day, I don't want to use a PC, and the tablet lets me use the web and other media comfortably, but I wouldn't try to actually use it for work beyond initially…
This is exactly how I use my tablet too. I use my computer all day writing code, so when its time to relax with some Netflix, or an ebook I grab my tablet instead. Its perfect for laying on the couch or in bed. A phone definitely works in that case as well, but the tiny screen isn't as nice for reading and watching video. Not to mention by the end of the day my phone is usually mostly dead and its time to put it on t…
Its perfect for laying on the couch or in bed
not for everyone though, as it emits light, and that is not what your body wants late at night. See example HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057575
edit: I'm simply indicating staring at a screen late at night might not be all that good for us humans. Downvoting this doesn't make it any less true.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#70The initial tablet market struck me as a very boomer focused device, one that made computing easy for a limited subset of tasks. I think he's wrong that tablets have peaked. As the software and hardware on tablets catches up to the capability of a full laptop, they are a much more compelling device for use at home or at work. Content creation, software development and file management are still a challenge but these c…
I'm a Linux user and very much addicted to the CLI. For any kind of work, a tablet isn't really right for me. I'm getting by okay with two laptops at the office: An MBP that weighs at least 7 lbs and a 2.2 lb ThinkPad. All my work stuff is on my MBP which stays on my desk. I take my ThinkPad to meetings, and if I need to reference something off the MBP I simply ssh into it. That would be a pain without a keyboard. So…
I wonder if there'd be any market for bringing back the keyboarded smartphone in the phablet scale - that is, something that splits the difference between a Nexus 7 and a Blackberry Q10. For people who need to type standing-up but don't want a tiny smartphone.
Then again, you'd still be restricted to thumb-typing, it would be hard to come up with a sweet-spot size that allows both thumb-typing and proper keyboard touch-typing - this is something the software keyboards excel at, since you get both form-factors by rotating the device.