Just some meta before the actual article begins: I wanted to mention that this is post ID number 100! I've been writing blog for years, but this is the 100th post I've put on this particular system. (I eventually mean to backfill, so you'll end up with posts from like 2007 with ID numbers like 300, but that's for later on.)
In addition, I personally have mixed feelings about this article. I started with an extensive outline that really was just a collection of thoughts about laptops and tablets, and started from there. I stalled out at about 2,000 or so words, and instead of starting fresh as I often do, I decided to re-read it and plod on. I have since moved a few things around, so there's a possibility the whole thing won't flow quite like it should.
I've been writing about tablet computers in one way or another since early 2010 when the iPad came out. Since then, I've owned several tablets, both because I've wanted to stay abreast of the latest developments in what has turned out to be a fairly interesting time in computing, a lot like when microcomputers first showed up and there were a lot of different types available. Since then, I've joined the many by writing about tablets as productive devices, and at various times, have believed pretty specifically in their magical laptop-replacing abilities. I continue to use a tablet as my primary on-the-go computer, although true to form, it's the Microsoft Surface RT, because OneNote, Word, and Excel 2013 are my favorite programs on any computer.
A few weeks ago, I made two posts that talked to the fact that Microsoft would like very much for the Surface Pro 3 to be your new default computer. This dovetails nicely with the fact that the tech blog industry wants very much for the successor to the laptop as "the default computer" to show up and, well, start dethroning. The idea is prevalent enough that I personally suspect it's what prompts companies to build giant phablet phones with quad-core processors and multiple gigabytes of memory, and devices like the Google Glass are trying to show that computing can be done in different form factors.
I'll go on record up front as saying that I like my Surface RT very much. I use it for most of my writing, and in fact, I probably wrote most of this post on it (I started on my laptop, though) and it has by and large succeeded the laptop for me, but that was less because it is a tablet, and more because it is a very tiny desktop computer with a really impressive battery life, in the shape of a tablet.
The idea that the laptop "needs" replacing is pretty interesting. For starters, I actually think it ignores the fact that desktop computers and minicomputers and mainframes never actually got replaced, just supplanted as the "default" computers for home and office users, and it suggests that even though not everybody can find something they like better, everybody wants the next big thing to come out. I suspect that from the tech press side of things, the inspiration for this is to be seen as having predicted or been on top of the trend. On the consumer end, I suspect that it's the promise of a "better" and simpler computing environment that's so attractive, even if it's so difficult to get started.
As such, there are a few different directions taken by players in the computing industry to court consumers away from Windows and Mac OS. The first is with tablet computers, using mobile-first, touch-friendly operating systems and applications. The second is "laptop" computers using simpler operating systems, albeit still optimized for use with a keyboard and a mouse or touchpad. Some of the newest efforts, particularly on Hewlett Packard's part, actually involve both strategies, by putting a tablet operating system on a laptop device.
I think the question that isn't being asked is what applications are really suitable for this form factor, and how should we think about those applications compared to their desktop counterparts. Apple's strategy on this front has been interesting because the iPad launched with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers available, but at that time those applications' functionality were very different from what they are today, and there continues to be disparity in the feature set of the iPad and Macintosh versions of these applications.
In 2010, the iPad made a lot of sense as an ultra-portable ten hour writing computer, because the small MacBook Air we have today didn't yet exist, and when it did come out, it cost twice what an iPad did and had half the battery life. Today, the least expensive MacBook Air costs even more relative to the least expensive iPads, but everything has come down in price and battery life has made a quantum leap on the Mac side of things.
The other challenge tablets have is that most people simply can't enter text efficiently on them. I like to imagine that the introduction of Apple's speech recognition to the iPad has made some kind of dent, but in more than fifteen years since speech recognition became practical on personal computers, I continue to believe it hasn't actually become a very viable method of text input. It's fantastic that it's around, but a physical keyboard is faster, more accurate (fewer errors), more precise (correct options for capitalization and punctuation), and easier to adapt to. Keyboards are so good at text entry that many people consider some kind of wireless keyboard accessory, or a case with a keyboard built in, to be a necessary iPad accessory. (To the point where many peoples' iPads are thicker and weigh more than the 11-inch MacBook Air.)
On the Android side of things, keyboard and mouse are recognized as being so important that there are now laptops and desktops that run Android, and Samsung's latest tablet efforts have a bundled mouse, and two different keyboard docks are already available. (The whole thing is fatter and heavier than a 13-inch MacBook Air when you appoint it in Samsung's recommended manner, and it costs more than a MacBook Air as well.)
All of this effort, and one of the marquee applications for tablets, the thing people always ask about, is access to regular file shares, and remote desktop tools in order to get more convenient access to traditional desktop applications like Word and Excel. It has gotten to the point where at work, if somebody asks about the iPad, we are instructed to ensure that the caller knows the doom and gloom situation of "productivity" on such a mobile device.
Microsoft side-stepped this issue when they brought their own consumer tablet, the Surface RT, onto the scene. (Admittedly, late. Apple got its start in 2010 and Google legitimized the Android tablet efforts in 2011 with Android 3.0.) Windows 8 and RT build one dual-purpose operating system by adding the "New Interface" layer on top of the regular Windows NT platform. When it shipped in October 2012, many people thought that Microsoft was making a mistake including the desktop and desktop Office applications with the Surface RT, in part because they occupy a whole bunch of disk space, and in part because they don't make much sense on a touch-screen. The other neat thing about Microsoft's Surface hardware, though, is that they've built a laptop keyboard and trackpad that latches onto the bottom, and with this contraption deployed, the device is still skinnier, lighter, and easier to carry than a MacBook Air.
What's really interesting is how Apple and Microsoft handle the situation differently. While Microsoft's solution is to build a tablet that comes with the desktop versions of Word and Excel and can map a network location as a drive, Apple's solution is to re-emphasize over and over their commitment to the Macintosh and the iPad as separate platforms with different purposes and use cases. Reviews of Macs have for a long time called out a desire for things like touch screens, different physical form factors, and better mobile connectivity with 4G/LTE networking, etc. Apple refuses to add such functionality, presumably believing that Macs have too long a lifespan to build in WWAN hardware, or that a touch screen would detract from the experience of using a Macintosh. Apple's focus instead has been on improving the performance and battery life, and decreasing the cost of the MacBook Air family.
Google's case is almost more interesting than Microsoft's or Apple's because they don't have what could be counted as a single strategy. Google is building two operating systems, each has a stated case, but because it's all open source, nothing at all is stopping a vendor from putting ChromeOS (the laptop OS) on a tablet, or Android (the phone/tablet OS) on a laptop. Google's lack of control over Android and ChromeOS has created some interesting things, like the Ouya and nVidia Sheild gaming consoles, but it has also produced such problematic things as various Android-based desktops and laptops. The challenge with this is that unlike Windows RT, although Android allows for the use of a keyboard and mouse, neither the OS nor any of the applications is designed for it. Reviews of Android desktops without certain hardware, such as accelerometers, often call out the fact that some applications need the accelerometer to launch. (Even some that aren't games.)
The Surface Pro 3 is an interesting admission that keyboards just aren't going away, and that people might even like having a desktop computing environment available. As I had said previously, Microsoft is taking chances on a lot of different methods of interacting with computers in its quest to build what it sees as the ultimate physical representation of Windows 8, as an idea. Windows 8 is kind of a unique operating system, in that it has the dual mode thing going on, and Microsoft wanted the svelte and well-built hardware that none of the OEMs can or are willing to build.
In the way that even though the MacBook Air isn't the fastest Mac but it is the flagship Macintosh computer, the Surface Pro 3 really is the flagship of the Windows platform. To do this, Microsoft played on all of their strengths in desktop applications, and handwriting recognition, as well as their direct control over the engineering and manufacturing of the device, and their own generous catalog of software to create a compelling computer even before you add third party software. There are a lot of great new interface applications as well, and a Surface RT/2 or Pro could handily serve as a pure "tablet" if needed, though Microsoft has been slow to introduce the rest of the Office MX suite, and the Windows 8 Store is well behind iOS and Android, in quantity and in some ways, in quality and variety.
One tangential thing that's interesting is that touch screens are becoming more common on laptops. It would be really interesting to hear whether or not anybody uses them. Long ago, in a world far away, I talked about using the touch screen on my Surface RT for scrolling and a few other tasks. These days, I am almost never jamming my fingers onto the display, even though it's low enough to the table that touching it isn't a problem, but a mouse is just more convenient for my work.
Unfortunately, despite touch screens becoming more common (to the point where there's actually a healthy selection of 18-20-inch giant desktop tablets using ultra low voltage processors,) pen input is still pretty difficult to find. Wacom is manufacturing a slate tablet, Sony has a few Vaio products with pen input, the Microsoft Surface Pro family feature digitizers, and otherwise, nobody is building computers with an eye toward pen input.
Voice control (as I alluded to) is getting better, but I don't think anybody thinks it's a good default mechanism. Google Glass is on the horizon, and Samsung has several of its own wearable watches and is almost certainly planning glasses, but I don't think anybody believes glasses and watches are the replacement for laptops.
One advance in tablet ecosystems since the launch of the iPad in 2010 has been in network connectivity and network-based services that are almost necessary to have and use in order to take advantage of a tablet. Because file management is difficult on a touch screen, and without a USB port or traditional filesystem access, online file storage services need to be robust and useful from within an application.
I think most people lack the ability to truly separate their own needs with those of others, or with another potential use case. It tends to motivate two things. The first (and probably easiest to identify) is when somebody doesn't personally have a use case for a thing, they immediately and permanently internalize the notion that such a thing will never be useful to anybody for anything at all. The second is that because something is said to be useful to some people, it must be useful to them (a particular author or speaker who might not otherwise have been prompted to look at a particular thing.)
As a result of the latter phenomenon, much of the tech press and the most prevalent tech-focused bloggers are seen talking about moving more and more of their workflow to tablet computers. I think the thing people are missing is that just like every single time a new form factor has become available so far, the "old computers" almost never go away. There are still mainframes, there are still minicomputers, there are still servers, there are still remotely located timesharing systems, desktops won't go away, and neither will laptops.
The question, I suppose, is what role tablets play in computing today. There are several roles they do play, but over the years, tablet customers, vendors, and the tech press have been throwing almost everything at wall to see what sticks, without necessarily having a clear idea of what the use case is. There are several tasks at which tablets are great, and tablet-class hardware has a lot of potential, but the challenge continues to be finding a way to use that horsepower while either completely replacing older types of computers, or augmenting them in a useful way.
Like all computers, the success of tablets will ultimately hinge on a few things. Performance is part of it, although the fastest tablets today typically don't have much to worry about on that front. What they do, what kind of functionality they have, is another part of it. There are relatively few tablets on the market that can have a native development environment installed out of the box, for example. How easy it is to do those things, and how "productive" or how much of any given task you can accomplish is yet another thing. I think this last part is really what makes or breaks a computer, either a specific model, a platform, or a particular style of computer (mainframes vs. microcomputers, for example.) Tablets, as I've mentioned, got rid of a lot of stuff on their way to becoming 10-hour, high-pixel-density, 1.5-pound devices. The stuff they lost compared to the MacBook Air and other UltraBooks (which along the way have gained hecka battery life and shaved off a lot of weight) can be a big detriment to usability. As I mentioned earlier, writing on the iPad is a very popular example of a use case for the device, but because a physical keyboard had to go on the way to weighing only a pound and a half, most people add this back and add that much bulk and management complexity back to the device.
People often think and talk about the MacBook Air as though it's a really limited computer. Even though it was true in 2010 in terms of horsepower and expansion, it has always run a full UNIX operating system, supported multiple concurrent shell users, sported a free and very well liked development environment as well as hosted a more traditional console-based toolchain for UNIX development, and it even comes with web, file, database, and other server applications built in. Add in the fact that the MacBook Air has several much more general purpose interfaces, including Thunderbolt, which is literally PCI Express on a wire coming out the machine, and you're looking at something much more suited to certain types of tasks.
There will always be people for whom Chromebooks, Android-powered desktops, and iPads just make all the sense, even for as inconvenient at certain tasks (such as long-form writing) without a keyboard and mouse as they are. It can, as always, be challenging to recognize your own needs. The group of users whose tasks are best suited to tablets and Chromebooks are often not well equipped to know this, either because they don't already have a computer and are relying on the experiences of somebody more technically oriented, or because they already have a computer and have already put the effort into learning how to use it, and don't want to change their habits and workflows.
This is probably one of the biggest challenges facing anybody suggesting a particular type of computer for other people's needs. (Even me, and I do this all the time.) Many retail employees and other people who act as technology consultants simply aren't well equipped to talk candidly with customers and clients about their needs and how different devices will handle these situations. It's the same thing I explained above where many Internet commenters whose needs are actually relatively simple but have one thing preventing them from hopping onto a "Post-PC" computing device spend a lot of time telling everybody else that there's never a context for such a device.
Each style of computer brings with it particular types of challenges. Desktops and laptops operate by doing exactly what you tell them and always presuming you know exactly what you're doing and what you expect to happen. Tablets, on the other hand, compensate for their relatively limited resources and the fact that they don't need to use some metaphors (such as the desktop and the folder-based filing system) by taking most of the control and responsibility for things like ensuring information is replicated from the device to a network storage service, and assisting the user in organizing files using tags, categories, etc. With a desktop or laptop, the user typically either must or is given the opportunity to take complete control of the system, which as I've alluded to previously, is a more comfortable situation for technical users and self-described power users, even if it's ultimately a lot less efficient and robust.
Like the success of the Macintosh (in a Windows world), I also think it's unfair (or maybe just not useful) to talk about the "success" of tablets as though it depends on the death of desktops and laptops. Inevitably, there is only so much market available, but I think part of what we're seeing with tablets is that they've found new types of users, and they've found their way into the hands of a lot of desktop and laptop users as secondary devices for specific tasks. Even as I use my laptop, I often prop up my iPad nearby for watching a TV show, and my laptop will never be a good device to pull out of my bag and look at a map. On the other hand my laptop just has a better keyboard than my tablet. I think over the years, people will get better at discerning what's best for their needs, but as with all transitory periods, there are people who refuse to believe that the new thing is capable of anything, and there are people for whom it may be the ideal computer, but just don't know to try it.