Tablet revolution

[mr friendly guy]

I am sure most people have read that PCs are losing sales to tablets. I am sure overall that is most probably true. But I am interested to see has the rise of tablets affected the purchasing habits of members here in regards to personal computers.

For me I can't imagine doing most on line things, games, multimedia etc without my desktop. I spend more time on the desktop than the laptop, tablet, smartphone combine. I am in no hurry to get rid of one any time soon. At the present time I also have a laptop and a tablet. The reason being I haven't found a hybrid that suited my needs. So I had a tablet for minor work, acting as an E-reader etc. The laptop I bring it on holidays, mainly to try and sort out my photographs before I forget where exactly I took the pictures, surf the net and to watch multimedia on. I am hoping when I can get a hybrid which will suit my needs, such as possible the new Lenovo Yoga (the 2nd one).

So has anyone stopped buying PCs in favour of tablets. If so or not so, why?

[AniThyng]

I got an iPad 2 two years ago for free as a gift, and while I am in no hurry to replace it with a better tablet (I'll stick to the iPad line, I already have an Android phone so I see no point in limiting myself to one ecosystem when I can enjoy two, and I prefer android phones to iphones), I would definitely replace it if it failed, because I've gotten used to using it for light surfing and ebook/manga reading when I'm away from my desk and when pulling out an entire laptop would be needlessly awkward.

It definitely does not replace my Laptop or my desktop. A more interesting question for me is if it is actually worth upgrading my Desktop (2.5 years old, i5, ati 6950, 8gb ram) or just getting a PS4 instead.

But if money was tight and I had to choose between replacing my tablet or my desktop, I would replace the computer, I am a PC gamer, and if I had to I'd make do with my phone to replace my tablet...

[Sharp-kun]

The problem with a lot of comparisons of PC's vs Tablets is that they ignore the fact that for many users desktop PC's hit a plateau several years ago. That PC you bought in 2010? Probably still powerful enough for everything you do. Even gaming assuming you don't want to run everything on ULTRA MAX DOOM settings.

Before that there was an upgrade cycle to PC's. I'd replace (or upgrade) my desktop every 2-3 years. I've not felt the need to now since I'm still playing everything I want to at good rates. I will do at some point.

In the office we upgraded all the PC's about 4 years ago. That's going to do us for a while.


I use my tablet when I'm:

- Commuting
- Out and about.
- In bed / in the bath.

It can't replace what my desktop does.

[Zaune]

Further to Sharp-kun's point, I wonder how tablet sales are comparing to sales of PC components. CPU speeds haven't mattered all that much for a while now, and they're the only part of a PC that really can't be upgraded easily so it's actually worth just replacing the graphics card and maybe fitting a bit more RAM at the three-year mark rather than starting over with a new machine.

I also wonder if better environmental awareness and/or tighter electronics recycling rules are playing a part in it as well.

[Simon_Jester]

One point is that tablets are most likely to replace other computers for people who don't make heavy use of computers in the "traditional" ways that people did in, say, 1998.

The person who needs a tablet most surfs the Internet, but they don't write much there (you can type on a tablet but it's more effort per paragraph). They read electronic files on it, but they probably don't do much editing or creation of those files there. They play games, but not games that require much graphical sophistication, and probably not a complicated interface. They store files, but probably not with the kind of complex filestructure that lends itself to large directories. They are, very possibly, people who found actually using a computer 'complicated' in the past, and want something with a slimmed-down, simplified user experience.

Or, failing that, they just got sick of lugging around a laptop and decided they can work around any limitations of the hardware.

Long story short, the "tablet revolution" gets part of its aura from the fact that many people adapting tablets HAD computers, but were not what we might call "core computer users:" they might well not have had a computer back in 1998, and a computer was always an inexact fit to their real needs.

[Thanas]

Haven't bought a tablet, but have refrained from purchasing a new PC as well, because the OEM Windows 8 is a massive pile of user unfriendly UI crap. I now need always one or two clicks more than I used to need before.

[Zaune]

You know, one of these days Microsoft is going to realise they're never going to have another Windows 95 moment. Not this side of direct PC-to-brain interfaces or something, anyway.

[atg]

Working in the IT industry I'd say that Sharp-kun has pretty mich hit the nail - use of PC from what I can see is pretty much still the same, but there is much less pressure on having to replace a PC every 2-3 years, resulting in less sales.
With few exceptions tablets seem to be complementing PCs/laptops as an extra device, not totally replacing.

Interestingly sales of gaming PCs IIRC have gone up the past few years, and I know several stores that cater to such in australia, such as pccasegear have gone through a lot of expansion in the past 12ish months.

[Gandalf]

So has anyone stopped buying PCs in favour of tablets. If so or not so, why?

I haven't had a desktop since 2009, having gone completely to laptops (currently on a MacBook Pro).

When I'm out, I use the iPad for basic note taking and in my job as a tutor and leave the laptop at home unless I really have to. I like having access to the media storage in my own way, as opposed to through whatever the tablet demands in its OS.

[Lagmonster]

Tablets appeal to the Quiet Majority - the people who aren't hardcore anything, really, and who are dazzled by simple, comfortable, functional things. I have a PC and an iPad. Do I like the iPad? Yes. Does it have lots of interesting games on it, some of which rival console titles in execution if not sheer size? Abso-fucking-lutely. Does the iPad handle my surfing and video-watching requirements? Beautifully. But I want to play big-name PC titles like Battlefield, Civ V, Mount&Blade Warband, (plus some consolish titles like Assassin's Creed and the Arkham series of Batman games) etc., and I can only really do that on my PC, so I spend my time on the PC.

Here's what I need tablets to do for me to buy them:

1) Acknowledgement that big gaming should be an option. Besides just having the guts to let me play Crysis 3 in Ridiculovision, I look for mandatory app compatibility with this type of peripheral. That's an optional, removeable shell that converts your tablet into a gameboy-like device. It's not just enough to have GTA3 on iOS in all its glory; I'd like to be able to play it too.

2) The option to turn it into an actual workstation. I want to have the option for my tablet to plug into an actual full-size office layout, like I can do with laptops and those mediocre Transformer PCs out there. I realize that iPads already have miniature folio keyboards and styluses and iPlay receivers and shit, but fuck you: I want an actual keyboard big enough to play piano duets on and a mouse that requires two hands to move. Something I can sit at for several hours at and do reasonably complicated productivity tasks and other work.

[Simon_Jester]

Zaune, could you expand on what you mean by a Windows 95 moment?

Do you simply mean, a moment when by changing their user interface they capture an overwhelming market share advantage?

[Starglider]

I still buy (build) only the most monstrous of desktops crammed with as many top-end CPUs and GPUs as possible. However I have had a Windows tablet for three years now. It doesn't completely replace my laptop, but I expect to replace the tablet this year and retire the laotop without replacement.

[Zaune]

Zaune, could you expand on what you mean by a Windows 95 moment?

Do you simply mean, a moment when by changing their user interface they capture an overwhelming market share advantage?

Pretty much. I'm just old enough to remember the changeover; we must have been one of the last households to buy a PC with 3.1 installed as standard, and thanks to my stepfather's obsession with shiny new gadgets we were among the first to buy it as an upgrade. It was a huge improvement in usability if you were a complete newbie, so much so that -and this is the important bit- it more or less made up for just how broken it was at launch. Even when their subsequent UI shakeups have improved things, it's never quite been that much of a game-changer; sometimes it's backfired on them so badly, such as with Vista, other times it's just annoyed experienced users into switching back to Classic Mode.

[Zixinus]

I brought (well, got) a tablet quite a while ago. The main things I do on it is: read it has a nice display and I don't have to worry about file-format tightness like I'd have to with an E-book reader); listen to music (it's more universal than my old phone and lighter) and sometimes play apps (to waste time while waiting in a bank or something).

For anything serious (like, typing more than a paragraph), I use a computer. Computers are just so much more open and capable than tablets, especially in terms of interface. Not to mention that I dislike using fingers as an interface. It's OK when I just tap the screen to turn a page or just to watch a youtube video but that's about it. I don't care how precise the touch interface is, you can't fingerpaint your name unto a stamp.

That said, it's not a surprise that people are switching to tablets. They offer pretty much what most users want from a computer: being connected to people, being on the internet, music and using, handy small programs.

I still buy (build) only the most monstrous of desktops crammed with as many top-end CPUs and GPUs as possible.

Yes, but as an AI programmer, don't you also get much, much more use out of them? Especially compared to an average user?

[TheFeniX]

Cursory reading shows that it's actually the commercial market where tablets are going to beat out PC sales, which actually makes a lot of sense. Gaming has reached a plateau, but hardware well above the requirements of most commercial applications is widely available. You don't need an i3 to write reports or create tables/pdfs, nor run outlook/gmail/whatever. So, investments made years ago on desktop PCs are still paying out and back-end stuff like servers and switching doesn't factor in. Unless you're doing CAD work, hardware you bought 3 years ago is going to last at least another 2. Contrast to less then a decade ago when just operating system enhancements (and some of the bloated software being pushed out) could crater your workstation that was SOTA 2 years prior.

The commercial market loves tablets because it makes communication more portable than a laptop and easier to utilize than a smart-phone. Even our podunk business has the boss man with his fancy tablet to check e-mail and review documents in the field.

Tablets are great, but just like docking stations were big for laptops back in the day, tablets need access to better peripherals to be PC replacements. There are usually additive devices, rather than replacements.

Even when their subsequent UI shakeups have improved things, it's never quite been that much of a game-changer; sometimes it's backfired on them so badly, such as with Vista, other times it's just annoyed experienced users into switching back to Classic Mode.

Don't forget the Me/2000 launch where they kept the old outdated 98 kernel for home users and used the vastly superior NT kernel for "pro" use which turned out to just be the only operating system worth using between the 2.

[Zaune]

[quote="TheFeniX"Don't forget the Me/2000 launch where they kept the old outdated 98 kernel for home users and used the vastly superior NT kernel for "pro" use which turned out to just be the only operating system worth using between the 2.[/quote]
I missed out on that; we went from 98SE straight to XP.

[Simon_Jester]

Cursory reading shows that it's actually the commercial market where tablets are going to beat out PC sales, which actually makes a lot of sense. Gaming has reached a plateau, but hardware well above the requirements of most commercial applications is widely available. You don't need an i3 to write reports or create tables/pdfs, nor run outlook/gmail/whatever. So, investments made years ago on desktop PCs are still paying out and back-end stuff like servers and switching doesn't factor in. Unless you're doing CAD work, hardware you bought 3 years ago is going to last at least another 2. Contrast to less then a decade ago when just operating system enhancements (and some of the bloated software being pushed out) could crater your workstation that was SOTA 2 years prior.

The commercial market loves tablets because it makes communication more portable than a laptop and easier to utilize than a smart-phone. Even our podunk business has the boss man with his fancy tablet to check e-mail and review documents in the field.

Tablets are great, but just like docking stations were big for laptops back in the day, tablets need access to better peripherals to be PC replacements. There are usually additive devices, rather than replacements.

I actually feel that this lines up well with my earlier comment. What's going on here is that in many cases, these are business users for whom a desktop was never really the right tool, and for whom a laptop was the almost-right tool... but for whom a tablet is the ideal tool, because they've finally built a computer small enough for a wandering manager to use conveniently, but capacious enough that you can (sort of) write and (definitely) check a website on it.

It's a computer you can use while standing up, and that's progress, because even with laptops you usually have to sit down and park somewhere to get anything done.

[Mr Bean]

I disagree with a few comments in here I need to take issue with.
In no real order

1. Gaming has reached a plateau
Anyone who sticks to playing 2d fighter or side scrollers can say that a plateau has been reached. As far as many traditional games go the limit has been reached when it's ingenuity not engine power holding back the next Bastion or Street Fighter. But have you played an open world RPG recently? Let me put this bowel down, oh wait fuck it shot off the screen. Why? Because physics sucks and it needs major power to get better. Look at the triple A stuff like your BF4 where the engine chugs under the mostly moderate amount of destructibility. Or something like GTA 5 where 95% are locked off painted boxes.

Gaming is on the verge of undergoing another massive boost besides graphic increases. And it's a side effect of 3d printing, specifically 3d scanning. One of the biggest time sinks is today in a 3d system is getting models done of the 50,000 or more objects most higher budget games need done. There was a "cape guy" during the Batman games who's only job was getting the physics and look of Batman's cape right.

Combine open librarys with the ability to buy a 3d scanner in three or four years time big enough to port a real world object directly in Maya or 3d Mark and from there into a game engine is going to make it dramatically easier on the art department. Add in procedural deformation and destruction handled by the engine run by a PC power run to handle and we are going to see another dramatic step forward in a few short years. This plateau is a temporary thing and even today only applies to some genres of games.

2. Tablets (general comments)
Tablets are good for enjoying someone else work, but trying to create and work on a tablet? A good recipe for eyestrain and hand injuries. There is a fine line between something like a MS Surface keyboard and a full up laptop that's not built to be a desktop replacement. I think myself we are still in an environment where the market is still deciding if we need ultra-books with tablets, if we need monster laptops when a new tablet might do as well, even more if tablets get the kind of docks laptops have used to hook up a full size monitor and keyboard to as a default option.

Myself I'd not buy a tablet, still waiting off another two years for them to reach late 2011 laptop power.

[TheFeniX]

I actually feel that this lines up well with my earlier comment. What's going on here is that in many cases, these are business users for whom a desktop was never really the right tool, and for whom a laptop was the almost-right tool... but for whom a tablet is the ideal tool, because they've finally built a computer small enough for a wandering manager to use conveniently, but capacious enough that you can (sort of) write and (definitely) check a website on it.

I agree.

But have you played an open world RPG recently? Let me put this bowel down, oh wait fuck it shot off the screen. Why? Because physics sucks and it needs major power to get better. Look at the triple A stuff like your BF4 where the engine chugs under the mostly moderate amount of destructibility. Or something like GTA 5 where 95% are locked off painted boxes.

We're at a point in gaming where developers are trying to sell us on the idea that 30FPS with motion blur is better than 60FPS and that there's no visual difference between 720p and 1080p (which also leaves out that PC is looking at 4k in the next year or so). The brand-spanking new consoles on the market are struggling to pull 60FPS and 1080p which PC gaming has been doing for years.

And GTA5 was developed to run on a decade old console.

Gaming is on the verge of undergoing another massive boost besides graphic increases. And it's a side effect of 3d printing, specifically 3d scanning. One of the biggest time sinks is today in a 3d system is getting models done of the 50,000 or more objects most higher budget games need done. There was a "cape guy" during the Batman games who's only job was getting the physics and look of Batman's cape right.

I can't agree here. We just saw a new line of consoles hit the market that can barely compete hardware-wise with what you can build on a budget for today, even accounting for the overhead a PC will have. This hardware cycle is going to last at least 7 years and it was bad enough when games were just forced to deal with 360s or PS3 being the lower spec requirements. With mobile gaming being "the next big thing" portability to those system is another factor developers will have to deal with.

Things like physics and AI will continue to take a backseat while all that limited hardware is devoted to "what matters:" AKA graphics, overpaid celebrity voice-actors, and poorly animated character interactions passed off as "cutscenes."

Will there be games that make it worthwhile to keep your rig updated for? Definitely, but just like today, they are going to be the exception, not the norm.

[Covenant]

As a game developer and a hard-core computer user who has a lot of messy peripherals and heavy usage programs, I really hope the tablet revolution slows down a bit. Right now it is super trendy to be sure, but it causes a lot of problems for me. I would have loved to update my workstation from my 2-screen XP box to a big fancy new machine, but Windows 8 (and 8.1) are a disaster and there's no reason for me to break my workflow speed by going for the marginal upgrade of 7.

People like me are the people who big PC and PC component sales can grab, but we're not thrilled with the offerings right now. We'd upgrade but we don't want to end up spending twice as long to do the same tasks. I'm not saying XP is the work of a genius, but I've got this machine doing nothing I do not want it to, not "helping" me in any way that is not actually helpful, and still running modern games and programs with lightning-fast ease. My fiancee is desperately envious of my ancient machine, and hers is a new touch-screen Windows 8 laptop. It boggles my mind.

Tablets are also a bit of a cannibalistic market. I just got a smartphone for the first time this year, and it rapidly replaced the godawful iPad I was using before. We got iPads so we could work on iOS development, and ever since I had the thing I was appalled at how bad it was for everything I wanted to do. The android I got is gigantic but it fits perfectly in my huge hands, and everyone chuckles that its a mini-tablet. Maybe true, but tablets are in large part too big to be as convenient as some large phones, and so I wonder if the final products of this new trend will be a mix of sizes that all have relatively similar usability. None of them, however, can replace my desktop. I absolutely NEED something that plugs into my big Wacom tablet, but also has a functional keyboard that lets me type fast (and not one of those shitty laptop keyboards with the keys that barely have any room to breathe) and a mouse and a nice big monitor so I can organize my workspace and run 3-4 big heavy Adobe programs simultaneously.

I can see some manager who needs to constantly on the move getting a ton of really useful work out of a tablet, but PCs are always going to be necessary for a few. They're bound to get less common, but I'm sure they're going to also get a lot better. In a way, if the PC got a lot less popular then the OS that I use on it would not have to be catering to people who would really be better off sticking just to their phones.

[Enigma]

Don't have a tablet but would like to get one soon in the future for minor surfing and e-reading.

I use my laptop for story righting, web surfing (would like to do more but my laptop uses Ubuntu and I am a lot more comfortable with a Win OS)

My desktop I use for practically everything and I don't see it being dropped for a tablet or for a newer laptop. I use Win 8.1 and I love it. I've gotten so used to it that whenever I have to use my in-laws' Win7 computer it feels like I'm using an inferior OS. I used to like XP but hated its useless backwards compatibility mode. I hardly have any issue with Win8.1's compatibility mode. Would love to have a touch screen monitor though.

[phongn]

So has anyone stopped buying PCs in favour of tablets. If so or not so, why?

No. I'm a software developer: a tablet just isn't enough mojo for what I need to do. Not enough screen real estate, not enough compute power, not enough multitasking, etc.

But I do have an iPad Mini (in addition to a work desktop, a work laptop, a home desktop, a home server and a smartphone) and love it. It's really a spectacularly good device for content consumption and light gaming.

1) Acknowledgement that big gaming should be an option. Besides just having the guts to let me play Crysis 3 in Ridiculovision, I look for mandatory app compatibility with this type of peripheral. That's an optional, removeable shell that converts your tablet into a gameboy-like device. It's not just enough to have GTA3 on iOS in all its glory; I'd like to be able to play it too.

IOS 7 has first-class support for such game controllers and such products should be hitting the market this year.

2) The option to turn it into an actual workstation. I want to have the option for my tablet to plug into an actual full-size office layout, like I can do with laptops and those mediocre Transformer PCs out there. I realize that iPads already have miniature folio keyboards and styluses and iPlay receivers and shit, but fuck you: I want an actual keyboard big enough to play piano duets on and a mouse that requires two hands to move. Something I can sit at for several hours at and do reasonably complicated productivity tasks and other work.

Uh, that's called a Windows 8 tablet. It's not working out too well for Microsoft: the great strength of tablets right now are their relative simplicity.

Don't forget the Me/2000 launch where they kept the old outdated 98 kernel for home users and used the vastly superior NT kernel for "pro" use which turned out to just be the only operating system worth using between the 2.

Windows ME was a backup plan; Microsoft wasn't quite able to get backwards-compatibility good enough with Windows 2000 and were forced to make a new 95-descended OS in the interim. Windows XP ended up unifying the two, anyways.

I can see some manager who needs to constantly on the move getting a ton of really useful work out of a tablet, but PCs are always going to be necessary for a few. They're bound to get less common, but I'm sure they're going to also get a lot better. In a way, if the PC got a lot less popular then the OS that I use on it would not have to be catering to people who would really be better off sticking just to their phones.

PCs are going to cater to a minority market (people like you or Starglider who need or want a lot of power, or tinkerers).

I still buy (build) only the most monstrous of desktops crammed with as many top-end CPUs and GPUs as possible. However I have had a Windows tablet for three years now. It doesn't completely replace my laptop, but I expect to replace the tablet this year and retire the laotop without replacement.

Surface Pro?

[Covenant]

That's actually the first positive feedback I've heard about Win8. I find it to be such a disaster, but I knew there had got to be a degree of unfamiliarity playing into it.

What do you like the most about it? Maybe I can try to sell her on some of those features. It also feels really slow so if you have any optimization hints I'd be greatly desirous to hear them.

[phongn]

I run Windows 8.1 with Start8 and so hardly interact with Modern UI*. There's a lot of small interface tweaks that I like, I personally prefer the flat interface design and there's a substantial amount of work under the hood to make Windows 8 use fewer resources and run faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware. If Windows 8 is slow for you, something is wrong.

* I thought the Start Screen wouldn't annoy me, but it turns out my interactions with the Start Menu aren't modal; I tend to continue doing a task as I hit WinKey-[Application Search] and the Start Screen interrupts that flow.

[Covenant]

It's an ASUS laptop, so I assume the hardware is what is making it slow. I'm happy to hear it's normally faster, but annoyed that the origin of the problem is a relatively difficult to fix hardware sluggishness.

Since it is a laptop I can't exactly crack the thing open to see how it has been wired up, so I'm going to assume there's manufacturer garbage running in the background that I need to purge. A lot of these store-bought rigs seem to be bloated down with crap that comes 'as default' from the assemblers. I've already disabled most of the aesthetic features for her--your feedback does help me narrow my focus.

Never used Win7 so I cannot tell what improvements they've done overall, but Win8 hasn't seemed like a drastic improvement YET. I presume most of it is in the background, and that's getting missed by me because either the specs are bad (slow ram, big numbers?) or because of bloatware.