At the same time, Apple hasn’t figured out many new things to do with the iPad to bring back the old excitement. During the October keynote to launch the latest model, Apple executives gushed and gushed and gushed about how *thin* the new iPad was. And it is! The iPad Air 2 is thin, elegant, and so light it just might float right off your lap. But the drama is gone.
The iPad is nice. You might still hang out together sometimes on the couch. But when you’re done, you probably just put it down on the pile with all the magazines and mail and other stuff stacking up on the coffee table. It’s just another way to waste a little time.
Even with dropping iPad sales, it’s still a massive business that rakes in huge amounts of money. With the amounts of money Apple rakes in, it’s easy to lose perspective.
That being said, the upgrade cycle for tablets appears to be a lot longer than for phones, which is why Apple isn’t concerned about the iPhone 6(+) cannibalising iPad sales: iPhones are not only more expensive, they are also on a two year upgrade cycle and appear to be “free”. As long as any drop in iPad sales is more than made up for in increasing iPhone sales, Apple is getting more money, not less.
Problem with ipad, what has it really had innovative since first ipad? Its pretty much been small hardware updates each year and slightly thinner some generations. When that thinner one is only a few mm’s no one notices it. even 10-20% thinner its pretty much impossible to tell that. While Ipad has remained pretty much same year to year, its competitors made better tablets each year for much cheaper price that did everything the much more expensive Ipad did. When you have a choice of an ipad for 5-600$, but can get a tablet that is comparable for around 2-300$ people will compromise on things if it does it as well.
That would imply Android tablet sales are surging. I honestly doubt that – I think Android tablet sales are similar stutters. Anyone have any data on this?
The trend in the last 2 years has been “iPad down, Android tablets up”. Android tablets have surpassed iPads a while ago. If you want a top-tablet you need an expensive one, but as tablets became commodities the bulk is now in the lower regions where Android rules.
Source? Any of the links from this search that all display this trend:
https://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=android+sales+are+up&gws_rd=ssl…
Apple has moved on from iPad, that is why the latest iPad mini only had Touch-ID and nothing else. For a mini-tablet they want you to use the maxi-phone. For a maxi-tablet they still have the best hardware/software combination on the market but that market is not buying them because they already have a maxi-iPad.
This article mentions that the upgrade-cycle for tablets is slower than for phones. I am wondering if there really is an upgrade market at all. Sure, the new devices are nicer, but ones you have one there is almost no incentive to buy a newer one. We still use our iPad 2 sometimes, but mostly we use the phone (more portable) or the Surface Pro 3 (more powerful)
But the competition is only comparable when it comes to hardware, and even then, if you want something as nice as an iPad then the price matches the iPad anyway.
The problem for Android (and windows) tablets is software, it just isn’t even close when it comes to tablet optimized software, which is why i would recommend most people to get the iPad.
That said, for some users the android tablets are fine, and there can be other reasons to even make them better than the iPad. The reason why my tablet is a samsung note 10″ and not an iPad is because we use it a lot for watching videos, so 16/9 is much prefered, and my wife likes to draw on it so the built in digitizer is 1000 times better than using a finger or a stylus. Also if you use it so little you don’t need many apps, then the brand doesn’t matter, but the lack of apps is what annoys me the most.
Depends on what you’re doing, really. I have an iPad because I like playing with music creation apps like Korg Gadget, which aren’t represented well on Android. (Although this is slowly starting to change.) I also have an Android tablet and other than this one niche category, I don’t find myself wanting for anything.
On the other hand, my friend uses his Android (Shield) tablet to play emulators on, and to stream games from his PC into the living room. You ain’t doing that with an iPad
I would say there is an remarkable difference between our iPad Air and our iPad Air2 when it comes to how thin it feels.
If you have an already good product, then you do not need to make that large changes to still have an product that sells.
This is how I felt when I bought an Apple product.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple
Edited 2015-01-28 11:16 UTC
Or : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCwBkNgPZFQ
The whole idea of buying the most fancy device is just a flawed.
Welcome to the world of hype and trends, also better known as the consumerism and built in obsolescence.
Exactly!
I buy phones that are several years old and have strong COMMUNITY support. That way my phone can be more up to date than the latest and greatest.
My Samsung Galaxy S2 can run all the latest and greatest Android ROMs (still has some issues with 5.0, but they’re getting better) and apps without issue or lag.
I broke my screen and just bought a new one for $75… no, not a new screen, a new phone. And I own it outright. The next time my screen gets cracked I may look for an upgrade, but certainly not before then.
My phones prior to this were
Motorola Atrix 4G
Palm Treo 680
Palm Treo 650
Nokia something or other
Land line
Cups & String 6.0
Lungs & throat 2.0
Umbilical cord 0.6
The iPad sales are limited by Apple’s simple refusal to expand the concept. If they simply would offer larger products without the asinine size limitations then sales would uncork.
Where is the 17″ iPad with half a terabyte of storage? It could be thin and light, but have a thick enough cover glass to survive hard impacts and drops. It would be large enough to dissipate heat from much stronger processors. It would also encourage more iTune movie sales.
It’s not just about selling hardware.
It could be thin, but not light. It would need a bigger battery to feed the screen (and more if using a beefier CPU).
The problem with tablets is that they aren’t really usable devices. (Unless of course you add a keyboard, a mouse and it boots into Windows 8.1 Professional.)
Right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct1_r_61sk8#t=65
17 inch ipad. If they want something that is very different, that would be it.
I’m not sure if you’re trolling or serious.
If it is a troll that’s a really good one. Bravo.
If it is not a a troll, you are a very interesting person. Seize the initiative, blaze your trail. Take pictures on your journey, they’ll be fascinating.
I just bought the Wife the 64GB iPad air 2 and it maxed out before we bought anything new. It’s really time consuming to download movies from the PC to the iPad. At least move the storage bar forward. Your investors should be questioning why your iTunes sales are flattening out.
Simple answer. Storage limits.
My kids watch some show with a teenie bopper sporting a tablet between 17-19 inches. I believe they call it a Pear Pad. It looks halfway believable. I think the primer is there for a market.
I think a big part of the problem is how successful the product is and how reliable it is,
I had an iPad 1 and then upgraded to the 3 and recently to the iPad Air 2, there was a gap of about 2-3 years between the ipad 3 and the air and i expect this gap to only grow longer, as the iPad’s remain reliable fast and does everything i need.
I see iPads everywhere and they are very useful devices, part of the problem is the actual need to upgrade, iPhones are a little easier, iPads though like Laptops are a lot harder to get onto the upgrade cycle, i know plenty of people that are happy with their iPad 2’s and 3’s and see no reason to upgrade.
My iPad 2 is on the edge of being too slow, but to be honest, it was always better than my Nexus 7 2012 model. My Linx 8 Windows 8.1 tablet is pretty much the only thing I use now, plus my Surface 2 pro when I code.
The problem here is that I can do with my iPad 2 what can be done with my iPad Air. So why should I get a new one? Cause it’s thinner?
I mean I can get a new iPhone every year cause it’s on contract for $199. Where the iPad (I have cellular) is gonna be $599.
It’s not gonna go away but will be like Macs. Just sell a strong steady amount, most growth is over.
Plus I can do most things with my iPhone.
That’s been the business model for all Apple products. Why buy a new one when your old one still works well? Because we have fancy ads.
I agree for the most part with the thoughts about upgrades. My wife recently upgraded her iPad 2 to a new iPad Air. It’s faster, has a much better screen, is much lighter, etc. It is certainly an upgrade, but at the same time the software is the same. It didn’t allow her to do anything new with it. Some of her games run better.
Contrast with Macs and you see CPU performance dropping across the board due to Intel now trying to compete with ARM on battery life rather than keep it’s performance advantage. The new Mac Mini only comes in dual core. An iPad gets faster over time with new ARM chips. A Mac gets slower over time with new Intel chips. Your 2012 Mac Mini can blow out a 2014. A new iPad has more RAM and storage space than an original. A new Mac has less storage space (due to the SSD transition). A new Mac can’t get user installed RAM (outside the mac pro) and comes with about the same amount it did years ago. There is much more reason to buy a new iPad than a new Mac.
As bad as the reasons to buy a new iPad are, the Mac side is worse.
If you bought any of the 2012 products, there is hardly a reason to buy anything in 2015…..except when you are still using a harddisk instead of an SSD, or maybe when you are using a 3 kilo machine with 2 hours of battery instead of a 1 kilo machine with 8 hours of battery.
Upgrade cycles are simply not 2 to 3 years anymore, software didn’t become more demanding, there are no new killer “applications” anymore, etc.
I remember the days when I updated my computer because I wanted to have “multimedia” (meaning a CDROM and soundcard), than a CD-Burner, then more memory and HDD for the scanner, then a 3D card for games, and of course every OS upgrade also required more hardware. Now I can genuinely suggest for people to buy a mid-level device and be very satisfied for years and a high-end device for people that will keep that “new-and-shiny” feeling for a long time
Yes, Intel’s officially rated clock speeds seem to be dropping. However…
Get one of the unlocked Intel chips, slap a closed-loop water cooling block on it, and overclock the heck out of it.
It’s pretty easy to run a 3 GHz rated chip at 4.1 or faster.
It really seems that the performance limits on Intel chips are almost entirely set by power use and heat dissipation.
In a laptop, mini, or all-in-one design like Apple’s biggest sellers, you need a cool-running chip, not a performance monster. A Macbook Pro will already burn your lap in heavy use; you don’t want it to be even hotter.
The iPad is not a computer, but it has similar upgrade cycles. Period.
An iPad1(2010) is (mostly) doing fine in 2015.
So the first iPad doesn’t need an update, which means there is no upgrade cycle
But it has a similar upgrade cycle to a computer…PERIOD?
Your truth is too simple and could use some sources
source: my 2 cents
The iPad 1 is the only iPad, that’s not on the current version of iOS, but stuck on 5.1. Any iPad after that is still fine.
Nowdays the iPhones and iPads are fast enough to run OSX. Imagine if you put your device in a small docking station – and you instantly have a desktop computer. All documents, web page, etc that were opened in your mobile apps can be instantly available on their OSX counterparts.
Apple will have to support two architectures on OSX, but they’ve been there before.
good luck with 16 GB of storage, 1 GB of memory, no OSX counterparts for 95% of the apps on the IOS-side, no touchscreen optimizations on the OSX-side…
Microsoft is much further in their “one device to do it all”-strategy and even they are quite far away from that goal.
Android actually has some devices like that but they aren’t a success because …. well, Android on Tablets isn’t good and Android on a PC is something that even Google doesn’t believe in (hence ChromeBooks)
That’s actually the Microsoft approach, and it is starting to succeed with it!
Tablets, phones, computers and xboxes running the same OS, apps, etc. Pretty cool actually!
That’s been Ubuntu’s vision for… well, about as long as I can remember, calling it “convergence”, and it seemed like a great vision way back when.
In the meantime, Google approached the “same documents and pages on big computer as on mobile” from the other side. Chrome instances sync, and when you’re using mostly web apps and cloud data, you’re 90% there without a dockable mobile / desktop hybrid.
Still interested in an Ubuntu phone (coming soon! still), but not really for convergence. I just prefer the Gnu environment to the more limited Android or iOS environments, and would like to carry a mobile-adapted version around with me (again – RIP N900). Convergence would be cookies, but more oatmeal than chocolate chip.
Tablets have always been meh, just took the m(asses) 5 years to figure this out.
Depends on what you wanna use them for. I use my tablet for reading non-online content, ie. content that doesn’t require a web browser to be read, and for that it’s certainly better than a laptop or desktop.
Exactly!
My iPad is loaded with all the operations manuals I need for the Industrial plant I work on. I can use it while in the middle of the plant. No internet connection needed and a decent sized screen that more than one person can see.
Tablet use is not all about online media consumption (music/movies/tv shows) or gaming you know. Mine is a usable and very portable reference library.
I have been thinking for a while now that it’d be great if someone came out with a tablet with two screens, not only one, and one of them being a regular, 1080p colour-display and the other one being an e-Ink – one. You could use the colour-display when you’re reading material that would suffer or become completely unreadable without colours, and the e-Ink when reading other stuff and/or when you just want to conserve battery.
In the device that I envisioned there would be an integrated switch-cover attached to one side of the device and you simply switched the display the device uses by turning the cover over to the other side. Simple, effective, and it’d protect the display that’s on the backside.
A Yota Tablet would be nice (see YotaPhone and YotaPhone 2 for example in the phone sphere), I agree.
Or even a large-screen colour e-ink ereader. Something large enough to handle tech manuals and books at full-size without zoom or messed-up formatting. Doesn’t need to support high refresh rates, just be colour and large. E-ink would be fine.
… so a lot of sales will be replacements for dead devices from now on. And Apple devices don’t die so easily.
My iPad 1 is slow indeed, but it’s still usable for some web browsing and perfectly usable for reading. I also have an iPad Air 1, and I feel absolutely no need to upgrade *that*.
We are using the tablets regularly in my house, but there will be no new purchase until one of those two dies. Or maybe when the ipad 1 becomes completely unusable for browsing.
As for phones, the US market is distorted by the majority of them being sold on contract way under the real price. If it weren’t, we would see the same pattern.
Android is a bit like Windows and iOS MacOS. The story repeats. Aside from that, tablets have been overhyped. Especially now, with > 4” phones and phablets. They are a nice gadget when you want to browse web from bed or make a survey but nothing compelling. Much of work scenarios need a bigger screen and physical keyboard. Tablets with >10” screens are rarity, adding external keyboard is clunky. I’ve not replaced my old TF101 with another tablet, I’ve bought a cheap 13” Chromebook with > 10h battery instead and never looked back.
I don’t think anyone needs a 7-10″ tablet when they have both a 6″ phone and a 11+ inch ultrabook. RADICAL BUT THERE, I SAID IT
iPad became popular when there were no big phones and laptops were heavy pieces of shit.
I have a 6″ phone the Note 2 and I have a small laptop but honestly I use the 10″ tablet more than anything else. I am on the train 2 hours a day plus lunch time and I use the tablet during meetings and even at home while watching TV with my wife it is great for looking things up and keeping up on the latest news.
Surface or Yoga might change your life
Why do you foolishly assume that everyone’s needs and tastes are the same as yours?
I didn’t. Did you miss the 18% year-over-year drop of ipad sales that spurred the death-of-the-ipad stories like this one we’re all replying to? That’s the story here.
The human population and the ipad population are growing in opposite directions. To me it makes sense to attribute this to the simultaneous growth of big phone and light laptop sales.
Tablets to me have always been oversized cellphones, most of which without the convenience and cellphone part. They’re not powerful enough to replace workstations. They’re not good for gaming beyond things like Candy Crush and Farmville. They don’t fit in your pocket… The only real thing they seem to be good for is reading digital books/magazines, and entertaining kids during car rides. That is just about the only thing my tablet ever gets used for and we could easily do without one.
To be fair, there are more legitimate uses for tablets than reading & entertaining children. But, a lot of them don’t apply to an average/personal user.
Tablets are far superior to phones for Web site browsing. I force all my tablets to viewing the Desktop version of Web sites (Phony extension in Firefox), which is a *much* better experience than the crippled mobile version of sites you get on phones (and, yes, on tablets unless you force it like I do).
Just typing any text on a phone screen is a nightmare – even the best onscreen keyboard alternatives have me pressing the wrong key, whereas that hardly ever happens on my tablet. Phones only have 2 advantages – one: they can make phone calls/SMSes (though it can be possible with a SIM on a tablet to approximate this) and two: they fit into small pockets (7″/8″ tablets will fit in large coat pockets though).
For *everything else*, tablets are better, which is why I own multiple tablets and only have one phone (which is a work phone – if I didn’t have that, I’d probably not buy a personal phone because they’re really not nice to use compared to tablets).
For “*everything else*” like what though? The only thing you pointed out was it can make browsing the web better using trickery, and the on-screen keyboards sucks less. Fitting in a coat pocket as long as the coat pocket is huge is not a pro in my opinion. None of that to me equates to tablets are great.
Everyone has their own use cases. Some people get along fine using only a cellphone. People of your opinion seem to like tablets I guess. Neither of those are sufficient for my needs in both power & ease of use. At the end of the day people will use whatever works for them. The truth is there’s room for any and all devices as long as people are buying them.
The biggest problem right now with something like the iPad 2 is simply the built in browser, Safari, is not being updated.
And the web browser space is moving crazy fast right now. We’ve found several sites that simply outright crash Safari on our iPad 2 now. The same can be said with Safari on the older iPhones.
It does affect older Mac OS versions, but Firefox/Chrome can mostly mitigate that today.
I haven’t looked, I don’t know if there are really any viable, alternative browsers yet, especially for legacy iOS products. I still run iOS 6 on my 4S, I don’t know what I run on the iPad 2. Finding software for the older OSes is challenging.
But since the devices are “internet devices” the vast majority of the time, this software obsolescence is what will drive upgrade cycles.
My biggest gripe with the iPad is that one can’t access it’s file system. for a mere $200 one can get an Android tablet with two or three times the system specs, with most of the same apps and also USB connectors to attach external drives or flash drives, SD card slot, HDMI out (without special cables) and a user accessible file system to save files, etc. I mean, why would anyone choose iPad unless they were a brain washed sheeple who somehow thinks they’re oh so cool?
Your use case is different to that of a lot of people.
Please try to accept that not everyone has the same demands on a tablet as you do.
For example,
Not everyone needs access to the filesystem.
I don’t. Even with my now defunct Android tablet, I didn’t feel this overwhemling urge to meddle with the filesystem.
Having used iPad, Kindle, and generic Android tablets, I can see a good use case for each.
My iPad had the best build quality and battery life of any tablet I’ve tried, and the OS is dead simple to use. I found it too restrictive personally, but for people who are app-centric, it’s a low maintenance and remarkably high quality product.
My Kindle is best for reading in my experience, with Android apps on the side, and my generic Android tablet excels at customization, flexibility, and syncing across my phone and Ubuntu desktop.
The reason all three options sell so well in my opinion is because different people have different needs and expectations. That’s why I think choice beats a mono-culture six ways to Sunday.
…are iPad users that take the device to weddings in order to take pictures! They don’t know how to actually transfer a picture from a phone to their iPad so they are perfectly happy to stand blocking the view of the wedding photographer with an iPad enclosed in a hulkingly large protective case! Seen it a million times and I’m like…what an idiot.
Another funny Apple video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
With ‘My Photo Stream,’ the photos ‘transfer’ almost instantly to the iOS devices I want to share with….it’s something even an idiot could do.
They don’t even know how to add their devices in the first place!
iPad needs not good, but apple style, knock it out of the park, hand writing. Not with some squishy stylus either. I’ve tried every capacitive stylus out there and none of them work worth a damn. I should be able to flip open my iPad in a meeting and take hand written notes as easily, quickly and naturally as using paper. I should be able to take the notes on a blank page or on an existing document. The notes should be OCR’ed, indexed and available on all my devices. I should be able to open them later and add text or more notes. They should be easily sharable.
Do that and everyone in business will need an ipad.
I was thinking “who cares” when I first heard about a tablet computer by Apple and “meh” as the typical Apple hype kept building up toward and after release. No “awesome” about it.
Edited 2015-02-01 18:57 UTC