[colinshark]

"1. The iPad eats the consumer PC market.

This is happening right now. In the third quarter of 2012, PC sales were down 8 percent on a year-over-year basis worldwide. In the U.S., sales were down 14 percent. A big chunk of the decline can be attributed to the rise of the iPad."

Or just that PC speeds have reached a plateau, and common desktop applications no longer need the latest hardware. The continuous upgrade cycle is slowing. I think that speaks for the 8% on its own.

On second glance, this whole article is borderline troll bait.

[s_henry_paulson]

Second glance? Even on the first glance this article doesn't pass the sniff test.

Nobody would predict Windows 8 would "stop" the iPad only a month after release. (not to mention the weird comparison of an operating system to a hardware gadget)

"Employees switching away from Windows PCs", and then citing a large iPad purchase by a company. Again, nobody with half a clue would think that these employees are replacing their work computer with an iPad.

Comparing the years old Apple Store to the brand new Windows Store, and trying to pretend like the numbers mean something.

Saying "office is losing relevance" and then citing absolutely nothing.

Saying Microsoft can't continue to invest the profitable Xbox.. because they can't make it the flagship of the company?

Saying their "platform business is collapsing", and then citing areas where they are doing well, and then just assuming they're all eventually going to fail.

This "writer" needs to be fired.

[pyre]

  > This "writer" needs to be fired.

Why? The pageviews just keep coming in!

[bobsoap]

And that's exactly what's wrong with such publications these days. Linkbait takes preference over accuracy. That's not journalism anymore, far from it.

[prewett]

It's not just "these days." Journalism has always suffered from linkbait, although they called it other things, like "sensationalism," back in The Day. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism. Even the august Joseph Pulitzer engaged in it.

[bobsoap]

Good point. I think the main difference between then and now is that back then, it was easier to identify yellow journalism. Pulitzer started sensationalism by printing caricatures on the front page, if I recall correctly. Polarizing and wild imagery then went on to become one of the things that helped you spot trash easily from miles away.

That characteristic slowly became more and more ubiquitous... in the internet age, linkbait became Pulitzer's cartoons because that's what attracts attention.

So I'd say it's become a little harder these days to identify sensationalism as such, because sometimes, there's not much about the appearance of the publication that screams 'yellow journalism' anymore... The cartoon has moved into the content itself.

[dingfeng_quek]

You got it for free - why should you expect more? If there's a demand for accurate, well-supported, and much harder-to-produce news and commentary, which someone is willing to pay for, many journalists would be happier as well. This, however, is a free publication that (simplifying) earns on a per-view basis. Perhaps there already exists another source of information that's accurate, but behind a paywall.

[novalis]

I don't think we should act like there aren't any quality freely distributed reporting sources. Someone paying for content can have the perception that it is worthy and better than other models, but that often leads to comsumption of more targeted content that fits the internal level of bias and doesn't necessarily make it to be of higher journalistic quality. These both considerations shape the content industry, and none of them are "free" models. Ignorance, in communication, is not an externality that we can afford in this day and age.

[bobsoap]

There are plenty of monetization models besides trashy linkbait and paywalls that are capable of producing great results. I agree with you that, as a consumer, if you get something for free, it's actually you who is the product. But there are many facets in the quality/trash spectrum and there are quite a few good examples of successful business models that are "free" yet produce good quality.

[wisty]

Also, it's too early to call the Surface. The RT has flopped, but the Pro is very interesting. I can imagine it being very handy for students.

[shinratdr]

No tablet with less battery life than a cheap laptop will be handy for anyone.

[enraged_camel]

Exactly. What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life? It would be especially useless for students since it wouldn't last till the end of a school-day.

[pmelendez]

> What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life?

I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.

Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.

[avens19]

Most of the students I know at my university get maybe 3 hours on their laptops and many have Wacom tablets to write notes with. Most classrooms have plugs now. Writing directly onto the screen is a big value proposition for many of these students. I wouldn't count it out yet.

[barista]

And I am sure it will be even less popular than a certain laptop that had less than 4 hours battery life and didn't even have a touch screen but it fit in a manila envelope (MacBook air)

[JuDue]

Unfortunately being similar to 2008 Apple Air specs just isn't going to cut it.

[wisty]

Haswell will fix this. Microsoft does well when it designs for next year's hardware - sell to the enthusiasts, then wait for the masses to upgrade into their maw.

[enraged_camel]

Haswell will fix what? The battery life? Because that's a no. You might see some marginal improvement, but that's about it.

[wisty]

The main difference between the RT (10 hour life) and the Pro (4 hour life) is the CPU, isn't it?

A peak 17W vs 10W draw is a pretty big difference. And that's peak power; Haswell may be even better at idling. We might see 6 or 7 hours on the next Pro (wild guess).

[recoiledsnake]

Not to mention harping on about an IDC report about last quarter Windows Phone sales while WP8 launched only last month and is selling okay according to many reports. People were waiting for WP8 to launch because of both the new OS and hardware but also because WP7 phones can't be upgraded, so sales weren't that great.

>This "writer" needs to be fired

The "writer" is more likely to get a pay hike or get promoted because his blogspam is garnering a lot of hits from sites like HN because of the headline and content.

[bobsoap]

My thoughts exactly. The writer is comparing apples to oranges (PC / iPad, for one). I must have uttered "are you kidding me" a dozen times while reading that crap.

[marshray]

How many people do you know who have an iPad but not a PC (or a Mac)?

My sample is completely non-scientific, but I can't think of anyone I know like that. My impression is iOS and Android are taking eyeball-time and consumer purchasing money away from PCs, but I just don't see them replacing PCs any more than iPhones or Playstations did. Yet.

What am I missing?

[MrFoof]

>How many people do you know who have an iPad but not a PC (or a Mac)?

Here's an edge case -- my parents' apartment community. This is a 2-building apartment complex (with about a dozen condo units in the front) with about 500ish total residents. When my folks sold their home a few years ago and moved in, no one else on their floor (two buildings, three floors each) owned a computer, and many never had owned one in the past. My parents today are still on the younger side of the spectrum (57 and 63), so we're talking about a population whose kids went off to college or moved out in 1992 or earlier.

However, there was a desire amongst people they met to own one as they were aware of what could be done, they just didn't want to deal with the hassle. My mother (a textbook technophobe) showed folks her Kindle, and people in the community felt that was easy enough to deal with (especially when getting to a library in the sticks can be a hassle). As a result, my parents helped get folks set up with 3G Kindles. My parents bought themselves iPad 2s about 18 months ago. My father, unlike my mother, was comfortable around computers, but his computer/iPad usage shifted to 10/90% after about 3 months. My mother was initially more 70/30, but is now more along the lines of 20/80. As of right now, they have no intention of replacing their computer with another one. Moreover, my mother who was always paranoid of someone "messing up" the family computer 15-20 years ago is eminently comfortable with her iPad. An even weirder outcome is she apparently follows Apple product news a bit, as do one or two of her aged 55-65 friends.

The new thing? The septuagenarians and octogenarians are now getting iPads. They're buying an Airport Express, calling Comcast to get internet access, and the iPad is the first computer they've ever owned. And they're pretty chuffed about it. And using them. Significantly. Do you have any idea how fantastic the idea of HD FaceTime is to grandparents who almost never get to see their grandkids (and that they'll use it every chance they get)? When I mentioned LetterPress to my mom, the next time I talked to her she mentioned how big a hit it was at her community.

I think to date my parents have set up a dozen other residents with Kindles and about another dozen so far with iPads + internet access. This number will continue to grow.

[klibertp]

That's kind of old news. On the other end of a spectrum I know quite a few people who are my age (nearing 30 (already?! eh...)) and who never had a PC or had one for some time and then didn't replace it when it broke. They were using, however, game consoles and then early smartphones and then tablets. They wouldn't use Kindle, though...

It's just that not everyone needs the full power and flexibility of a PC. I think in reality just a tiny fraction of users needs one, and as a number of users grows that percentage only lowers. The truth is that a PC always was and always will be much too hard for average user to operate (by design!) while not offering anything meaningful for said average user.

I suspect that tablets and other narrowly focused devices will only gain popularity with time, replacing PCs for most day to day tasks for most users. They are easy to use and they give people something of value without too much hassle. I welcome this trend with joy: it means less calls from family to help them set up/configure/uninstall/clean up things.

There is one thing, however, that I'd like to see included in this future of tablets and similar devices. It would be a tiny, protected with PIN, but mandatory on every single device icon which, when clicked/taped, would invoke a BASIC interpreter (or Lua, or anything similar). I'm worried that while it's getting easier for average user to use these devices, it's also getting harder and harder to hack them. And when there won't be a PC in a household anymore, how children are supposed to learn to love computing? Instead of just using devices...

[snuze]

I've experienced something similar. My grandma recently got into computers because of being able to stream her favorite shows on demand. She now also has an iPad where she can watch her shows and play casual games (solitaire/bejeweled/etc). This is a person who has never really used computers before. My mom is another case. Never used computers seriously other than a rare web lookup, until I got her an iPad. She too now does casual gaming and streams shows.

[brigade]

I know a number of old people that never learned how to use or were never confident in using a desktop OS that now only use tablets. My father as well, but for other reasons.

Also think of how long the shift from desktops to laptops took; for a decade they were just secondary machines and everyone who had a laptop also had a desktop. Now... the only person I know to even own a desktop built it himself 6 years ago and stopped upgrading it altogether a few years ago in favor of laptops.

A similar shift to tablets isn't as inevitable as the shift to laptops was (in hindsight), but if it's happening it's proceeding in much the same way, only faster.

[marshray]

I think as long as people have asses we will have chairs, and as long as there are chairs there will be desks and we will want to use our hands at them.

So I don't think the physical keyboard is going away, it will still be the most efficient way to bang out a school paper, computer code, or a thoughtful business email.

The screen we prefer to look at while sitting down will probably always be larger than the one we prefer to carry around.

[njharman]

> it will still be the most efficient way to bang out a school paper, computer code, or a thoughtful business email

Those are niches. Most computer use is and will be going fwd, consumption. Majority of creation will be photos/videos/minor typing (txting, tweets, short emails)/other forms that don't require keyboard.

[bathat]

It's been a while since I was in high school, but aren't students still required to write long-form reports? I recall writing book reports and essays about historical events. In college I distinctly remember having to write a least one multi-page document for most courses (and for virtually all courses outside the hard sciences). Most people stop there, but those continuing on to grad school (even in the hard sciences) will need to write many 5- to 15-page documents, as well as a 50- to 100-page thesis.

I don't doubt that most people will not need a keyboard most of the time, but not needing a keyboard in the house seems more likely to be the niche. The niche will be 23 to 30 year-olds who have finished school but don't yet have kids in school, and the 55's, and up, whose kids have finished secondary school. Perhaps the computer will again be relegated to the spare bedroom / home office, but I can't imagine a scenario for the majority of middle-class households that doesn't have some sort of physical keyboard.

[jseliger]

>It's been a while since I was in high school, but aren't students still required to write long-form reports?

This is a tangent, but I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and, based on what I've seen, the answer is often "no;" a lot of students say they've never had to write anything longer than two or three pages before taking Intro to Comp.

Some, to be sure, have done substantive writing, but that appears to be the norm.

A lot of 18-year-old freshmen also appear to be MUCH more proficient at typing on phones and tablets than I am, which definitely gives me a bit of culture shock, and reminds me of the typing proficiency I have that many of my own professors appear not to.

[marshray]

So I agree, PCs aren't really the greatest platform for content consumption (except perhaps for very involved 3D games). But how much has this been a driver of PC sales historically?

The PC was doing just fine before websurfing came along and even before DVD playback.

[dingfeng_quek]

1. It's possible to connect a keyboard to an iPad/Android tablet. (and larger screens as well) 2. You imply that only a minority of people would be doing "heavy" production work on a computer. The trends seem to be the opposite of that, at least in modern cities (I doubt office workers can avoid keyboards and decent-sized-screens.)

[klibertp]

Also, isn't a "thoughtful business email" a bit of contradiction? ;)

[klibertp]

Hey, I was joking! I even indicated this with an emoticon! Why the downvote?

[gnaffle]

I think it's important to separate two things. One is the tablet trend, but along with that you have an OS platform play.

I think it's completely plausible that in the next couple of years Apple and Google will launch add-ons to your average tablet that gives you a big, high-res screen to do work on along with a tablet.

Or maybe apps will be able to show content on other tablets (like AirPlay does to a TV today) so that you will have more space available for the apps you use.

I think there will be an opportunity for iOS and Android to innovate in this space, in a far more profound way than the "no compromise" dual-UI that is the current Windows 8.

[milep]

You can have a docking station with a keyboard and larger screen.

[gamble]

An awful lot of people have new iPads and ancient computers they don't need to replace because the iPad does 95% of what they need day-to-day.

[dhimes]

Upvoted because I get your point, but it depends how you measure "95%." I've not met anybody who enjoys typing on them. Perhaps for the few who will also add a bluetooth keyboard it will replace, but I think those are fairly tech-savvy (where do you save your docs? etc.).

It may be coming...But they've got to get a lot better first.

[wtvanhest]

I think the 95% could have been better phrased as "a lot of people", but the OP's point holds for me personally. I'm currently typing this on my 3 year old VAIO I paid $600 for. I just bought a Kindle Fire HD 8.9 for $370ish, and don't intend to buy another computer for 2 or 3 years.

If it wasn't for the tablet, I'd probably be buying a new computer in the next 12 months. Effectively windows just lost a license sale to the Kindle.

Now, where things get interesting is when it stabilizes. What happens in 24 months when everyone has a tablet and a PC/Mac? Which do people replace, and what does that do to tablet sales vs laptop sales? I have no idea, and I'm sure it depends on new technology, but the future is not as clear to me as many writers assume.

[foxylad]

My wife has used a Galaxy Tab exclusively for the last year, despite her laptop being an arm's length away the whole time. Tablets cater for her browsing and light email use with no problem at all, and that laptop will never get replaced.

[dhimes]

But is that 95%? I mean, my wife likes the tablet too, but she's not using it to put her powerpoint slides together (which she is doing as we speak).

[jshen]

I find it odd that you demand evidence for his number, yet provide none about your claim that people will have a PC cause they hate typing on a tablet.

I don't have any hard numbers either, but people that can't touch type can often type faster using a tab with swiftkey than on a keyboard.

[InclinedPlane]

That's actually not a relevant metric. What matters for MS is when someone buys an ipad instead of buying a new pc. That can mean not having a pc but it can also mean forgoing updating an older pc. That phenomenon seems to be occuring and it very much is affecting pc sales to the tune of billions of dollars per year.

[pmelendez]

I don't think that comparison is valid. It's like saying that MS would be worry 12 years ago because people was buying blackberry devices and wouldn't upgrade old PCs because they had a new way to send and receive emails.

Granted, you can do a lot more with an Ipad than with the 1st generation of blackberry devices but being an owner of an iPad I can't think in somebody that would prefer to write an email or a blog entry in an iPad rather than in a computer.

[InclinedPlane]

That's an interesting theory. But the fact is that the data doesn't lie. People have bought iPads and other tablets in huge numbers and their purchasing of PCs has slacked off by an enormous amount. The timing and severeness of the change is too much to be accounted for reasonably by any other phenomenon.

The conclusion is clear: people are forgoing purchases of PCs because they are buying tablets.

You may think it's ridiculous, but the market is speaking loudly with the voice of billions of dollars, and any company which ignores that is doomed.

As I pointed out, this may not be because people are not using PCs, it just means that they aren't buying new PCs. Perhaps they find that an old, clunky computer is just fine for writing emails and so-forth and their tablets and smartphones are preferable for doing everything else. Or maybe they aren't satisfied with their technology choices at all but because they spent so much money on a tablet they have to delay any updates to their laptop/desktop machine for financial reasons.

[pmelendez]

> But the fact is that the data doesn't lie

Well correlation doesn't imply causation. (http://xkcd.com/552/) Sorry I couldn't help it :P

The thing I don't think your conclusion is necessarily true. I can understand that people just don't need to upgrade their PCs as often of they used to (I noticed that on my self too). In my case, I just don't need to upgrade and since Win 8 is running faster in the same old hardware I don't see that happening anytime soon.

But the true is that people is just wasting their money in something else. I wonder if that grow in the tablet market will decline now that new game consoles cycle is coming up.

[kalid]

Imagine you're a user whose "blog" is facebook, and primarily sends texts, tweets, and 2-line status updates / comments. Email is like paper mail, used as an archive for official documents / notices, or used on the work computer for work things, and rarely replied to ("Why did you email me? Just text me or facebook me." aka "Why did you send me a real letter?").

This sounds like a hypothetical, right? My brother's laptop broke for a year, and he was fine on his phone until it was recently replaced.

[taylodl]

Did that this year. Bought an iPad instead of a new PC. I might not even do that again - thinking of buying a device like the Nexus 10 next.

I have a family with lots of eyeballs. Yes, there is still work requiring a PC and so every family should have one. But not every person in the family needs one.

[kalid]

> What am I missing?

How many people do you know under 10? That's the generation MSFT needs to worry about.

Anecdotally, the kids I've seen get tablets/phones/ipod touches and blast away on them. They'd vastly prefer a tablet to a laptop. Arguments like "You can do real work on a PC!" are not going to sway them. If anything, it reinforces "regular computers = drudgery, to be minimized as much as possible".

[marshray]

I have kids bracketing that age range. They all enjoy the family tablets.

However, as soon as they need to complete a school assignment, they have always used a desktop with a keyboard (we don't have floater laptops). This despite never having had any instruction on how to type. I have never heard them once consider using a tablet for this.

[kalid]

Ah, now we're getting away from PC (as defined by an OS) to PC as a synonym for having a keyboard :).

If your kids had a tablet with an excellent keyboard touch cover, would that be enough to never use a traditional PC? They aren't in a position to buy it themselves, of course, but if you had them side-by-side I wonder what they'd prefer.

[suresk]

If we're talking about differentiating features (at least at a hardware level), I think it would be:

- Larger display - Keyboard - Mouse - Power

It depends on what your usage requirements are, of course, but once you start carrying around one or more peripherals to make your tablet work for your situation, you have to start asking "Is this really better than a laptop?"

[ErikHuisman]

You forgot one: Better cut and paste..

[marshray]

We have a keyboard dock for our Galaxy Tab 10.1, but haven't used it much. When I've tried to use it, I've found that apps developed for the tablet tend to be clunky when used from the keyboard.

I have a Surface RT with touch cover, but haven't let the kids loose with it much. :-) It's not replacing any of my real PC gear, but mainly because it doesn't run any of my existing apps. However, the Surface Pro is going to be a very interesting mix of capabilities.

[WayneDB]

Once you add a keyboard to a tablet, it's just a laptop with a touch screen, but whatever you call it, I just hope the keyboard has tactile feedback, the screen is big enough to see what I want, I can add a mouse and most importantly: I can run a general-purpose operating system on it.

(My paranoid side is convinced that our NWO techno-slave-masters are simply using these new form-factors as an excuse to kill freedom.)

[rgbrenner]

Wait... 10 year old kids would prefer to play on a tablet rather than do WORK(!!) on a PC?! AND they are unswayed that they can do work on a PC?!

What is the world coming to? Next you'll be telling me kids no longer find their chores fun.

[kalid]

I'm confused by the sarcasm, since we seem to be in agreement on this "obvious" trend. Yes, tablets/phones are absorbing the "fun" computer scenarios and PCs are left with the "work" scenarios.

Over time, will people veer towards doing "more work" on a tablet or trying to have "more fun" on their PC? I know which side I'd bet on.

[rgbrenner]

>I'm confused by the sarcasm

10 year old kids might not be the best indicator of future trends. After all, we aren't doing our work on the Wii, building our homes using Legos, or any of the other things children spend their time on.

[kalid]

I think the change isn't in the exact use of the item, but expectations. Did the 80's Nintendo generation (me) expect more or less video games in their adult lives, compared to other types of recreation?

Kids won't do work on the wii... but will they expect (or demand) that devices be motion-aware by default? Screens be touchable by default? Have 10-hour battery life by default? Be comfortably handheld by default?

Think about how downtime has evolved. This century we went from "I'm bored, let me grab a newspaper" to "I'm bored, what's on the radio?" to "I'm bored, what's on TV?" to "I'm bored, what's on the desktop computer?" to "I'm bored, what's on my phone/tablet?"

The earlier industries are dead or stagnant (newspaper/radio), regular TV (at a specific time, interrupted by commercials) is on its way out, the growth is in the new form factor/experience Microsoft is barely relevant in. That's the nightmare.

[WayneDB]

If people start veering towards more work on a tablet, then the tablet is going to have to take on more characteristics of the PC like a keyboard and some of the features of a more flexible/general purpose OS.

So, what do we have then? Do we still have just a tablet? Maybe, but the definition will have changed.

[marshray]

A Microsoft Surface?

Disclosure: I recently accpeted a position at MSFT (not related to Surface) and am drinking the koolaid.

[danso]

Isn't the problem that many of those iPad users eventually go from PC to a Mac? I've been in the Apple system enough to actually be ok with using different OSes. I recently got an Android phone and more than one person asked me if it was difficult to use Android while having an OS X laptop.

[barrynolan]

I hear what you're saying but in my family (Irish so sample size is huge) Dad, my father in-law, my kids (<5), two teenage nieces (admittedly the have access to a Mac, but its probably a 20% use case) are iPad only.

[leak]

Both my parents only use an iPad and never ever used anything else.

[wiredfool]

My inlaws got an iPad last christmas. They've always had windows machines of one form or another, and hated them.

They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.

There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.

[leak]

My parents had the same exact issue. I use dropbox for that. I just change the size of all the images to 1024x768 and share a folder with them with all the pictures. It works marvelously!

[wiredfool]

Dropbox is an interesting idea with that. Given their API, it's entirely possible to build a bunch of services on top of it, such as archival DVDs, or uploads to printing companies. When I was on vacation, I wound up sending my photos I wanted to print to snapfish via Flickr. (after running them through iPhoto for editing)

There are a couple of sticking points:

* There's still going to be space management issues. 2gb on Dropbox doesn't go far when you've got a 4gb cf in the camera, and the next step up is 100gb@$100/yr.

* the other half of space management is clearing it off of the iPad. It's difficult to manage storage of imported photos, it turns out that if you don't delete them after import to iPhoto on your desktop, you either have to delete them individually or use image capture on the Mac to do it. I'd love to see the high res ones synced off to the cloud, leaving smaller jpegs around, but with the promise that the high res ones were securely stored. What I wound up doing for that was using a USB stick and my work netbook as the real storage for all the holiday images, rather than being able to do it on the iPad.

Finally, and this isn't a problem for the inlaws, but for me as a photographer, I shot raw+jpeg. iphoto imported raw+jpeg, and then didn't use any of the raw data, just the small(well, 8mp) jpegs. I tore through them, using iPhoto as a passible Lightroom substitute. And now, the adjustments are orphaned if I want to apply any of them to the raw files. That's annoying. Not critical, but annoying. And it's not as if there isn't a raw converter in the core of OSX that couldn't be used here.

[marshray]

This is a common theme and seems to support the idea that tablets are growing new markets moreso than displacing old ones.

[jarcoal]

I know a handful of people that have completely left the PC market for the tablet market (read: iPad), but you know what they say about anecdotal evidence.

Sidenote: they are thrilled with the transition.

[marshray]

What types of things do they do on their tablets? Anything professional (i.e., more than just content consumption)?

[jarcoal]

No, not by our definition. But for many people email, web browsing, and writing the occasional text document is their professional life. The iPad is well equipped to do those things (most of those handful bought a keyboard as well).

[baddox]

I know several people who have bought at least one tablet in the last 5 years, but not a PC or Mac.

[suresk]

This may partially be due to the maturity of the two: desktops and laptops are, of course, continuing to improve, but at a much slower rate, and you probably won't get a huge benefit out of an upgrade unless you are doing high-end stuff. Tablets are improving dramatically with every release.

I used to upgrade my main computer yearly, but now doing so every 3 years or so feels more than enough. Most people I know keep theirs for even longer.

On the other hand, my iPad 1 - less than 2 years older than the iPad 3 I now own - feels downright sluggish and old. Many apps don't work on it, and I get tons of crashes on it due to memory issues. I think that trend will probably continue for a few more years (I think phones are in a similar position).

[rsheridan6]

I don't know anyone who has an iPad but not a PC, but I know several people who have smartphones but no PCs. They're good enough for people who aren't heavy internet users and don't want to spend money on a PC or a separate internet connection.

[w1ntermute]

> On second glance, this whole article is borderline troll bait.

If you look closely, the article was written by Business Insider[0], which is not what I would call a trustworthy source.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider

[ceejayoz]

Yeah, I'd be skeptical of what's essentially investment advice from Henry Blodget.

[ekianjo]

Totally agree. This article is pure BS. I especially loved the part where the author says that, by using non-Windows devices, companies would consider switching to Macs for work. Yeah, sounds like the author has never seen how companies buy computers en masse. Usually they go for the cheapest models available. And those aren't Macs.

[adventured]

The iPad isn't even remotely a threat.

Android will dominate tablets for the same reason it is dominating smart phones. Android tablets will outsell the iPad five to one within a few years. The volume that Android tablets will bring to market will, however, remove volume from the laptop market.

[pixie_]

I just tried the iPad mini the other night and was impressed by the office suite included with it. To people who have used it, how does it compare to MS Office?

[Someone]

I guess you are refering to Pages, Numbers and Keynote. These are not included with the iPad, but sold separately (at $9.99 each)

Compared to MS Office (my comparison is desktop MS Office; I haven't even seen its tablet version), they have fewer features (fewer than Mac OS X counterparts, which already have fewer features). Whether that is an issue for you depends on your requirements.

Major lacking features are the ability to handle large documents and macros. They also are worse in importing MS Office files than MS Office itself.

On an original iPad, they also are fairly sluggy. I wouldn't write large texts in Pages, for instance, or create large spreadsheets in Numbers. Reading and revising existing not-too-large files is OK, though.

On the plus side, they look better and are somewhat easier to use (although the iOS versions, IMO, suffer from the limited interface that tablets offer)

Integration with iCloud for document storage and synchronization is somewhat spotty, but IMO has gotten better recently (my experience is syncing to Mac OS X Numbers and Pages; I have never synced with Windows or with Office documents)

[nathos]

There's no office suite included with any iPad.

Perhaps you tried the iWork applications from Apple that they sell for $10/each?

[mtgx]

I think the sales were down 21% for November compared to a year ago, according to NPD.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/29/npd-pc-sales-down-microso...

It also seems things are so bad, that they've already started to raise prices on enterprise customers, from 8% to 400%, trying to milk them as much as possible before they lose them:

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/03/sales-down-microsoft-rais...

[recoiledsnake]

That doesn't take into account Black Friday sales which more and more people are waiting for before purchasing.

http://microsoft-news.com/black-friday-boosts-windows-8-net-...

"While the days leading up to Black Friday had Windows 8 running below 1% US net usage, Thanks Giving and Black Friday saw a large number of new Windows 8 PCs hitting the market, taking its US share above 2%. While the number reduced over the next week,indicating that Windows 8 users are mainly at home rather than at work, it returned to 2.12% yesterday, indicating the new level was real and not just an artefact of increased usage over the holiday break."

Also, Steam's hardware surveys shows that Windows 8 is at 5% of the userbase, despite's Gabe's comments about the "catastrophe".

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-8-thunders-past-ma...

The lesser said about Charlie's rants and non-sequitir arguments on SemiAccurate(which should be titled SemiWrong) the better. Just reading his previous articles makes me want to add that site to my /etc/hosts blacklist.

[propercoil]

but yet again it is compared to November last year (ppl waited for Black Friday then too), so the statement is valid.

you can also take into consideration the simple fact that each year there is a population growth to some degree, So naturally the figures need to be up. But that's macro economics i really don't know alot about, maybe someone else can explain?

[MaysonL]

Or just that PC speeds have reached a plateau, and common desktop applications no longer need the latest hardware. The continuous upgrade cycle is slowing. I think that speaks for the 8% on its own.

Except that Mac sales keep rising...

[jpxxx]

Yes and no. They were marginally down YOY last quarter. There is a possibility that they're stalling too. Time will tell.