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Fitting in a pocket is a great advantage for a portable device, to everyone. The market seems to be saying: if I need something that I have to lug around, I mi

Fitting in a pocket is a great advantage for a portable device, to everyone. The market seems to be saying: if I need something that I have to lug around, I might as well have a keyboard. i.e. a laptop. Another effect is people are doing everything they can on a phone, because of the convenience. This leads to slightly larger phones every year, and now a 5.5" phone is no longer considered a "phablet", and apple is rumoured to having a 6.5" phone next (their smallest tablet is 7"). So... tablets will rule the world, but they'll be "phones". The barrier to adaption was changing consumer behaviour... as always.

shurcooL 9y ago
I agree. I've been using an iPad mini with Cellular as my phone-replacement mobile device since the day iPad mini came out. It fits in my pocket (not as comfortably as a phone, but well enough). My only other device is a 15" MBP. To be more accurate, the iPad mini is 7.9", not 7" though. And 4:3 aspect ratio. So in area, it's still much bigger than a 6.5" 16+:9 phone would be.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones - they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile. These days I'm not using much Windows for desktop (HN took over the time I had for games), but I do sincerely hope this OS will live on for at least couple more years, because Microsoft is the only company that knows how to do tablets. Seriously. A proper operating system, with real capabilities and proper user interface that can make use of the tablet form, makes a world of a difference. And I say that as someone who owned a decent Android tablet in the past. As someone who's friends and family with people owning currently decent Android tablets. My little Windows 10 el-cheapo tablet/netbook I picked up second-hand for ~$130 is much more useful than the top-of-the-line Samsung tablet offering. Hell, it already earned me many times more than its own value back, as it's good enough to do some meaningful dev work on the bus/train.
- icc97 9y ago
  Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows RT, thankfully that was a disaster. Netbooks are ridiculously useful, I used to have a 15 minute bus ride to work with an Asus EEE and would manage to fill that 15 minutes with active moonlighting development time every day. The work I did on that bus became the frontend for what now 10 years later is a $50m company. I realise I'm making a slightly different point as I'm purely talking about netbooks/laptops. But having the full power of an OS on a tablet is definitely the way to go. Certainly that's one of the bad points about iOS and Android they are so locked down that you have to jump through hoops if you wanted to use them as a work machine. For my current job I bought myself a $350 refurbished Thinkpad (T430 8GB SSD core i5), this brings me in all my income. You can compare this to my nephew that is paying $1000 for an iPhone X because he got bored of his iPhone 8. Further to that I bought exactly the same spec Thinkpad for my 5 year old daughter. The Thinkpad T-series are great because you can pour a litre of liquid over them without problem [0] plus they're built like a brick, so basically perfect for kids. My daughter immediately covered the grey brick with shiny stickers and gave it a name (she has an iPad, but that's always just called 'iPad'). It has the full capability to do everything she'll ever need in theory for the rest of her life/career. Further to that it's got Ubuntu installed and I can then install Sugar [1] for her to use (the same used for One Laptop Per Child). The possible drawback is that it doesn't have a touchscreen. But with my experiment of buying a laptop with a touch screen I found I pretty much never wanted to use the touch screen, it's a slower interface than keyboard and mouse. You want the screen in front of you at arms length but then you have to reach with your arm to touch the screen. I can now teach her over the years what it means to have real freedom with your software and hardware. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo [1]: https://sugarlabs.org/ https://sugarlabs.org/
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    Sadly, netbooks seem to be gone. Even chromebooks are full-size, full-weight. Do you know of termux.com, for linux without rooting? It's basically a linux distribution, adjusted for android's slightly odd filesystem. The app itself is tiny, and you install from its repository. e.g. there's latex, youtube-dl, curl, vim, clang, ecj, python, ruby, perl, lua, erlang etc. A bluetooth keyboard completes the DIY linux netbook... sadly, bluetooth keyboards are also almost gone, presumably as people adjust themselves to "touch" typing.

shurcooL 9y ago

I agree. I've been using an iPad mini with Cellular as my phone-replacement mobile device since the day iPad mini came out. It fits in my pocket (not as comfortably as a phone, but well enough). My only other device is a 15" MBP. To be more accurate, the iPad mini is 7.9", not 7" though. And 4:3 aspect ratio. So in area, it's still much bigger than a 6.5" 16+:9 phone would be.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones - they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile. These days I'm not using much Windows for desktop (HN took over the time I had for games), but I do sincerely hope this OS will live on for at least couple more years, because Microsoft is the only company that knows how to do tablets. Seriously. A proper operating system, with real capabilities and proper user interface that can make use of the tablet form, makes a world of a difference. And I say that as someone who owned a decent Android tablet in the past. As someone who's friends and family with people owning currently decent Android tablets. My little Windows 10 el-cheapo tablet/netbook I picked up second-hand for ~$130 is much more useful than the top-of-the-line Samsung tablet offering. Hell, it already earned me many times more than its own value back, as it's good enough to do some meaningful dev work on the bus/train.

icc97 9y ago
Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows RT, thankfully that was a disaster. Netbooks are ridiculously useful, I used to have a 15 minute bus ride to work with an Asus EEE and would manage to fill that 15 minutes with active moonlighting development time every day. The work I did on that bus became the frontend for what now 10 years later is a $50m company. I realise I'm making a slightly different point as I'm purely talking about netbooks/laptops. But having the full power of an OS on a tablet is definitely the way to go. Certainly that's one of the bad points about iOS and Android they are so locked down that you have to jump through hoops if you wanted to use them as a work machine. For my current job I bought myself a $350 refurbished Thinkpad (T430 8GB SSD core i5), this brings me in all my income. You can compare this to my nephew that is paying $1000 for an iPhone X because he got bored of his iPhone 8. Further to that I bought exactly the same spec Thinkpad for my 5 year old daughter. The Thinkpad T-series are great because you can pour a litre of liquid over them without problem [0] plus they're built like a brick, so basically perfect for kids. My daughter immediately covered the grey brick with shiny stickers and gave it a name (she has an iPad, but that's always just called 'iPad'). It has the full capability to do everything she'll ever need in theory for the rest of her life/career. Further to that it's got Ubuntu installed and I can then install Sugar [1] for her to use (the same used for One Laptop Per Child). The possible drawback is that it doesn't have a touchscreen. But with my experiment of buying a laptop with a touch screen I found I pretty much never wanted to use the touch screen, it's a slower interface than keyboard and mouse. You want the screen in front of you at arms length but then you have to reach with your arm to touch the screen. I can now teach her over the years what it means to have real freedom with your software and hardware. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo [1]: https://sugarlabs.org/ https://sugarlabs.org/
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Sadly, netbooks seem to be gone. Even chromebooks are full-size, full-weight. Do you know of termux.com, for linux without rooting? It's basically a linux distribution, adjusted for android's slightly odd filesystem. The app itself is tiny, and you install from its repository. e.g. there's latex, youtube-dl, curl, vim, clang, ecj, python, ruby, perl, lua, erlang etc. A bluetooth keyboard completes the DIY linux netbook... sadly, bluetooth keyboards are also almost gone, presumably as people adjust themselves to "touch" typing.