A few years ago, it was said that tablets were going to eat up the computer market and even replace them. Today they are nothing more than a marginal product that very few people use and, therefore, they have not become what they were promised in their day. Why was this transition never made? Are tablets doomed to be a niche product incapable of surpassing a laptop?
Many of us have a tablet in our drawer, we usually use it to read books in digital format or, failing that, to browse the internet. But its use is not that of a computer. What’s more, if you have a mobile with a large enough screen, you can do without them. What is the reason for its low popularity?
The PostPC concept
When the iPad was first introduced, the sadly deceased Steve Jobs began to coin the PostPC concept, referring to a change in the way computers are consumed by the general public. Specifically, the words were given in an interview with All Things Digital. The words of the founder of Apple were the following:
You see, I’m trying to make a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation all the cars were trucks, because this is what you needed on the farm. But as soon as cars began to be used in urban centers and Americans began to move to the cities, cars became more popular and innovations like automatic transmissions, power steering, and things from truck to truck. the one you didn’t give importance to began to be integrated into the cars. And now, I probably don’t know what the statistics are, possibly one in 25 or 30 vehicles is a truck, where before it was 100%. PCs are going to be like trucks.
Well, time has passed and we find that tablets have not replaced computers at all, we even find cases like the Apple iPad in its professional version that all they have done is make laptops more expensive of the brand and with artificially limited functions. And yes, it is very obvious to talk about the failure of tablets, however, it is a topic that we believe deserves to be highlighted and analyzed.
The interface problem on tablets
We have to start from the fact that the majority of applications that we use daily in an operating system must have a coherence in the visual presentation of their applications. That’s why they use common visual elements arranged in the same way. Which makes the learning curve easier.
When there was the boom in tablets, many applications were designed for mobile phones, and due to using the same family of processors, ARM, and the same operating systems, Android and iOS, many applications had to be adapted to a larger screen format. . However, we must start from the fact that the interface of a tablet is not the same as that of a PC, so the large number of applications had to be adapted to a totally different way of using it.
Thus, software companies had to spend financial and personnel resources to adapt their applications to a device that used a different user interface and that was completely new to the market. Although the processing capacity was going to evolve over time to allow a use like that of a laptop, there was no incentive for it and the work of adapting an application to be used from a conventional PC to a touch screen was, to say the least, daunting and it didn’t work for all apps.
The limitations of the format
Taking a mobile chip and scaling it up into a tablet is easy, but doing it from a PC processor is much more difficult. That is why they have had disparate software ecosystems. Some companies have tried to carry out the conversion process, but it has come to nothing. The biggest demonstration of the fiasco, though, is the appearance of conventional laptops with tablet chips that are much more popular with ordinary people. We refer to the MacBook with Apple M1 and M2 chips or the Surface X with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.
