Research: Android taking over the tablet market from iOS (opens in new tab)

Nah, the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today. So that's digital artists, developers with their VMware/VirtualBox/etc and servers. I look to my non-techie dad(though he use to do those punch-card stuff) as an example; got him an iPad and the only thing he misses from his previous laptops is the keyboard.

I'm very interested in what other people think about this. Does the general public need anything more than a high-end tablet + bluetooth keyboard? Or maybe, just because some people enjoy a big screen, a tablet with a docking-station providing the keyboard, mouse and big screen?(which is basically a PC, I guess). Some of my coworkers predict a day where smartphones are so powerful, that you'll just put them in a docking-station at work and it'll be just as powerful as a high-end notebook today.

Today's consumer laptops/desktop are like Adobe Flash. They're both dead and the tech to replace them exists, we just haven't completely agreed on how to go about it - but they are both definitely dead.

That is the relevant question. (What does Post-PC mean?)

Looking back at the PC 'revolution' we see that initially computers were in the office and not so much at home. And if they were at home there was only 1 and generally shared.

But what PC's did was create a place you could deliver an application (the PC provided input/output/storage) for the marginal cost of the software bits (which is quite small). So a tremendous number of companies sprang up to deliver those applications since the rate of return is quite high.

As PC's migrated home, they did so primarily as an application vehicle and less so as a tool. This is markedly different than most of the readership of this site (which uses computers as tools) but it is far and away the largest use for computers in the home and individually owned computers.

The programability came at a price however, it made compatibility challenging (bad mojo to have your app not work on your customers machine) and it enabled a threat to undesired programming (viruses, worms, etc) running on it.

For the biggest chunk of the market, the customer's ideal device has no programmability capability outside an application's need for configuration, no way for any application to interfere with another application, and rock solid compatibility. Sort of the 'game console' equivalent of information appliance.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all gunning for that space (and apparently so is Valve :-). Apple's approach is an appliance OS (iOS) and a developer OS (MacOS), Google's approach is an appliance OS (ChromeOS) and developer tools (Chrome, AppEngine, Etc.), Microsoft has the developer OS (Windows) with what might be called the third attempt at an appliance version (Windows RT) (previously Windows CE and Windows Embedded).

If these efforts mature the way their respective owners would like, the bulk of the "computers" out there will be information/data appliances running their appliance environment. Computers will go back to something nerds, scientists. and engineers use and "regular" people ignore.

Ops! Typing on an iPhone, tried to edit and hit send by accident :) I meant file system, which is key for any kind of real work on device. For instance, on an Android I can save a PDF file in say Work folder, then open it in one app to annotated it, in other to perhaps rotate some pages and rearrange content, and finally compress along with other files into a single zip and email it out.

In theory, I could do the same on an iPad, but it would be a really convoluted string of passing that file from app to app, as appose of have that file in one place and using different apps as tools, to work on that file.

With all the hard work apple is doing trying to make OSX users think that their hard drive starts at the ~/ folder, I don't expect full system excess here, just a Document folder and a Finder.app to manage it.

My Nexus 7 is sitting in its dock, as it has been for the last six weeks except for maybe a few minutes a week.

I bought one of the original 16GB Nexus 7s; the battery life sucks; the responsiveness made my iPhone 3GS running iOS 5 look good. I commonly tell those who ask that the Nexus 7 is one of the worst technology purchases I’ve made in the last ten years (the worst before that would have been the Compaq iPaq in 2001; it didn’t even run Linux very well, although that ran better than WinCE at the time). I use my iPhone in preference to the Nexus 7 for just about everything. I bought a Kobo mini for $50 because the Nexus 7 wasn’t even a good epub reader, and that’s having tried four or five different ebook readers on the Nexus 7.

This is anecdotal, but I am not sure whether I’ll ever buy another Android product—regardless of manufacturer—and I say that despite feeling the need to stay on top of available technology from a friend/family recommendation perspective. (That, and I do like gadgets, but I'm much less willing to put up with crap these days.)

You have to know the real numbers to make that determination. Increased 17% from 100 is 117. iPad decreasing from 550 to 450 (pulled out of my ...) would mean the parent is still right.

the iPad mini it may be mini, but is still expensive, and from my own empirical experience, 9 out of 10 tablets I see in the user hands are cheap $59 devices.

You mean how their margins in iPods and phones and desktop computers have .... er ... What was your point again?

I don't think anyone of note has said Apple will dominate the tablet market forever.

Those posts were making statements about the future, and both were unequivocally wrong.