The death of the tablet PC

(Image credit Wired.com)

It was 8 years ago that Apple revealed the iPad to the world, bringing an age old concept into the spotlight. In spite of the what some may still say, the tablet PC wasn't invented by Apple. And no, Job's comment in 1983 about him wanting a computer that you could hold in a book doesn't mean he invented it.

  What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes ... and we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.  - Steve Jobs 1983

Not when the Dynabook predates it by over a decade. Alan Key's 1972 proposal for a slate/tablet computer that would be easy to use and easy to carry. 

(Image credit Wikipedia)

So why did it take so long for the concept to take off? Well, the Dynabook was made in an age where it was technologically impossible to make it. There were a lot of them in the '90s and the early '00s, including attempts by Microsoft.

(Image credit Wikipedia)

So, even though this and a few others existed way before the iPad, why didn't they take off? The answer is quite simple. Tablets like the two above were designed for education and for work, and therefore do not appeal to everyone. The iPad was designed for media consumption, and that does appeal to everyone... for a while. 

I remember when tie iPad came out how people that didn't really understand technology, especially on TV, were touting tablets as the PC killer. Doom to the big computers and the laptops. What use would they be in a world where a touchscreen could do everything a keyboard could, and a compact system you could carry around was able to run every app you'd ever need? Well, there was the problem. Apart from being compact, it wasn't really good for doing actual things on it. So in case of tablets killing the PC, tablets committed suicide or transformed into the toaster-refrigerator laptops that Apple used to make fun of... until they turned the iPad into a toaster-refrigerator. 

Now, you may say to yourself: "But tablets aren't dea, I've seen them on the market yesterday!". Well, here's the thing. The tablets you're seeing on the market haven't been updated in years, typically around 2015, when tablets kinda officially died. They're basically unsold stock, because the tech companies that made them aren't really making them, since no one was buying them. Most tablets that are still on the market now offer you less power than a low-end phone, having 1GB of RAM, which is barely enough to browse an image heavy website, or at best 2GB of RAM. There are models with 4GB, like the iPad, which costs so much money that you're better off getting two phones with 6GB of RAM and taping them together to form a bigger screen. 

Why aren't they being made anymore? Because people aren't buying them. They probably bought one, it was nice, it was neat, but phone screens got big enough in recent years to make them pointless. Sure a 10 inch tablet is still nice to look at, but, is it really worth the investment when you've got a 6 inch phone? To many people it doesn't, mostly because there isn't really much else you can do with a tablet that you can't already do with a phone. Quite the opposite, often there are things you can do with a phone that you can't do with a tablet, like make a call in public without looking like a clown. 

And one of the main problems with tablets not being all that useful is the same problem that the Dynabook concept still has. The right software for it doesn't exist. Apple "invented" Apps. The tablet PC didn't need apps. It needed programs. It needed tools. It needed games. It needed software that could use the control method to the fullest, but instead we got the "free" app mania that gave us an endless field trash, with the occasional good thing. This has been especially valid in the video gaming department. 

When tablets started showing up in the market, I saw them as the perfect method to revive genres of games that were best sellers back in the '90s. The city builders, the management games, the adventure games, things that could work perfectly on a touchscreen, that could be played flawlessly and would allow a new generation to enjoy games like these. Let's face it, a lot of people don't have the patience for the perceived difficulty of turning on a PC and double clicking an icon... and the setting up a PC, maintaining it, not downloading "totallynotavirus.exe". But through a tablet, they'd be perfect. And you could play them in bed and on the toilet. But we didn't get that, did we? We got phone games on bigger screens. We got "play them in 5 minute loops that have no substance and will never lead to anything better, but use micro-transactions so you can play for 6 minutes instead of 5 every hour." It took gaming companies like the bloated corpse of Atari until last year to figure out that maybe making a proper Rollercoaster Tycoon game for tablets... and phones, would be profitable. 

The only way for tablets to become useful to the people that would actually be interested in buying new versions of them on a regular basis was to become laptops, at which point there really isn't a reason to not get a laptop, which is why Chromebooks took over in the educational field, after schools realized "Oh, spending thousands of dollars on iPads was a dumb, dumb idea".  Tablets are an evolutionary dead end. They could have been something, had they been developed in about 5 years, when they could actually have some decent power on-board, and if the software wasn't garbage. As they are, there really isn't much of a market for a Facebook machine when the one you got in 2011 won't need an upgrade until Facebook isolates itself from the internet and enforces its own devices. 

Now, phones have big enough screens as it is, and they're getting bigger what with the foldable sector starting to pick up.

(Image credit Cnet.com)

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For more content made by me, please check out the gaming and hardware videos I make over at @gaminghd and on @free999enigma 's channel.Also, check out the stuff my friends @stefanonsense @ropname and @vladalexan make, if you like video games.