There's no real alternative. You buy an iPad or Amazon tablet, and you get either iOS with the App Store or Amazon's weird Android fork and it's Amazon centric ecosystem.

Google is being short sighted here. These are the operating systems our kids are growing up with, and tablets are amazing for kids. My kid started on a busted old iPad 3 I had laying around, and now he's punching trees in Minecraft on an iPad Air.

Android tablets have been replaced by Chromebook convertibles that are capable of running Android apps. It's a much better experience than a typical android tablet ever was.

Also smartphone screens became larger and took usecases from tablets.

Yeah, that's a good point. The old 7" tablet market is kind of pointless when 6.5" is a normal phone size.

6.5" at what aspect ratio though?

6.5" 18:9 (2:1) aspect ratio phones have a _lot_ less area than a 7" 4:3 tablet.

For a reading surface this makes a big difference.

> I thought tablets killed the PC market.

Per IDC numbers over 250 million PCs were shipped in 2017 versus about 170 million tablets, which includes iPads but may not include the super cheap Ali Express models.

That was was decline of 3% and 8% respectively.

> I know Android tablets haven't been selling well, but that's because people like me have been desperately waiting for a decent device to be released.

Amazon sells Fire tablets pretty easily. The problem is that there's Amazon, selling tablets for next to nothing, and Apple and Microsoft, selling premium tablets. The middle market has to be either exceptionally good to exist, or it just disappears. That's what happened.

> I know Android tablets haven't been selling well, but that's because people like me have been desperately waiting for a decent device to be released.

Indeed. E.g. I want a tablet to be a as big as needed to view A4/Letter PDFs in 100% zoom without scrolling (so I'd be able to stop carrying papers with me) and have as much RAM as possible (at least 4 GiB). I'd also appreciate it to utilize the extra space available in this case by adding full-sized USB3 ports, and an external SD card reader to be used as removable media (in addition to the internal SD card reader to be used as the "hard drive" expansion).

Set them up with Fortnite and that won't be a problem much longer.

(You'll have plenty of new ones, though!)

The new solitaire? When mice first became a thing, games were useful to teach the motor skills; I suppose there's no reason it wouldn't work again:)

FWIW Fortnite has a PEGI 12+ rating for violence.

It also, I gather, has text chat making it difficult to monitor in a teaching environment and open to problems at home.

I ran into the issue your wife experienced with kids at her school teaching kids to use a mouse with my daughter. We have a Samsung tablet that my daughter has made her own for the last several years. The tablet will not charge anymore so I put her in front of my old laptop. I was surprised at how much she struggled to use the mouse. Her hands are stiff and she seems bewildered. I realise now how intuitive tablets are.

> I realise now how intuitive tablets are

Only if you're used to them. I've used PCs for more than 30 years, since I was 5 years old - and it took me a while to become comfortable navigating around my first Android tablet. I only recently tried my first iOS device, and it was an infuriating experience trying to find the settings menu for it - it was so unintuitive to me, I ended up asking Siri to open it!

Anything is intuitive with years of experience.

I watched my kids figure out how to use a variety of Android and iOS devices they had never seen before when they were less than 2 years old, so I would argue that touchscreens are in fact more intuitive to use.

Apple sued the heck out every other tablet company to help cement their lead. It worked.

What's annoying is that history will remember Apple as having "invented" the tablet. Prior to apple they were a sufficiently big thing that even Microsoft had a Tablet PC standard. Sure, capacitive touch screens were a big step forward and made tablets truly usable. But it's not like Apple invented them either although they were very early into that technology.

I’d love to see a link substantiating that claim.

Apple his owned the high end of the tablet market since the day the iPad came out.

As of earlier this year, the price of a fantastic brand new iPad is down to $300.

Android tablets never seemed to get anywhere. My impression, having never use them, was that the software wasn’t quite ready at the start and by the time it was it was too late.

Amazon attacked the low-end with cheap and subsidized tablets, taking up anything Apple didn’t.

The only thing that seems to be left are the $80 things that you can buy at pharmacies and other places. Sure they run Android, but the version is ancient and the hardware is garbage.

So basically only Amazon and Apple seem to be left at any volume.

Windows tablets obviously never took off, despite the fact Microsoft has been trying forever. The only “success” they have is convertibles, which are really Windows computers with detachable keyboard. No one seems to use them as tablets from what I’ve seen.

Your mention of the $300 price prompted me to take a look. I'm in the UK tho... and of course they've done that annoying thing of making everything more expensive here - £319 (~$425), so not quite as appealing :(

That's a hell of a claim. They sued Samsung (mainly because Samsung went out of their way to imitate Apple and fell afoul of design patents) but I don't remember them suing others.