Nobody would predict Windows 8 would "stop" the iPad only a month after release. (not to mention the weird comparison of an operating system to a hardware gadget)

"Employees switching away from Windows PCs", and then citing a large iPad purchase by a company. Again, nobody with half a clue would think that these employees are replacing their work computer with an iPad.

Comparing the years old Apple Store to the brand new Windows Store, and trying to pretend like the numbers mean something.

Saying "office is losing relevance" and then citing absolutely nothing.

Saying Microsoft can't continue to invest the profitable Xbox.. because they can't make it the flagship of the company?

Saying their "platform business is collapsing", and then citing areas where they are doing well, and then just assuming they're all eventually going to fail.

This "writer" needs to be fired.

  > This "writer" needs to be fired.

That characteristic slowly became more and more ubiquitous... in the internet age, linkbait became Pulitzer's cartoons because that's what attracts attention.

So I'd say it's become a little harder these days to identify sensationalism as such, because sometimes, there's not much about the appearance of the publication that screams 'yellow journalism' anymore... The cartoon has moved into the content itself.

I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.

Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.

A peak 17W vs 10W draw is a pretty big difference. And that's peak power; Haswell may be even better at idling. We might see 6 or 7 hours on the next Pro (wild guess).

>This "writer" needs to be fired

The "writer" is more likely to get a pay hike or get promoted because his blogspam is garnering a lot of hits from sites like HN because of the headline and content.

My sample is completely non-scientific, but I can't think of anyone I know like that. My impression is iOS and Android are taking eyeball-time and consumer purchasing money away from PCs, but I just don't see them replacing PCs any more than iPhones or Playstations did. Yet.

What am I missing?

Here's an edge case -- my parents' apartment community. This is a 2-building apartment complex (with about a dozen condo units in the front) with about 500ish total residents. When my folks sold their home a few years ago and moved in, no one else on their floor (two buildings, three floors each) owned a computer, and many never had owned one in the past. My parents today are still on the younger side of the spectrum (57 and 63), so we're talking about a population whose kids went off to college or moved out in 1992 or earlier.

However, there was a desire amongst people they met to own one as they were aware of what could be done, they just didn't want to deal with the hassle. My mother (a textbook technophobe) showed folks her Kindle, and people in the community felt that was easy enough to deal with (especially when getting to a library in the sticks can be a hassle). As a result, my parents helped get folks set up with 3G Kindles. My parents bought themselves iPad 2s about 18 months ago. My father, unlike my mother, was comfortable around computers, but his computer/iPad usage shifted to 10/90% after about 3 months. My mother was initially more 70/30, but is now more along the lines of 20/80. As of right now, they have no intention of replacing their computer with another one. Moreover, my mother who was always paranoid of someone "messing up" the family computer 15-20 years ago is eminently comfortable with her iPad. An even weirder outcome is she apparently follows Apple product news a bit, as do one or two of her aged 55-65 friends.

The new thing? The septuagenarians and octogenarians are now getting iPads. They're buying an Airport Express, calling Comcast to get internet access, and the iPad is the first computer they've ever owned. And they're pretty chuffed about it. And using them. Significantly. Do you have any idea how fantastic the idea of HD FaceTime is to grandparents who almost never get to see their grandkids (and that they'll use it every chance they get)? When I mentioned LetterPress to my mom, the next time I talked to her she mentioned how big a hit it was at her community.

I think to date my parents have set up a dozen other residents with Kindles and about another dozen so far with iPads + internet access. This number will continue to grow.

It's just that not everyone needs the full power and flexibility of a PC. I think in reality just a tiny fraction of users needs one, and as a number of users grows that percentage only lowers. The truth is that a PC always was and always will be much too hard for average user to operate (by design!) while not offering anything meaningful for said average user.

I suspect that tablets and other narrowly focused devices will only gain popularity with time, replacing PCs for most day to day tasks for most users. They are easy to use and they give people something of value without too much hassle. I welcome this trend with joy: it means less calls from family to help them set up/configure/uninstall/clean up things.

There is one thing, however, that I'd like to see included in this future of tablets and similar devices. It would be a tiny, protected with PIN, but mandatory on every single device icon which, when clicked/taped, would invoke a BASIC interpreter (or Lua, or anything similar). I'm worried that while it's getting easier for average user to use these devices, it's also getting harder and harder to hack them. And when there won't be a PC in a household anymore, how children are supposed to learn to love computing? Instead of just using devices...

Also think of how long the shift from desktops to laptops took; for a decade they were just secondary machines and everyone who had a laptop also had a desktop. Now... the only person I know to even own a desktop built it himself 6 years ago and stopped upgrading it altogether a few years ago in favor of laptops.

A similar shift to tablets isn't as inevitable as the shift to laptops was (in hindsight), but if it's happening it's proceeding in much the same way, only faster.

So I don't think the physical keyboard is going away, it will still be the most efficient way to bang out a school paper, computer code, or a thoughtful business email.

The screen we prefer to look at while sitting down will probably always be larger than the one we prefer to carry around.

Those are niches. Most computer use is and will be going fwd, consumption. Majority of creation will be photos/videos/minor typing (txting, tweets, short emails)/other forms that don't require keyboard.

I don't doubt that most people will not need a keyboard most of the time, but not needing a keyboard in the house seems more likely to be the niche. The niche will be 23 to 30 year-olds who have finished school but don't yet have kids in school, and the 55's, and up, whose kids have finished secondary school. Perhaps the computer will again be relegated to the spare bedroom / home office, but I can't imagine a scenario for the majority of middle-class households that doesn't have some sort of physical keyboard.

This is a tangent, but I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and, based on what I've seen, the answer is often "no;" a lot of students say they've never had to write anything longer than two or three pages before taking Intro to Comp.

Some, to be sure, have done substantive writing, but that appears to be the norm.

A lot of 18-year-old freshmen also appear to be MUCH more proficient at typing on phones and tablets than I am, which definitely gives me a bit of culture shock, and reminds me of the typing proficiency I have that many of my own professors appear not to.

The PC was doing just fine before websurfing came along and even before DVD playback.

And yes, don't complain about being downvoted. From the HN guidelines, http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. "

If you look at my comments you'll see that I don't use this form very often - or maybe even at all. I had slightly worse day yesterday and that's the result and I'm sorry. Do you think I should delete this and the three more comments in this thread, which were made in similar manner?

No (imo). Obsessing about 'correct form' and karma is just as bad as completely ignoring it. Everyone gets downvoted once in a while. Learn from your mistakes, and go with the community ethos, and you'll be fine. Karma is just a number on a webpage.

I didn't even think about karma, honestly, I asked having in mind the quality of the thread. I'm still rather new here, I started posting just a couple of months ago and learned by watching others and not from a textbook of rigid rules and that's why I'm still sometimes unsure about how to proceed; even more so because I actually do care about the 'ethos' (although I probably wouldn't use this word) more than about points of any kind.

Either way, thanks for advice and for taking the time to respond even though this was probably one of the least exciting topics you could discuss here, I appreciate it very much.

I think it's completely plausible that in the next couple of years Apple and Google will launch add-ons to your average tablet that gives you a big, high-res screen to do work on along with a tablet.

Or maybe apps will be able to show content on other tablets (like AirPlay does to a TV today) so that you will have more space available for the apps you use.

I think there will be an opportunity for iOS and Android to innovate in this space, in a far more profound way than the "no compromise" dual-UI that is the current Windows 8.

It may be coming...But they've got to get a lot better first.

If it wasn't for the tablet, I'd probably be buying a new computer in the next 12 months. Effectively windows just lost a license sale to the Kindle.

Now, where things get interesting is when it stabilizes. What happens in 24 months when everyone has a tablet and a PC/Mac? Which do people replace, and what does that do to tablet sales vs laptop sales? I have no idea, and I'm sure it depends on new technology, but the future is not as clear to me as many writers assume.

I don't have any hard numbers either, but people that can't touch type can often type faster using a tab with swiftkey than on a keyboard.

To my defense, I wasn't citing numbers. The 95% thing sounds like a made-up number.

To your point: I don't know exactly what swiftkey is- but it's an interesting idea that these new devices may allow a touch-typing replacement to gain traction. That could be a game-changer, I agree.

This is the main reason I can't switch to IOS from android. I type a lot on my phone, usually work related email.

Granted, you can do a lot more with an Ipad than with the 1st generation of blackberry devices but being an owner of an iPad I can't think in somebody that would prefer to write an email or a blog entry in an iPad rather than in a computer.

The conclusion is clear: people are forgoing purchases of PCs because they are buying tablets.

You may think it's ridiculous, but the market is speaking loudly with the voice of billions of dollars, and any company which ignores that is doomed.

As I pointed out, this may not be because people are not using PCs, it just means that they aren't buying new PCs. Perhaps they find that an old, clunky computer is just fine for writing emails and so-forth and their tablets and smartphones are preferable for doing everything else. Or maybe they aren't satisfied with their technology choices at all but because they spent so much money on a tablet they have to delay any updates to their laptop/desktop machine for financial reasons.

Well correlation doesn't imply causation. (http://xkcd.com/552/) Sorry I couldn't help it :P

The thing I don't think your conclusion is necessarily true. I can understand that people just don't need to upgrade their PCs as often of they used to (I noticed that on my self too). In my case, I just don't need to upgrade and since Win 8 is running faster in the same old hardware I don't see that happening anytime soon.

But the true is that people is just wasting their money in something else. I wonder if that grow in the tablet market will decline now that new game consoles cycle is coming up.

This sounds like a hypothetical, right? My brother's laptop broke for a year, and he was fine on his phone until it was recently replaced.

I have a family with lots of eyeballs. Yes, there is still work requiring a PC and so every family should have one. But not every person in the family needs one.

How many people do you know under 10? That's the generation MSFT needs to worry about.

Anecdotally, the kids I've seen get tablets/phones/ipod touches and blast away on them. They'd vastly prefer a tablet to a laptop. Arguments like "You can do real work on a PC!" are not going to sway them. If anything, it reinforces "regular computers = drudgery, to be minimized as much as possible".

However, as soon as they need to complete a school assignment, they have always used a desktop with a keyboard (we don't have floater laptops). This despite never having had any instruction on how to type. I have never heard them once consider using a tablet for this.

If your kids had a tablet with an excellent keyboard touch cover, would that be enough to never use a traditional PC? They aren't in a position to buy it themselves, of course, but if you had them side-by-side I wonder what they'd prefer.

- Larger display - Keyboard - Mouse - Power

It depends on what your usage requirements are, of course, but once you start carrying around one or more peripherals to make your tablet work for your situation, you have to start asking "Is this really better than a laptop?"

I have a Surface RT with touch cover, but haven't let the kids loose with it much. :-) It's not replacing any of my real PC gear, but mainly because it doesn't run any of my existing apps. However, the Surface Pro is going to be a very interesting mix of capabilities.

(My paranoid side is convinced that our NWO techno-slave-masters are simply using these new form-factors as an excuse to kill freedom.)

What is the world coming to? Next you'll be telling me kids no longer find their chores fun.

Over time, will people veer towards doing "more work" on a tablet or trying to have "more fun" on their PC? I know which side I'd bet on.

10 year old kids might not be the best indicator of future trends. After all, we aren't doing our work on the Wii, building our homes using Legos, or any of the other things children spend their time on.

Kids won't do work on the wii... but will they expect (or demand) that devices be motion-aware by default? Screens be touchable by default? Have 10-hour battery life by default? Be comfortably handheld by default?

Think about how downtime has evolved. This century we went from "I'm bored, let me grab a newspaper" to "I'm bored, what's on the radio?" to "I'm bored, what's on TV?" to "I'm bored, what's on the desktop computer?" to "I'm bored, what's on my phone/tablet?"

The earlier industries are dead or stagnant (newspaper/radio), regular TV (at a specific time, interrupted by commercials) is on its way out, the growth is in the new form factor/experience Microsoft is barely relevant in. That's the nightmare.

So, what do we have then? Do we still have just a tablet? Maybe, but the definition will have changed.

Disclosure: I recently accpeted a position at MSFT (not related to Surface) and am drinking the koolaid.

They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.

There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.

There are a couple of sticking points:

* There's still going to be space management issues. 2gb on Dropbox doesn't go far when you've got a 4gb cf in the camera, and the next step up is 100gb@$100/yr.

* the other half of space management is clearing it off of the iPad. It's difficult to manage storage of imported photos, it turns out that if you don't delete them after import to iPhoto on your desktop, you either have to delete them individually or use image capture on the Mac to do it. I'd love to see the high res ones synced off to the cloud, leaving smaller jpegs around, but with the promise that the high res ones were securely stored. What I wound up doing for that was using a USB stick and my work netbook as the real storage for all the holiday images, rather than being able to do it on the iPad.

Finally, and this isn't a problem for the inlaws, but for me as a photographer, I shot raw+jpeg. iphoto imported raw+jpeg, and then didn't use any of the raw data, just the small(well, 8mp) jpegs. I tore through them, using iPhoto as a passible Lightroom substitute. And now, the adjustments are orphaned if I want to apply any of them to the raw files. That's annoying. Not critical, but annoying. And it's not as if there isn't a raw converter in the core of OSX that couldn't be used here.

Sidenote: they are thrilled with the transition.

I used to upgrade my main computer yearly, but now doing so every 3 years or so feels more than enough. Most people I know keep theirs for even longer.

On the other hand, my iPad 1 - less than 2 years older than the iPad 3 I now own - feels downright sluggish and old. Many apps don't work on it, and I get tons of crashes on it due to memory issues. I think that trend will probably continue for a few more years (I think phones are in a similar position).

If you look closely, the article was written by Business Insider[0], which is not what I would call a trustworthy source.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider

Android will dominate tablets for the same reason it is dominating smart phones. Android tablets will outsell the iPad five to one within a few years. The volume that Android tablets will bring to market will, however, remove volume from the laptop market.

Compared to MS Office (my comparison is desktop MS Office; I haven't even seen its tablet version), they have fewer features (fewer than Mac OS X counterparts, which already have fewer features). Whether that is an issue for you depends on your requirements.

Major lacking features are the ability to handle large documents and macros. They also are worse in importing MS Office files than MS Office itself.

On an original iPad, they also are fairly sluggy. I wouldn't write large texts in Pages, for instance, or create large spreadsheets in Numbers. Reading and revising existing not-too-large files is OK, though.

On the plus side, they look better and are somewhat easier to use (although the iOS versions, IMO, suffer from the limited interface that tablets offer)

Integration with iCloud for document storage and synchronization is somewhat spotty, but IMO has gotten better recently (my experience is syncing to Mac OS X Numbers and Pages; I have never synced with Windows or with Office documents)

Perhaps you tried the iWork applications from Apple that they sell for $10/each?

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/29/npd-pc-sales-down-microso...

It also seems things are so bad, that they've already started to raise prices on enterprise customers, from 8% to 400%, trying to milk them as much as possible before they lose them:

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/03/sales-down-microsoft-rais...

http://microsoft-news.com/black-friday-boosts-windows-8-net-...

"While the days leading up to Black Friday had Windows 8 running below 1% US net usage, Thanks Giving and Black Friday saw a large number of new Windows 8 PCs hitting the market, taking its US share above 2%. While the number reduced over the next week,indicating that Windows 8 users are mainly at home rather than at work, it returned to 2.12% yesterday, indicating the new level was real and not just an artefact of increased usage over the holiday break."

Also, Steam's hardware surveys shows that Windows 8 is at 5% of the userbase, despite's Gabe's comments about the "catastrophe".

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-8-thunders-past-ma...

The lesser said about Charlie's rants and non-sequitir arguments on SemiAccurate(which should be titled SemiWrong) the better. Just reading his previous articles makes me want to add that site to my /etc/hosts blacklist.

you can also take into consideration the simple fact that each year there is a population growth to some degree, So naturally the figures need to be up. But that's macro economics i really don't know alot about, maybe someone else can explain?

Except that Mac sales keep rising...