Very well put.

In my experience tablets are also replacing books and tv.

I suspect that in a lot of houses the parents are now using tablets, the kids are using PCs/laptops and the tv is mostly off.

Well this is how it is in our house :). Our tv now exists for netflix via chromecast once or twice a week.

My experience of watching kids (ranging from 3 to 15 years old) use this stuff is, in order of level of use/desire to own: Smartphones, tablets, <moderately large gap>, PCs/laptops. As a proportion of use, parents are more likely to use a PC/laptop than kids.

For kids, their default go to device isn't the PC. That's what they use when they have to do something which isn't great on a tablet.

The other interesting thing is what they think "isn't great on a tablet". Non-professional photo or video editing - if you're a 15 year old today, that's a tablet thing, not a PC thing. A lot of gaming is phone/tablet rather than a PC.

A PC looks to me to be primarily homework using something MS Office-ish.

> A lot of gaming is phone/tablet rather than a PC.

You can take my ability to dissipate over a half kilowatt from my cold dead hands. Some games will always be better on PC because they can make use of the power.

Indeed.

Just the proportion of people who play computer games who see them in this way is shrinking rapidly.

I have this theory the so called breakthrough of Apple in the TV business is the iPad and not a big 5k TV screen.

Ben Evans himself says that Eric Schmidt was right when he said Google would own the TV market a few years back - he (Schmidt) just didn't realise it would be Android tablets rather than GoogleTV.

Slightly off topic here but I still think a large part of that is due to hostility from more traditional content providers. The promise of GoogleTV (that was mostly squashed before it had a chance to mature) was that it provided a front-end for content on more traditional satellite/cable services as well as for finding all of the free streams available on network websites and newer platforms like Youtube and Vimeo.

I think the real disruptive potential of GoogleTV was that it allowed you to search for something and have results from all of these disparate feeds show up in a single list. It put content from the web (including independent and user-generated content) on par with network programming or programming delivered via the web instead of a cable subscription.

When networks blocked GoogleTV from accessing their streams without tinkering with user agent strings, etc. it really put a dent in the whole strategy. The point was to show you everything that was available on the big screen in your living room. Networks wanted you to watch on the TV via the more lucrative cable and rental options and only use free web streams as an alternative when you're at your computer in the office or the hotel.

In this way, current tablet-to-TV options like Chromecast and AppleTV are less disruptive since they don't put web content on the same level as cable content. To watch TV you just flip through the channels. To watch web stuff you need to connect some device and push content to the TV. It's a small thing but I think it's a legitimate difference. Firing up YouTube to push a video to your TV isn't the same as searching for "video games" on your Google/Apple TV and seeing TotalBiscuit come up in the same search results as something from Viacom.

And they also didn't realized that it would be the iPad and not Android tablets.

The latter have not been making any inroads...

You need to think outside of the US.

It may not be official Google Android, but low cost generic Android tablets are massive in Asia. Most of them are low spec devices but that's all you need if all you're doing is watching movies and a bit of web surfing.

Well, I spent my time in S.E. Asia and people either don't have a tablet at all, or more frequently they have an iPad. For every Samsumg I see there are like 2 or 3 iPads.

Now, I'm in perhaps the richer country of the whole region.

Your anecdotal evidence appears wrong:

"Worldwide sales of tablets to end users reached 195.4 million units in 2013, a 68 percent increase on 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. While sales of iOS tablets grew in the fourth quarter of 2013, iOS's share declined to 36 percent in 2013. The tablet growth in 2013 was fueled by the low-end smaller screen tablet market, and first time buyers; this led Android to become the No. 1 tablet operating system (OS), with 62 percent of the market (see Table 1)."

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2674215

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple-ipad-t...

> an iPhone is primarily a communications device

That's why I've started calling them 'personal communicators' instead of 'phones'. Sounds a bit more Star Treky as well :)

> They're only replacing PCs to the extent that the PC had already partially replaced some of those things.

I don't know if that's entirely true. A lot of people bought PCs 10 years ago simply because that was the only way to access this new Facespace thing their kids told them about. Those users are now using tablets or mobile because it serves their needs better than a desktop did.

The reality is that a whole lot of people bought systems with way more capabilities than their use case or abilities warranted. Desktop sales are down, and for this reason I don't think they are coming back. "Real" computer users will still use real computers, everyone else is probably better served by mobile.

> I think the mischaracterization is of what mobile is replacing. It isn't the PC.

Are you sure about that?

I am a developer. I have a computer for programming and a couple of LAN party games. I have a phone for everything else.

I have a monster custom built desktop at home that I don't even bother plugging in.

PCs are becoming work devices. They are cool because you can take a laptop home and do professional stuff on them for cheap, but they aren't ubiquitous or necessary like they used to be.