Following that same line of examination (looking at refreshes), consider the impact of each refresh. What does a new iPad include?

Thinner and lighter? That's a nice to have, but is it cost-of-upgrade nicer?

Touch ID? How important is Touch ID to users who use the iPad casually. With an iPhone you're frequently operating the device with one hand, so Touch ID simplifies the authentication process. When you're using your device for payments, Touch ID is pretty damned incredible. Neither of these apply to the iPad. I'd love to have Touch ID on my iPad, but it's not worth the cost of an upgrade.

Better camera? I'm an outlier here — almost everyone I know uses their iPad as a camera, except me — but I'm just not sure this alone is enough to push people to upgrade. In the iPhone environment, all of these new features act cumulatively to make an iPhone upgrade worthwhile.

Larger size? Oh, wait. That's iPhone only, and it's probably one of the biggest drivers of iPhone 6/6+ sales. It's irrelevant to the iPad.

Tablets, as a product, involve a slower upgrade cycle because they're actually the more traditional product when compared to a device like the iPhone.

That said, sales have plateaued at best and there are probably a lot of contributors:

- Slow upgrade cycle as you suggest. I have a 2nd or 3rd gen iPad and I have absolutely zero reason to upgrade at this point.

- They are probably being squeezed to a certain degree. I find that, even with just an iPhone 6 rather than a Plus, I'm often more inclined to just read on my phone than go grab my tablet.

- I've probably become more quick to grab a Chromebook or some other laptop I have laying around than do anything half-way complicated on my tablet. So there may be some realization that tablets are sometimes more trouble than they're worth even for more complex mostly-consumption tasks.

- I suspect that we may end up with some sort of tablet and laptop reconvergence even though tablets took off in large part because the convergence between the two devices was broken.

At the very least, sliding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse next to your tablet then having it turn into "laptop mode" would solve the problem.

I don't really disagree. This might well be what the reconvergence looks like--in combination with software changes that better bridge different modes of operation.

That said, you may also be right that enhancements to interfaces could make a tablet-type device qualitatively better than today while also pushing it in directions that are fundamentally different from the type of device needed to do the types of tasks we mostly use laptops for today.

Microsoft is approaching the tablet by scaling down a laptop. I like it but it needs more work.

I tend to agree. The only tablet I own and use is a Surface Pro 3 (and not because of Windows, rather in spite of it--it's a great Photoshop machine for the money, and happens to be pretty good at some other stuff on top of that). I've got Visual Studio on it too, though I don't use it for development much because the Type Cover is crap. If I could get a stiff-hinge keyboard dock for the thing, it would probably be my primary game development machine (I use C# for that, day job stuff and web stuff is on my Mac). As-is, Photoshop and light browsing are what it's good for. And I think that's the basic point of overlap for bringing tablets into "work" modes - the transformable tablet/laptop, only actually good.

The 2nd gen (non-Retina) iPads make my eyes bleed. They are terrible devices.

I had a 3rd gen and after a year, websites became more complicated and it just felt 'slow', so I sold it and got the Retina Mini.

As for use - they are constantly getting used for games, movies, books, and web browsing. That is what they are good at. You want a clear use case - its that. My computer stays on the desk most of the time.

How so? Android and Windows tablets never sold as much as iPads and still don't. It might be 50-50 now, but not 3 times as much by any means.

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2954317

   """
   Device Type    2014   2015   2016
   [...]
   Tablets         216    233    259
   """

The last numbers I've seen were from around 2012, when no Android tablet had made any dents yet, and that version of a Surface was a failure.

I use my iPad all the time, but primarily for reading and watching movies and TV shows. My three-year-old iPad does these things great and there's simply no reason to upgrade.