If I get his argument correct: It’s not that Tablet PCs are bad, it’s just that they haven’t reached the level he thinks they should be at (in terms of hardware and experience) so the market is small. He sums it up this way: “It’s a technology with good and bad points, and people need to evaluate it as such.”
Sounds reasonable to me. If I read correctly between the lines he’s most frustrated when people claim a value greater for Tablets that he sees or the market is indicating. Yeah, hype is often misleading and wrong.
That being said, I think John has missed a rather large market in his breakdown of the value of Tablets: education. And by education, I’m meaning everything from kindergarten to medical school. In schools, not everything fits so nicely into typed text. No doubt, some things do, but not all. Take math class, for instance. A math teacher isn’t going to want to type out their math problems, nor do the students want to type their way through taking notes in math class or solving a math problem. Science classes are another example. Of course, there’s art class too.
Yes, a four year old learning to write can do so on paper–but setting aside cost issues for one moment–it is quite natural to envision a student writing on a digital device and getting feedback from the computer.
Likewise, it’s possible to imagine a student practicing the clarinet at home with their Tablet showing an annotated score as they play that listens to their playing and gives feedback.
Both of these examples stretch the practical issues of Tablets in terms of costs and software availability, but the potential seems extremely viable to me.
So let’s assume some clever engineers and schools can make this happen, then what? I can see Tablets becoming a preferred platform in most schools. Why? Because they provide the basic value of automating tasks, digital content distribution, sharing, and the like that all computers provides–as well as additional modes of input (such as pen input) in a form factor that enables the computers to be used in more places.
Now back to today. If you accept that schools are going to go more digital than ever before (in terms of how teachers teach and students participate in class and study at home and in groups), then the next question up is what hardware might be used. A regular notebook? A PDA? A Tablet PC? I know what I’d pick–Tablet PCs. I can see others making a different decision, though.
What about the cost premium? Yes, this has been a shame–though the premium has been dwindling. You can get a 14″ Gateway Tablet PC for $1000, for instance. Can you get a $600 Tablet? Not that I know of. I imagine the cost premium will continue to dwindle, but don’t forget Tablets do include extra hardware–such as the active digitizer. That’s going to add something to the cost. It’s in large part about numbers. The more Tablets that are sold, the smaller the cost premium will be.
Finally, what about performance, battery life and so on? With first generation Tablets there was an issue. This has largely faded away once Intel launched Centrino. There are some high end 64 bit game and performance notebooks as well as some nice laptops with varying display sizes and resolutions that outpace most Tablets, but here again I think we’re talking numbers. The more Tablets that are sold, the more Tablet choices the market will see.
So John’s core comment that Tablets are relegated to a small market–in relation to overall computer sales–is valid. (Though don’t forget that we’re still talking over 1 million Tablets to be sold this year, which yields more than a $2B market if Tablet hardware and software sales total about $2,000 per Tablet.) What I remind people though is to watch the growth. Today Tablets are in third place behind mainstream, standard Windows boxes and Apple’s line of computers, but that doesn’t mean that Tablets don’t have a lot of value for people like me nor an extremely compelling future–which as a developer I’m quite interested in.
