I'm just not seeing this, no matter how many times tablet evangelists repeat it. How is a tablet with a detachable keyboard that you have to lug around separately more convenient than a laptop which has it built-in?
Who is arguing that tablets are more convenient to lug around if what you need is a laptop? But the point is the vast majority of users don't need a laptop - smartphones already vastly outsell laptops and demonstrates what users really are looking for: a tiny, portable computing device that does the basics.
Since by "power users" you apparently mean "anyone who uses a computer for anything more than YouTube and AIM," I am going to have to vehemently disagree that they are a minority at all, let alone a tiny one.
Sales numbers disagree with you.
See, this is the difference between "can" and "should." Yes, it's possible to use a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard in place of a laptop, but that doesn't make it a better option. Separate Bluetooth keyboards require a case like my brother has in order to not be a pain in the ass, and while snap-on keyboards like the Eee Transformer circumvent that, in either case you're just making it into a poor man's laptop.
You're back to talking about tablets when my focus have been smartphones. FACT is that more smartphones get sold than laptops. FAR more. At home, more and more newer smartphones can transform into a stationary computer by hooking up to a monitor or TV and a bluetooth keyboard. Same goes for tablets. The Transformer, Atrix and cases are workarounds for people who mostly just need a smartphone or tablet, but *sometimes* want laptop like functionality but not badly enough to want to buy both (or opt for the laptop instead of a smartphone). Those options will remain niche.
What won't remain niche is for the user that want a large screen stationary setup to instead of having both a smartphone and a desktop come home and plug their phone into their screen and have all their data accessible in one location but with a large screen as an option rather than paying for two computers and have to deal with shuffling data around.
Which raises the question, why not just a laptop, then? They're cheaper, they're nearly as compact,
They're nowhere near as compact or practical as a tablet, but I was talking about smartphones - tablets are a tiny niche - and my phone fits in all my pockets, my laptops don't.
But lets talk about tablets for a second: My tablet slips easily into my bag. My laptops don't. I could get a netbook, but it'd be as slow as my tablet, more expensive than my tablet, and it'd be far less convenient in the places where I use my tablet, such as while commuting, when what I want is a device I can easily hold with one hand while reading or surfing.
they have a better software selection, and you don't have to tote around a separate freakin' keyboard if you feel you might need it (or leave it behind thinking you won't and then find that you do after all.)
More users use smartphones than laptops, so clearly most users are perfectly fine not carrying a keyboard around, or not having the same application selection.
And while desktop PCs might not be as convenient generally as laptops or other portable computers, they offer full access to all the expandability the market offers, up to gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of hard disk space, and the best CPU and GPU horsepower out there, and that's something no portable computer can claim.
Most users *never* open their machine, so no extra RAM, no extra internal harddrives (ever wonder why the market for external harddrives is as huge as it is, and why network attached storage is so big?). Have you looked around your local PC shop lately? In most mainstream ones, you'll see most machines displayed are laptops, all-in-one PC's built into the monitor, or small form factor machines which are nearly impossible to expand. Ordinary users don't care about expandability, nor even know about the options.
Yes, that's probably not necessary for most users, but the set of people who can make significant use of more than what a laptop or tablet can provide is most certainly non-negligible.
I'm not saying it is, but of the 300 million sold PC's last year, I'd be shocked if it accounted for more than 30 million users. 10% of the market. A market that has already been surpassed in size by smartphones, and that is stagnant, while the smartphone market is projected to pass 600 million new units sold next year.
Tens of millions of users is still a valuable market, and a high margin one at that, and so there will remain plenty of options for those who need or want larger box computers, but it'll become a smaller part of the overall market.
You'll note, however, that the primary use of VNC in the personal-use computing world is to allow netbooks and tablets to access the storage capacity and computing power of desktop PCs.
Which is another reason why people don't need to carry high end computing power with them. My main machine is a low powered laptop. It can be even for someone like me who definitively fall in the power user category, because all the heavy lifting is done by a big server under the stairs.
The question is, what happens when they're ubiquitous enough that they stop being cool, and the public frenzy is diverted to some new trendy gadget? They'll be left with only the people who really want them and are comfortable using them, and who knows what percentage of the peak market share that will be?
My prediction is that it will *become* the majority of the PC market. It won't replace PC's - it will gain the capaibilities needed to *become* PC's for the large majority of PC users that today buy $200-$600 PC's and/or the users that have eschewed PC's for phones for years already (e.g. penetration of expensive phones amongst the <25 year age group is far higher than the penetration of PC's).
Desktops will keep becoming smaller, lessening the gap, with larger PC's remaining confined to enthusiasts as they have been for the last 10-15 years, but their market share will shrink as it has for years, only now it will lose sales to smartphones instead of laptops.
The laptop market will flatten out, and maybe start a slow decline, as people left buying laptops will increasingly be people who are business users who travel and power users who do serious work but want to do it from the sofa. The casual users who have driven the surge in laptop sales are users that moved on from desktops because laptops took less space and could be moved more easily, but that still have computing needs largely easily met by low end tablets and/or high end smart phones + screen / keyboard combo's.
Within 5 years, the majority of computing will be done on smart phones - already by end of 2013, the number of smart phones in active use is likely to have surpassed the number of desktops and laptops in active use with current projections - the PC market is growing at less than 4% year over year, while the smartphone market is growing at more like 40%-50% year over year.
Given the low price point of the low end of this market, the smartphone and tablet markets combined are likely to get far wider penetration into low income markets, which will drive the numbers to far higher totals than for PC's - About 3 times as many people in the world have cellphones as have PC's, and while most of those are simple devices, we've seen the capabilities of the lowest end devices rapidly increase as the cost gets low enough. E.g. even poor but large countries like Nigeria are one of the largest cellphone markets in the world because if people have to choose between buying a phone or buying a PC, the market shows that the phone almost always wins out. This will accelerate as the option to buy a phone with computing functionality tilts the benefit of even a mid range phone further towards picking the phone.
Feel free to hold me to this in five years time
