Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer Google today announced new phones, VR kit and home gadgetry. But it didn't announce a tablet. And nobody cared. We've known for ages that tablet sales are declining. The most recent tablet sales data we've covered has the market at about 150m units a year. Apple has a quarter of the market and Samsung has about 15 per cent. …
"hexpads on the front panel."
Hexpads on the front panel. Luxury! In my day there were just rows of switches. Except when we had to take the switches out to boil them up for soup. Then we had to twist bits of wire together.
"nigh on 60!"
ah, that explains it. A youngster. Don't know they're born these days...
Yep ... first systems I worked on had 8k toroid coil core memory, 512K drum memory for fast storage and 5 MB removable platter disks. I 'fingerboned' in maintenance programs from the front panel flipping switches to signify 1's and 0's, then stuffing them in memory locations or registers accessible from there.
Yes .... I am now 60, and still working IT, although evolved into IT Security now...thank goodness. If I didn't, at my age, I'd be out of a job in IT as it's a younger game now.
Nah, you haven't lived until you've booted your machine by first setting a row of toggle switches and then feeding in a length of punch tape. Then loading a boot disc the size of your desk drawer.
Really, really, really really - oh heck, lost count - old. Mid 60s.
I suddenly felt very old recently when, in conversation with a junior colleague, I recalled the first time I used a PC with a whole *1 Mb* of RAM and being amazed at the extra memory (all 300-odd Kb of it) would make.
Said colleague admitted to his first PC having had a mere 512 Mb of RAM.....
In addition we also see that the smartphone market has been showing signs that it too is flattening out prior to serious slowdown (the first indications that mobes were affected as well as tablets and pcs started to appear about a year ago). Quite what is killing what I do not know other than it is quite obvious that refresh cycles for all these three types of shiny are getting longer and longer. I note that a certain section of our little congregation here at El Reg post regularly claiming that Win 10 is destroying the pc-market. I wonder what their explanation is for condition of the tablet and smartmobe markets? Given that the Demon Lords of Redmond have a low percentage market presense in both those areas. Something is definitely going on and whilst one can speculate about market saturation, commoditization and so on and so forth it is still somewhat of a puzzle.
I don't see it as a puzzle at all, the only thing that's going on is that the market is maturing. People know what these different gadgets can do and what they can use them for, and in many cases that is not sufficient to buy a new, more shiny, phone, or a tablet. In the past these things had novelty value or potential for new untapped use cases. This is not so much the case any more.
Plus the technology curve is no longer so steep. A new device is not necessarily going to be a huge improvement on the old one.
This already happened with PCs/laptops, irrespective of Win 10.
Not just Maturing but saturating and stagnating. Consumers crave novelty and the current products in both tablet and laptop formats are just 'meh'.
Everyone who has a tablet sees no reason to upgrade.
Google will merge android tablets and Chromebooks in Andromeda; a next generation cloud terminal with consumer applications in containers that can migrate between nodes depending on network availability and processing needs/cost.
Devices will have two touch screens, one working as a soft keyboard and the other as a display. Or both can be used as a display.
Single screen tablets and laptop will then suffer a final extinction.
A new device is not necessarily going to be a huge improvement on the old one.
Noted this in mobile phones. My current Samsung 4G phone is two years old, looking around for a replacement, I find that the broadly equivalent model (same platform chipset) retails at a higher price point...
"Something is definitely going on and whilst one can speculate about market saturation"
Stuff is good enough, improvements are tiny, tablets last longer than phones, laptops under 1kg are commonplace.
Google is having to differentiate its pixel phones with software; software upgrades are being used to sell phones and tablets. Win 10 has, it seems, failed to sell PCs. Short of deliberately introducing exploits into the wild that require a change to the latest hardware/software combination, what are West Coast mega-corporations supposed to do?
Trouble is that Google aren't going great guns with software - Android is a total mess, so them dabbling in hardware doesn't feel like it will end well.
The only people who did a good job of hardware/software combinations were Blackberry (pretty much extinct because they took too long to get BB10 out and by then the ship had sailed on apps) and Apple (who are doing a better job on quality of hardware than specification/features now) and the software is often questionable - lack of choice, option, control etc, but have the app support in spades.
Google makes a big deal about the Google Play Store being required as part of the certification process, yet can't be arsed to have the app store vetted for quality and malware-free content. Morons.
"I note that a certain section of our little congregation here at El Reg post regularly claiming that Win 10 is destroying the pc-market. I wonder what their explanation is for condition of the tablet and smartmobe markets?"
Probably the fact that Google, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that being able to save to a device's external SD card (and thereby do useful work on it) is somehow a "security risk". The fact that the Android OS even has such a setting is to my mind idiotic; but to have it enabled by default, and locked so that the end user cannot correct it (short of rooting the device), makes less sense than deliberately trying for a Darwin Award. You couldn't make it up.
I know from experience (my first tablet was a Nexus 7) that it is not safe to buy a tablet which lacks an SD card slot, for any data saved to internal memory since you last backed-up the device is lost forever; and the other choices are to contend with the real security risk of cloud storage (not to mention the waste of internet connectivity; we don't all have so-called "unlimited" data) or to ignore Google's paranoia and decide to use my device in my way, not theirs. Even if there is some kind of risk in saving to an SD card, to my mind it's much less than the risks of the other two approaches, as outlined above.
"Probably the fact that Google, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that being able to save to a device's external SD card (and thereby do useful work on it) is somehow a "security risk". The fact that the Android OS even has such a setting is to my mind idiotic; but to have it enabled by default, and locked so that the end user cannot correct it (short of rooting the device), makes less sense than deliberately trying for a Darwin Award. You couldn't make it up."
And I heartily agree with you.
My current device, a Huawei T1-701U mediapad allows me the luxury to use my SD-card as storage, but if I upgrade my OS on that, I will not have that luxury anymore.
That is the reason why I prefer a device with SD-card capability as you can store your data on the card. Device crashed/bricked solid? No fear, pop out the SD-card, pop it into another device and it is business as usual.
SD card getting full? No sweat, procure a bigger one, copy all data over from old to new, and continue as usual.
Any iThing? Sorry, you're out of luck. It is either upgrading (expensively) to any unit with larger internal storage or employing cloud storage (with additional $$$ expenses)
Oh, by the way, I'm not in the mood to, neither do I have the funds available to, pay for extra $$$ expenses for cloud storage just to enable me to store more private documents/pictures/etc in the cloud (aka somebody else's computer). Any beancounter worth his salt will tell you that unnecessary overheads will continue to eat at your bottom line.
So, give me a device with the ability to put all my apps and data on SD card, and I will use that product/device for a long time, thankyouverymuch.
"You're storing important stuff on (single) SD-card storage? Remind me how reliable that is, especially long-term, again??"
As opposed to the renowned superb reliability of relying on the device's internal storage, or on cloud storage (read: somebody else's computer)?
As I already said, my first tablet was a Nexus 7 (no SD card slot and I didn't even have the option of cloud storage back then), and I lost several months' data when it failed without warning. Never again.
As for cloud storage, I had already learned the hard way that one cannot trust a third party to store data; what if they go bust, or decide without warning that they no longer want to keep your stuff? (Both of which have happened to me.) Many a web site has been lost forever because the owner made the mistake of editing it online, instead of editing it on their computer and uploading the changes, which is what I did when I had a site.
While I agree with your premise there is one thing wrong about iDevices
You don't have to use iCloud to back up your device. you can do it using iTunes.
Yes I know that iTunes is the sign of the devil but it can be used (provided you scatter the runes in the right way) to backup your iDevice. This saved my other half when her iPhone went through the washer. She backed it up to iTunes the day befofe.
As for Google, don't they want to collect everything you do right down to the smallest detail inorder to feed the insatiable appetite of their AI?
We all know about Slurp (aka Microsoft) sending data to all sorts of MS Owned IP addresses even if the IP is blocked in the hosts file, has Google followed suit with their latest OS?
It would be interesting to know.
If Alphabet has not done this the they could get a lot of Kudos by telling the world.
"Probably the fact that Google, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that being able to save to a device's external SD card (and thereby do useful work on it) is somehow a "security risk".
...the same google that doesn't have good security for android and still allows any old person to install any old crap on the Google Play Store. Thanks for helping us with that SD card risk though folks!
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