The Trouble with Tablets

For the past several years, I’ve had an uneasy relationship with tablets, and I think I’ve finally figured out why: Tablets are an imperfect solution to a problem that few people actually have. And I don’t know why we keep trying to pretend otherwise.

As is often the case these days, this is all Apple’s fault.

When Steve Jobs announced the original iPad, he tried to justify the reasons that Apple made the thing. “All of us use laptops and smartphones now,” he said from the stage in early 2010. “And the question has arisen, lately: Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone.”

That sounds like a reasonable question on the surface. But read that again. The question has … arisen? That’s a curious choice of words. One naturally wonders where, and in what situations, has that question has arisen? Who exactly was asking for such a thing?

What’s interesting about the iPad is that it was the first major Apple product of the Jobs era to come into being simply because it could. Yes, it was initially successful because of the iPhone halo, but Apple customers have famously purchased virtually everything that this company produces. But then sales nosedived—not slowed, but fell, and dramatically—and have for almost three years now. And Apple was forced to copy its competitors and create mini-tablets (the iPad mini) and productivity 2-in-1s (the iPad Pro) just to slow the pace of the fall.

Apple says the shortfall is because this is a new product category and that they’re just now learning that the replacement cycle is longer than originally expected. I’m sure that’s true, but it’s only part of the story. What we’ve also learned is that the rough market size of the tablet is limited in scope. It’s smaller than that of the PC—which you’ll recall many believe is “dead”—and much smaller than that of the smartphone.

Size is … whatever. The tablet market is certainly bigger than that of smart watches, another Apple boondoggle. And it’s bigger than that for video game consoles, too. It’s possible to make money, even good money, in such markets. So it’s not just about the size. It’s about thepurpose, the intent of these devices.

So back we go to that original iPad launch. After introducing the concept of an in-between device, Jobs explained the iPad’s raison d’être, using an interesting list that anyone will instantly realize came to being long after the product was in fact conceived: The iPad should be far better than both the laptop and smartphone at some key tasks, Jobs said: Browsing the web, email, enjoy and sharing photos, watching videos, enjoying music, playing games, and reading eBooks.

With the arguable exception of email, which can be both sent and received, all of these tasks are what we now call consumptionactivities, as opposed to the creation activities that many of us still use PCs for. That is, writing, number crunching, presentation creation, email creation and replying, photo and video editing, and the like is still far more efficient on PCs than on tablets. And some advanced tasks—like software development—can occur only on the PC.

In 2010, Jobs bristled at this assessment because it was true. He had ensured that Apple had its own productivity suite, called iWork, ready to debunk the naysayers, but it was mostly terrible. Credit Microsoft, in its own fit of genius, for later embracing the iPad and the tablet wholeheartedly as part of its “mobile first, cloud first” campaign, providing reasonable Office apps to the platform’s users. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. As I think most would agree, the iPad and all other tablets are still very much “consumption first, creation second” devices. And the consumption bit is a much bigger piece of the usage pie. (Just like the cloud part of Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” mantra is dominant by a wide margin.) These devices are simply more efficient when used to enjoy content than when used to create it. The PC, of course, is the opposite.

The problem for tablets, as I see it, is two-fold.

First, a physically larger generation of phablet-type smartphones emerged—sorry, “has arisen”—and snubbed out the tablet’s primary niche. Most people would rather have a single device that does everything, and a phone, unlike a tablet, is necessary. People need a phone. They do not need a tablet. (For the most part.)

Second, and this is where I’m going to lose some people, is that tablets actually kind of suck even at their primary purpose. I mean, forget about the nightmare of trying to be productive with a tablet if your job requires anything more than light emailing. Tablets aren’t even that good at reading, watching videos, or doing most of those other tasks that Jobs outlined in early 2010.

And to be clear, I’ve tried ’em all. And to this day, literally, I still struggle with the glaring mediocrity of tablets.

What I’m looking for is simple, and I think this mirrors most people’s expectations of tablets. I want something that is thin and light, and will disappear into my bag without me noticing the bulk or weight.

But I also want something that is affordable, reliable, and offers great performance and great battery life.

I want a device on which I can read—not just eBooks, but everything: digital magazines and newspapers, graphic novels, saved blog posts, whatever—and watch movies and TV shows, and I want both experiences to be top-notch.

I want to be able to triage my email using the same app I use on the PC and phone, I want to browse the web, and I want to keep up on the social networks to which I belong.

I want, I want, I want. But … why shouldn’t I have demands? I’m the consumer, after all, the person who has to spend many hundreds of dollars on an item that only partially achieves my wants, and does so pretty poorly across the board.

Too, there are things I’m not personally looking for, but I understand that others might. Games, for example. The ability to organize photos that were taken with a smartphone. And so on. But tablets suck at almost all of those things too.

Not consistently, of course. And that’s why tablets really suck: There’s no one tablet that can do it all. No one tablet that excels at everything, or at least at most things, and does so at a price anyone reasonable would call reasonable.

For example, the best (electronic) reading experience you can have today is an Amazon Kindle (or equivalent) with a high-DPI e-ink display. But that assumes two things: You’re just reading text, and the content you want is available on an e-reader. Today, books are a great experience on such devices, but only books. If you want that other content—digital magazines and newspapers, graphic novels, saved blog posts, and so on—sorry. You’ll need another device in most cases.

That other device could be an iPad of some kind (expensive) or an Android tablet (crappy), whichever, with the Kindle app. The Kindle app will let you read all the content that Amazon’s e-readers can’t, but it comes with the flaws of the platforms on which it runs. The bright light emitted by tablet screens is jarring to your eyes, and studies suggest that reading this way disrupts sleep. Tablet makers have responded by limiting the amount of blue light the devices emit at night, but it’s no cure: My eyes still hurt when reading on these devices at night, and with the brightness down.

(The Kindle app for Windows will not work with most non-book content as it’s years out of date. It’s a non-starter.)

A tablet that is oriented to reading—like an iPad, with a 4:3 screen—is lackluster for watching videos, which are usually recorded at 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios. And these devices, especially Apple’s, usually just have a single speaker on one side of the device, making stereo sound a distant memory. (That is changing on some newer devices, finally.)

Tablets are too expensive. The cheapest new iPad, the iPad mini 4, costs $400 for an unusable version with just 16 GB of storage, so $500 and up, really, for 32 GB. (If you don’t mind performance issues, you can try the years-old iPad mini 2, which starts at $270, or $320 for the more viable 32 GB version. That’s what I’m stuck with right now—I have a 16 GB version—and I want to chuck it into an incinerator.)

Want an Android tablet? Good luck, as I’m not aware of any that actually work well. The last good Android tablet experience I had was the second- (and last) generation Google Nexus 7, which hit a nice sweet spot in its day. Which was 2013, or three years ago. The Google Nexus 9, meanwhile, sought a sweet spot between the iPad mini and iPad Air, and came up sour: This is among the most dismal of tablets I’ve ever used; even the iPad mini 2 performs better and more consistently. It’s a terrible device, and will not be missed.

But it’s not as terrible as Windows on a tablet. If there is anything more worthless than a Windows tablet, I haven’t seen it. And boy, have I looked.

The best you can say about Windows tablets is that some of them are actually PCs. The Surface Pro 4, for example, and its many copiers, represents a high-water mark of sorts when it comes to PCs that masquerade as tablets. But as actual tablets, these things are terrible, from the utter lack of viable apps (see my comments about Kindle above) to the strangeness that happens when you rotate such a device into portrait mode and have it magically appear to elongate by several inches: Why are these things so awful in portrait mode?

Honestly, who cares? They’re just terrible, and they can be safely ignored. Which, of course, consumers have done: The market for Windows mini-tablets, as I’m sure you noticed, has silently disappeared over the past year. All that’s left are the tablet pretenders, the 2-in-1s that are really just used as laptops. They’re PCs, not tablets. Sometimes they’re even good PCs.

But the issue with tablets isn’t Windows, and these devices are frustrating across the board. They’re a nicety when they meet a need, yes. But they’re mostly a curiosity. Tablets are, to put it simply, unnecessary in most cases.

And don’t get me started on smart watches.