The Future of Computing is … a Tablet? (Premium)

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad in 2010, he prematurely declared it the beginning of the so-called “post-PC era,” a claim that was met by laughter or polite applause depending on the audience. Regardless of where you stand on the PC vs. tablet debate, the intervening years haven't been kind to Jobs’ prognostication. Yes, the iPad went on to dominate the tablet market, but tablet sales have always trailed those of PCs by a wide margin. And the iPad, like the PC, experienced a several-years-long sales drop-off before rebounding, like the PC, during the pandemic.

What Jobs and Apple accomplished with the iPad is still impressive, of course: they created an enduring market for touch-based, consumption-focused tablets, and in recent years, it’s even made inroads in content creation. And while Amazon, Google, Samsung, and other Android hardware makers rose to the challenge, none of them ever created a tablet business as strong and vibrant as that of the iPad.

As Android’s maker, Google has been involved with tablets both directly and indirectly. It fielded its first Android tablet, the well-regarded Nexus 7, in 2012, just two years after its first Nexus-branded smartphone, and alongside the full-sized Nexus 10. And then it followed up those releases with a new Nexus 7 in 2013 and a Nexus 9 in 2014. And with the Pixel C in 2015, one year before Google’s first Pixel-branded smartphones.

Full-sized Android tablets like the Nexus 10, Nexus 9, and Pixel C were never successful because Android developers, for whatever reason, never broadly embraced tailoring their apps for the larger form factors. Meaning that most Android apps were designed for handsets only and simply appear larger and stretched out on bigger displays. By comparison, Apple’s developer embraced immediately the iPad and its unique features, and the library of iPad-specific apps has been large and of high quality almost from the beginning.

And so Google switched strategies. In 2014, it began adding Android app compatibility to Chrome OS, its web-based desktop OS for Chromebook laptops (and less popular desktop-class PCs). This, combined with the introduction of the Google Play Store for Android and Linux in 2016, fleshed out this once-limited platform, making it more of a direct competitor with Windows and the Mac.

And then the messaging changed: users who wanted Android on a tablet or other larger portable device were advised to get a Chromebook. And Google released its own Chromebook tablet convertible, the Pixel Slate, in 2018, seeking to take on the Microsoft Surface Pro and other PC convertibles and tablets. The Pixel Slate---like the Nexus 10, Nexus 9, and Pixel C---quickly failed, however, and Google canceled plans for two follow-ups, leaving its strategy for Android on larger devices in tatters. A year later, Google released an inexpensive traditional Chromebook, the Pixelbook Go, leading to even more questions.

Then the pandemic happened. Goo...