Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I tried to find the data but I could not, but I wonder, what did blender sales look like 15 years after their invention? 40 years? I picked blender because it is a useful appliance that it seems most people have one of today, and some people have had the same one for 30+ years (like my parents).

My point is, I wonder if this is just the typical performance of an appliance -- at first there is a lot of innovation and sales growth, and then it slows down as there just aren't that many new features to add and everyone has one.

View on HN

Anecdotally, I find this to be pretty true. I would probably still be using my old 2012 Nexus 7 if the combination of flaky storage hardware and Android updates hadn't caused it to die a slow painful death.

Offtopic: All this talk of tablets and blenders reminded me of this http://www.cc.com/video-clips/iymjih/the-colbert-report-step...

Unless my 2013 Nexus 7 has a hardware problem I don't see any reason to replace it. It's really hard to imagine a compelling reason to upgrade from today's crop of tablets.

I agree, and I appreciate the analogy. Like a blender, people know what a tablet does, what it is good for, and how to compare models. They also know what a tablet doesn't do - they're certainly not the desktop/laptop replacement they were supposed to be - and at this point, that's fine. A blender isn't going to cook a steak, an iPad isn't going to run Visual Studio.

It's probably mostly replacements and upgrades at this point, that graph is the graph of a maturing market.

Innovation in blender space :

Smoothie makers : dedicated to crushing frozen produce to make drinks

Vitamix : so powerful it cooks your food, vegetables in - hot soup out

Nutriblend types : blend and walk without changing container

Handheld blenders : blend right in the pan

You forgot the magic bullet. Sold like hot cakes.

Funny that you should choose a blender for the analogy.

Many other things that could be used for an analogy have been absorbed into the converged device that is a tablet or a phone or a proper PC or even a console.

Because of this there are not a lot of analogies left. However, I think the mountain bike is perhaps a better analogy, with 'off road' being no keyboard/mouse. In the early 90's mountain bikes sold like hot cakes, people would upgrade to the latest model (with even more gears) and eventually every able-bodied person had some lame MTB that was fairly useless on paved roads and not really that great off-road.

Eventually people came to their senses and the realised a normal road bike or a 'hybrid' bike would actually be better for going from A to B (rather than some mountain they never really needed to get to). The mountain bike market didn't die, it just evolved to what we have now, with most so-called mountain bikes being cheap junk - 'bicycle shaped objects'. Despite the plethora of such rubbish there is a smaller market for 'proper' mountain bikes that is doing fine, an established market. However, there was a time - decades ago - when many bicycle shops could not give road bikes away, every sale was for a mountain bike. At least the tablet craze never got so mad that all other devices where blotted out of the market.

I think the main issue here is that they're competing with phones and the main differentiating factor is size, I can't think of anything I'm comfortable doing on my phone but not on my tablet. Most people would rather use one device than two. Android phones have long been available in larger sizes, iOS ones have since the latest update. Perhaps a natural result of larger phones is fewer tablet purchases.

That's how I feel with smartphones. I've skipped the last 2 generations of Nexus phones (although I had to go back and buy a Nexus 6 to use Google Fi) simply because it works well enough for me and there are no new hardware features that I care about.

I don't plan on upgrading until my phone starts to become a hindrance.

I feel different about my phone because I use it so much. Outside of my desktop at work it may be the single most used item I own. Given that I spend so much time on it, I want it to be good. I want the screen to be nice, I want it to be fast, I want it to have the apps I want when I want them, etc...

Whereas for a tablet, I rarely use ours. It really has turned out to be a replacement for our son's portable DVD player on long trips.

I have an S4. I'd consider an S5 if I could nab one for like $150, just to hate slightly better hardware, and possibly stock 6.0 since the S4 won't get it and Cyanogenmod is always a PITA to keep working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com