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Comment by steego | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to go back that far. In 2007-2008, I remember polling friends and coworkers about smart phones. Just as you suggest, most said they were fine without it and didn't want to carry around a computer.

I'd just read Kurzweil's book and I remember saying they'll probably have one by 2010-2011 because smart phones will be the free phones by then. I was right for one simple reason: Most people tend to dismiss new tech right up to when it stops becoming a luxury item. As soon as people find value in something and they can afford it, adoption is practically inevitable.

I hope my self driving car has a nice sleeper option so I can take long road trips and wake up at my destination.

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And in the same vein, "who on earth is going to buy a tablet"? The iPad is going to be a dud. Nobody needs or wants tablets.

People don't know what they want, so we'll make them want it.

I was under the impression iPad sales were dropping.

iPad sales may be dropping for any number of reasons. The number of tablets in the average home is climbing, regardless.

You are correct [0]. For both iPad's and general tablet sales [1].

Of course this does not confirm that tablets are falling out of favour - they could simply have reached their saturation point. Does anybody know if saturation sales are expected to look like this normalish (gaussianish) graph?

[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/269915/global-apple-ipad-...

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/272070/global-tablet-ship...

Yup. That looks like the first derivative of bounded growth. The integral of that graph would look like a logistic function [1]. It's often used to model population growth.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

Clearly tablet sales performed better than critics expected, but they never matched the phone because owning a phone significantly diminishes the value proposition of a tablet. Sales may get better as manufacturers figure out new ways to add value for the consumer or to successfully absorb the PC market.

> In 2007-2008, I remember polling friends and coworkers about smart phones. Just as you suggest, most said they were fine without it and didn't want to carry around a computer.

things changed when a computer appeared that people really liked to carry. The same wait is here - for the iPhone of autonomous cars. What right now drives around in Mountain View seems to be more like HP Treo.

You really think people will prefer driving themselves to work rather than kicking back and doing whatever they fancy on the way? Driving a long distance? Punch in the destination and get some sleep, glorious

This does not need any shiny packaging to be a no brainer. It's a drop dead delicious invention.

That some even entertain the notion that they don't want one goes to show how clueless people are. They are just saying what they think everyone else thinks, without engaging thier brain.

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