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Comment by joeguilmette | Hacker News Reader

80-90% of computer users never leave the browser. The tablet will take over. Everything except power users will be using tablets in 5 years.

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Assuming you count iTunes and Microsoft Office as part of the browser, which isn't really that much of a stretch. (However, he iTunes Store is a browser (possibly still using their proprietary/strange markup language), and for many (if not most) tasks Google Docs or Microsoft's offering is good enough.)

And you can open .docs on iPad very very easily and edit them with an app that costs 1/10th of MS Office, if not for free with Google Docs.

That seems a bit too optimistic (pessimistic?) to me. I would predict that more than two-thirds of households will have a tablet in five years. I can see tablets replacing kitchen or living room laptops that have become so common in the last years, I can’t see them replacing the office PC, at least not in five years. PCs (~ $800) and tablets (~ $500) are cheap enough to co-exist. I don’t think it was that long ago when you paid $1300 for one desktop PC.

I think a $199 wifi iPad 1 is a few months away. The user experience on such a device will knock the socks off a similarly priced net book.

I believe you're right about the desktop in the office though. The fact that XP is still commonplace in offices goes to show the staying power of the form factor in that setting. I mean, the design of most cubicle farms alone is more suited for desktops than tablets.

I assume you (reasonably) count webmail as "not leaving the browser". Typing emails (or Facebook messages or whatever) is much more pleasant on a real keyboard than on a virtual touch-screen keyboard. Seems unlikely people are going to give up typing in droves.

What does seem quite plausible is tablet + peripherals - the tablet basically assuming the role of the old mini-tower computer, angled upright on a stand for desktop use, with keyboard and mouse hanging off it. (In fact if you also hung a monitor off it there's no reason you couldn't do that with a regular phone.) I think tablet + dock + keyboard may well become a popular home computer setup in the next few years.

Almost every single Facebook comment and status update made in the past two years has been from an iPhone or iPad. Every comment made in this thread has been from my iPad.

Almost all of my email is sent from my iPad, and I write a lot of email. I send vastly more email from iOS than OSX/XP/W7. I use all four operating systems between my personal and work machines, and prefer iOS for almost all tasks.

Touchscreen typing is weird at first, but, just like using a physical keyboard you start slow and eventually become proficient and comfortable.

80-90% of websites use keyboard as an input mechanism.

I'm not seeing why a tablet is so massively better than a netbook/laptop.

What's your source for that statistic? Or did you just make it up?

96% of statistics are made up.

Actually, that's 93%.

A lot of people were not seeing that, which is probably why Apple was able to launch a 10" $500 tablet without any competitors in the market.

It's still a rich persons toy though, or bought as an additional computer rather than to replace something else.

I don't see it going mainstream, or replacing laptops.

How much input do you actually do on these websites? Facebook, for a major example, is just a sentence or two for each status update, and a word or two for the chat messages.

a laptop isn't the way it is just to house a keyboard. It's that way so you can sit it on your lap with the screen positioned to view it.

I'm not gonna hold a tablet in my hands while I try and use it.

(I spend the vast majority of my time sat on a sofa with a laptop).

Funny, I spend the majority of my time on the couch using an iPad (and happily tapping away on my lap, if I have to use the keyboard, which I usually don't).

That sounds like a really bad position for your neck - staring down at your lap.

http://www.goincase.com/ipad/

Removing the abstraction of a pointing device and interacting directly with the GUI is a big deal. If you watch most people use a computer they spend the vast majority of their time tracking a pointing device and occasionally typing some text. Laptops are designed around the idea that most users are going to spend the vast majority of their time entering text and occasionally using a pointing device to track on-screen. Of course for some people this is perfectly appropriate because they do spend the vast majority of their time entering text.

So just make more touchscreen laptops.

A tablet is just irritating because it cant stand up on its own.

I've got a touchscreen laptop. It lets my 3-year old muck around with Tux Paint and educational Flash games but it's not much more useful than that. You'd really need both a transformable hardware setup, and two entirely different UI paradigms for it to make sense. And it would still be hard to compete with a netbook plus a tablet for most folks.

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