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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the reason for the empty space just because it’s a tablet — by which I mean that the dimensions are determined by a large screen? Phones are dense inside because they have to be small.

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I mean, if you have space left over you could just pack it with more battery? For example if we look at the iPad [0], there is some empty space inside, but mostly it's all battery.

[0] https://youtu.be/uCYUZQGjm8I?si=D-fpaRSSCkbOdReo&t=75

Might as well keep it cheap, though

You could, but that adds weight and cost.

The basic iPad costs $449 and the Pixel Tablet costs $499. The iPad weighs less than the Pixel tablet, 477g to 493g. The iPad battery is 28.6Wh and the Pixel Tablet has a 27Wh battery. I don't particularly care that the insides are 'emptier' in the Pixel Tablet, but to say they didn't do something because of weight or cost doesn't really appear to have any bearing considering it's the heavier, more expensive tablet.

>but to say they didn't do something because of weight or cost doesn't really appear to have any bearing considering it's the heavier, more expensive tablet.

So they should have made it heavier and more expensive? I don't understand your argument.

And what am I paying for, an empty shell?

You're paying for a tablet based on the utility that it gives you. If we could shrink every component except for the screen down to the size of a pin head, then, yeah, you'd be paying for a mostly empty shell, and that's not a problem in the slightest.

the amount of stuff you cram in also affects the weight (as well as the price)

^^^ I don't understand how's that sentence controversial or rude

I mean, what's the difference of how you distribute empty space in a product, either having a few high density components and empty space visible by naked eye, or using less dense material where empty space is between molecules

what is 'less dense' component, is the battery full of air?

No, my point is that the battery has the density it has.

I mean, you have a weigh budget, you have cost budget, you have a width/height budget, you also have a thickness budget chosen for many reason including the material the case is made of (which is determined by your cost budget); you take all those things into account and if it turns out your component have the density they have, it may just happen that you have some free space in the box.

The fact that a competitor's product doesn't have as much empty space in the case must come down to them having a different tradeoff in some of those design dimensions.

by that logic there is no such thing as bad product, they just took different tradeoffs.

there are different ways a product can be bad:

1. it could have had good requirements but badly executed 2. the chosen requirements could be bad and despite flawless execution the product is crap

I just think that the quantity of empty space inside of the encasement, is not a reason to label something a bad product. It makes no difference to the end user except for the "feeling" that something could have been added to it. But as I said, the moment you add something into that empty space you make the device heavier and thus perhaps you turn an otherwise good product into a bad product because it's too heavy.

Cooling.

In most tablets the extra space is filled with more battery, better cooling, bigger speakers, SD card slot, more ports… lots of possibilities.

Here’s what the inside of a 2020 iPad Air (10.9”) looks like for example. Still a little empty space, but much more full. https://i.ibb.co/hRKhPRP/IMG-2853.jpg

And an iPad Air costs between $600 and $800. If you want to hit a lower price point, it makes sense to just put less stuff inside. "The case isn't full" is not a metric that anyone should give a whit about, as long as the size of the case is determined by other factors (in this case, the dimensions of the screen).

At lower price points I’d probably be looking for a smaller tablet where the battery is better matched with the screen size so battery life isn’t terrible.

The OG IPad: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Image/meta/y5HAM4cflO64B3QH

And that was in 2010, before they knew if the product category was going to work or not, which is a better use case for tossing mismatched off the shelf parts into a chassis. After tablets proved themselves a viable market, iPad parts became more custom-designed and closely fit together.

But it's Apple so it's perfect!

The iPad's aluminum-alloy case probably conducts heat much better than the Pixel Tablet's plastic case. For all we know, the designers of the latter left voids around the components to improve thermal management.

That's not what the inside of a good tablet looks like though right?

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but: I bought a Pixel Tablet. It is good. The speaker/charger thing actually pretty useful (I have it on my desk as another screen, sound is decent).

I've owned a few Android tablets. This has been the best. They never feel as good as an iPad, but that's normal; hard to beat Apple there. But I have no desire to get back into the Apple ecosystem, I now actively avoid it.

The frustrating thing is that Google has made a tablet that had iPad-level or very close fit and finish, and that was the Pixel C. I had one. It felt nice to use. The problem with that tablet is that the software was awful, causing issues with accidental touch rejection, WiFi flakiness, somewhat frequent hard crashing, etc.

They had the hardware, all they had to do was fix the software. Instead they quit making Android tablets until the subject of this article was released.

The reason that Pixel C was so uncharacteristically good for a google tablet is that the usual suspects in the Android team had basically no part in designing it and making it. It was a ChromeOS team project meant to run ChromeOS, until the 11th hour when an edict forced it to run android. This can be seen in many ways, including in the way it boots, the existence of the standard chrome ec, etc...

>Instead they quit making Android tablets until the subject of this article was released.

Which is why I jumped on the Pixel Tablet when it came out. The Android tablet scene kinda sucks. I guess the Samsungs are good, but I'm not interested in their custom OS bloat and they're also pricey.

Again, the iPad is still the king here, no doubt. But this tablet is the best Android one I've used.

This question strikes me as bizarre. What is the causal relationship between the goodness of a tablet and what its inside looks like?

imagine someone wrote something this silly abour a car - "what is the casual relatio ship between how the performance of the car and what it looks lile under the whood? So what if the engine is a mess, surely thst does not affect how it drives"?

I opened up the hood of a car once and there was loads of empty space inside there. Why are they not filling up every cubic inch of the engine compartment with more pistons, or making the compartment water-tight and then filling it with even more petrol to increase the car’s range? Admittedly I don’t know a single thing about car design, but surely all of that empty space is an indicator of poor design right?

Have you seen an engine compartment of the Tesla? It's empty! So much empty space. Am I paying for this space? Oh no!

There's nothing that's a mess about the inside of this tablet, it's just not filled to the brim with stuff that it doesn't need. That's normal, good design.

Well, no, but how would a good tablet bring them a large enough increase in ad revenue to make it worth the investment? That’s what the difference in business models naturally leads to, right? There’s no indication that Google is trying to change what kind of company they are, is there?

Exactly.

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