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Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

The interesting conundrum here, as I see it, is that the iPad is losing its purpose.

Before, it was between phones- which were small-- and laptops-- which were big. But the Air is becoming a lot more mainstream, laptops overall are becoming knife thin, and phones are getting bigger.

I think the iPad was meant to replace the PC for most use cases-- e.g. the email, web surfing etc.

and I think it's been somewhat successful at that. But like pcs people don't replace them every year (wheras phones seem to be replaced every 2-2.5 years).

Now with the Apple Watch, the phone has moved up to be more tablet sized, and the new smallest form factor is the watch.

Will the iPad move up and become more like a PC?

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There was a nice article on an Apple blog the other day (don't remember where) that suggested the problem with the iPad is the lack of purpose built software.

I own an iPad 4 and it's pretty rare that I buy iPad only software. Developers just don't seem to make that much even though the markets a pretty decent size. Mostly it's just simple iPhone apps or games that have been scaled up.

The article was suggesting that because theres no trials or demos in the app store, as well as the inability to return things, people are very hesitant to buy at any reasonable price point and those developers are unwilling to put the time and effort in making it that should cost $20 or $30. Since consumers won't pay more than a few dollars high-quality in-depth apps are in short supply.

In the end it means the iPad feels like nothing more than a giant iPhone, and that's basically been my experience. I really would like to see more large fancy apps that would give the iPad its own strong purpose but for whatever reason that's not happening.

The interesting thing is that I have very little need for purpose built software on my iPad. I get by with Mail (or GMail), Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch, and of course most of my usage is Safari, which really could substitute adequately for all of those except Twitch.

Games are really nice on the iPad, but I only play those the few times a year I fly.

This is probably too geeky for Apple to do, but I wish they offered direct video input on their iPads. You'd be able to use them for extra screen space, hobby projects, dedicated views for things like audio production, temporary screens for headless terminals... so many possibilities! (I know there are apps that do that, but they're workarounds at best and have too much latency and/or quality degradation.)

Not sure if this meets your needs, but I find Air Display to be excellent for this purpose. Zero quality degradation, and the latency is less than I expected. Quite usable for most purposes. I grant you're not going to be doing video editing this way...but you could certainly use the iPad for the palettes for the app you're using to do the video editing.

If you project the future of computing by looking at serious hackers, perhaps project the future of reading by looking at the habits of serious readers.

I think the magazine form factor is here to stay. I definitely prefer reading journal articles in PDF or paper over html, and in PDF form, I prefer my iPad to my phone or my daughter's iPad mini. I was just at a friend's house yesterday. He had a similar problem with his smaller droid tablet, and he was showing me his 12" droid that he recently bought to solve this exact same problem of reading journal articles.

On the one hand, I wan to agree with you - just looking at my own situation I just ordered an iPhone 6 plus, and I have a MacBook Air. But I'm not ready to writ off he iPad just yet. It still has a major advantage over the mac - iOS is so much simpler to use for the average user.

If you go back 18 months or so there where a whole slew of articles describing peoples experiences trying to go iPad-only for trips. They all ran into problems caused by the lack of direct access to the file system, making the sharing of content between productivity apps quite difficult.

With the release of ios8, Apple has addressed this problem. In particular, extensions are a potential game changer, making it easy of apps to work together. For the time being I'm holding off on predicting the iPad's demise - I'm going to wait and see how the market responds to these new capabilities in ios8. For now it's an open question as to the iPad's ability to replace a normal computer for many people. Last year the answer was no, this year I'm not sure.

I don't know about that. I went to buy a iphone 6 and realized it would not fit in my jeans pocket very well. Decided to pass for now. Since getting an ipad I hardly use the phone for much more than email, camera and actual phone calls and the laptop is really gathering dust. I would much rather have a smaller phone and a tablet than an over sized phone.

It's interesting because I'm the exact opposite. I had an original ipad before I had a smartphone, used it all the time, but then saw an immediate drop in usage when I got the phone. Now as I've gotten more and more used to the phone over the years, my ipad has really started gathering dust.

There is about 2B Smartphone on earth. And it is still growing.

There is only 1.5B PC, some of these not even active, and some are business usage.

Which means there are still lots of people not exposed to the usage of computing. And iPad is where that fits in. For Grandparents, and in some countries, parents. iPad is ALL they need. To consume and do very very lightweight content creation.

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