Nobody Knows What an iPad Is Good for Anymore

I am in my 30s and the iPad is pretty useful for me as a device that just works and provides access to books, the web and YouTube. Heck, we use it as an awesome remote when we cast YouTube or Netflix to our apple tv, ps3, chromecast, etc.

I have three iPads myself. I use two of them every single day, for work, for entertainment, for study, for the weather, etc.

btw, Apple just announced a record quarter with incredible iPad sales. For whatever reason, Apple has a very odd history with the press. You basically shouldn't bother with any story about Apple unless it comes from Daring Fireball. He's kind of an Apple cheerleader, but he also seems to be the only person in the world who will fact-check a story about Apple before publishing it.

My girlfriend and I keep an iPad plugged into our stereo receiver via an auxiliary cable and use it as a Spotify terminal. My dad's iPad is his primary computing device. It seems like a lot of other people in this thread have similar stories. So, clearly, saying "nobody" knows what an iPad is good for is a little bit of a stretch.

I think it's more accurate to say that tech journalists don't know what an iPad is good for anymore.

The author answers his own question...enterprise. iPads are seeing massive adoption in Architecture Construction and Engineering (Plangrid comes to mind), not to mention medical and insurance practice. Go to any enterprise rent a car and they are using tablets exclusively for contracts with clients.

The consumer/causal user use case may not be there but there is a real need to be able to take a powerful computer with you that has network capabilities, screen sharing/powerpoint display, cameras all without needing to lug around a keyboard and mouse (yes I consider a laptop lugging around).

Especially when you consider power on/off time there is a big difference in use case that makes it perfect for enterprise.

The iPad 2 is still a very good tablet for a lot of people. Not a huge reason to upgrade until it breaks.

Also, nerds might not love it, but my wife adores her Kindle Fire HD and uses it all the time. For recipes, surfing the web, and watching videos, that is all she needs.

The need for a real PC has never gone away for me. A tablet or phone is something I can waste a little bit of time on or use on an airplane. They're great for that, but they're passive devices for consumption, not production.

Real work (anything that requires more than a small amount of input) and even real entertainment (playing a full-sized game, reading/watching longer pieces) is not comfortable for me on a mobile device. It would be a significant compromise to go without a real PC. The efforts to make a tablet act like a computer (like attaching a physical keyboard) don't go nearly far enough to bridge the gap.

For work I split 75%/25% between a PC and Mac, both with multiple large high-resolution monitors, proper keyboards, trackballs and a Wacom tablet. I couldn't imagine coding on an iPad or working on anything serious enough. The closed nature of the platform, with lack of file system access, user accounts, peripheral connectivity and lack of expansion (memory being a key issue) makes the ipad inconvenient at best.

But wait! There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this scenario. I am perfectly happy with what the iPad does for me. Sure, it can't match my 16 core PC with 24gigs of SDRAM, three monitors and five hard drives. It doesn't have to!

Different devices for different uses. And the ipad is great for what I do with it. Ideal? No, of course. Editing text is a pain in the ass, the screen is too small and some websites absolutely suck on it (Please STOP disabling zoom!). The iPad is very useful. I am sure people outside engineering/design might find a lot more use out of it.

(1) http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/27/apple-breaks-its-sales-rec...

(2) http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/ipad/big-screen-ipad-pro-plus...

By all estimations from teachers and students alike, this has been a wonderful tool for teaching and learning.

Now, I don't own any apple products at all, so (having never held an iPad myself) I'm not really sure what they can actually do, so the question "what is this device good for" is one I cannot really answer from personal experience ... but I think in-school work is probably an excellent use-case.

My in laws however, who curse their windows machine when they have to reinstall every year because of unbearable slowness and crap piling up, that is a very different story.

wonder if this is a wider trend or i just have a very self-selected peer group (i'm early 30s). everyone in my social circle is 25-45 and either needs to type very quickly or wants nothing to do with computers or gadgets beyond the basics.

I've had 13" laptops for a decade now (iBook G4 12", MacBook 1st Gen Intel, Lenovo X220), and they were always highly portable and had decent battery life. Along came smartphones with ever increasing screen sizes, leading up to my trusty Note 2.

I've tried a number of tablets. 7" is too similar to my phone. 10" is too close to the laptop. I need a separate bag for it anyway, and it feels about as practical as the laptop at home. I never considered tablets being devices to work on, and I'm that guy who will use his laptop on the couch just because I'm still used to it.

Along came tablets with stylus. Being able to scribble and take notes on a screen just made sense, even if there was no OCR and it's all just bitmaps. I followed suit on the retina jump, switching from a 10" Android Thinkpad Tablet to a Note 10 2014. I have to say, the tablet with stylus is about the best computer I've ever used. I use it to display scores when singing, to draw bitmap sketches when designing, to read PDF and scribble away in it, etc.. LectureNotes is the killer app that made me buy into the whole device class.

Granted I still play Hearthstone on it, I watch Youtube and Twitch, I browse the web and do internet stuffs, but that would never be worth the maintenance effort of owning a separate device between my phone and my laptop. At some point I'd like to try a Windows Tablet, I heard they have better PDF viewers and decent OCR. iOS devices on the other hand feel completely out of place to me nowadays. Phones are nice if impractically small, but tablets are nothing more than beautiful toys, and they're all overpriced by a factor of 4 relative to the use I see in them. They'd be nice as a fourth device, but not as a first or second one.

It just renders text books so perfectly. I have a smart phone, but there's no replacement for that big, 9.7 inch screen. It makes web pages and PDFs so pleasurable to read.

I think the sales have slowed because the upgrade cycle for tablets is similar to the upgrade cycle for computers. I've had my iPad with retina display for over 2 years and, unless it breaks, I don't see a reason to get a new one.

One side effect of having an iPad is that it has allowed me to have a clunkier PC life. I have a workstation set up with a 15inch MacBook, a second monitor, mount, usb hub, keyboard, mouse and the works. I no longer have to worry about its portability because I have my tablet.

I could probably replace the computer and ipad with a macbook, but 1) it would cost more money and 2) wouldn't be as mobile and easy to use as the ipad (for surfing in bed / on the couch, watching movies while eating, listening to music) or as usable as the windows computer (for coding and playing games) because of the smaller screen size and the relatively crappy keyboard / mouse. I could remedy the latter limitations with a docking station, separate monitor and keyboard, but now the solution is not just more expensive but much more expensive and even more cumbersome as compared to the ipad.

I think that if the iPad could serve to bridge the gap between consumption and production, then its place would be clear.

I own a Surface Pro 3 and I adore the ability to switch between consumption and production. However, its presentation and implementation leave a lot to be desired. It's often jarring switching between the clean Windows Store apps that were designed for touch, and the "Desktop" apps that dump you into the familiar, but frustrating, desktop where the mouse and keyboard dominate.

I feel that, if done well, a multipurpose device could supplant the incumbents.

I'm not able to write code or really produce much, but it's a great tool IMO.

I suspect that iPad sales have declined not as a result of the iPhone 6(+), but because the market is becoming saturated. There's little reason to upgrade past a certain point – sure, iPad 1 -> 2, and iPad 2 -> Retina were improvements. But aside from general performance improvements, there haven't been many changes since. In this situation, it's hard to see why most users would upgrade.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/

A great analogy used in the piece (spoiler?) compared PCs to bicycles and tablets and phones to tricycles. Anyone can just hop on a tricycle and go around the block, but you need to learn and practice riding a bicycle. The thing is, you cannot commute to work on a tricycle. The counter argument is that modern smart phones and tablets are closer to 3-wheel recumbent bikes than tricycles.

I found that Third party sync services seemed worked much better than iCloud for me.

It just got too annoying. I couldn't ditch my iPhone, so the iPad had to go.

Perhaps textbook social learning app? Something, native, fast and reliable. So you can do your homework in your study group and have the results to be shared between all people in one place with a textbook.

I think iPad fell short with its textbook software - can someone make a platform. There is the issue of expensive and profitable dead tree textbooks though.

When they first came out they sold like crazy even though we didn't know what they were for.

Finally we are seeing where they can fit in, but it is less than we dreamed, partially supplanted by smartphones and phablets; and came at a significant cost after many failures.

As a result many people have tablets they don't and can't imagine using (myself included), anecdotal evidence that leads to mistaken conclusions.

Of course, it's also a great computer replacement for people who don't do much beyond surf/email/casual-game.

Then again I was never one to sit on a couch and watch tv with a laptop so I figured I was not in the right demographic for an ipad.

>Innovations like automatic transmission

I'd count that (or indeed, tablets) an 'innovation' in the same way as PRISM or systemd. Sure, it is one in that it's new and a different approach and even helps a very specific class of users, but not a net positive. I guess that's just the state of the world though, that we will always be forced to accept 'innovation' that does nothing but make life hard for the power user, the enthusiast, the person with an above-room-temperature IQ.

>had to be “far better” than a phone or a laptop

That's where it gets interesting, I think. As stated above, better than a phone contemporary to its launch, yes, but it was never better than a laptop bar "easier to pick up and carry around", which rarely applied to what are so often sofa-bound devices, or shoved into a backpack on a long journey at most.