Tim Cook reckons that the iPad Pro is the final nail in the PC's coffin | TechRadar
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... in-1308597



'No no, I prefer to drive myself mental by not having tactile feedback while typing up a report that has it's own postcode.'

If you separate PC users into two parts. The first part being the "power users" like developers, gamers, designers... "Tech people" in general. The second part being people who want a PC to access the Internet, emails, Facebook, etc...

The second part is a much much bigger section and it is those people for whom something like an iPad or other tablet will be perfect for.

There will always be a desire for PCs from the power users.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

TBH i tend to find it easier on a PC or laptop than a tablet or smartphone the majority of the time. I tried to order a pizza through the Pizza Hut website and my ipad seemed to struggle with the site. I ended up resorting to firing up the laptop to order.

For general browsing, tablets and smartphones are very handy and this is where their strength lies.

The honest truth is Ultrabooks will get so cheap and so thin there will be little reason not to have a fully-fledged laptop over a tablet, unless storage capacities dramatically improve for tablets. But it's a few years off yet.

I don't think storage is going to be an issue. More and more it is not an issue. The music I listen to is streamed. The photos I look at are all stored online. The videos I watch are all streamed etc... All without having to know how to do anything than search for a song or take a picture.

Especially with Internet becoming "unlimited" more and more.

I agree with CW about the websites though. There are some sites out there that seem to be made to not work on any mobile browser.

Makes me wonder whether there is a Pizza Hut app and how easy (comparatively) it would be to download and use that?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Fair enough, but mainstream we're not

If Apple didn't sync a lot of people would lose files quite often - in fact they still do!

There is probably a percentage of the population where a high spec tablet is entirely capable of fulfilling their computing needs. The most recent generation of tablets actually have a roughly equivalent spec in terms of CPU, GPU and RAM to a mid range laptop. The bare fact is though that tablet is still going to be £100-£200 more expensive than that laptop, so we're not there quite yet. Another couple of years? Very possibly.

I don't think what he's said is ludicrous. I think it's 'within the bounds of acceptability' which is probably enough of an excuse when you're pushing your new product to the press. He's not required to be objective, after all.

For people who work with information, a small screen, be it a laptop or tablet is never going to be big enough.

And if you spend all day entering data, then you want a real keyboard and a decent sized screen ergonomically placed.

That is the biggest problem with tablets (and notebooks), the screen cannot be ergonomically placed. With the notebook, at least it is usually in front of you and far enough away, but you are usually still looking down at it, which isn't good for your neck. With a tablet, if you had to hold that up at eye level and hold it far enough away to be comfortable for the eyes, you would be suffering from strained arm muscles within minutes.

Me, I use a tablet, but a Surface Pro 3. It is great for when I am on the move, but I spend a majority of my time in the office and there it is connected to a docking station, 2 external 24" monitors, a headset for the telephone software and a proper, ergonomic keyboard and mouse.

Likewise, most of our customers work on production lines. There a traditional PC is of about as much use as a tablet. Here we have been supplying touch screen industrial PCs for well over a decade. A tablet wouldn't last 5 minutes, if you could operate it at all. The industrial PCs are in a stainless steel casing, which is IP69K certified (high pressure steam jets from all angles). They spent their day being coated in fat, blood and meat; they are often operated using chainmail gloves or with the point of a knife. At night, once the shift is over, they are washed down with high pressure cleaners and abrasive chemicals.

A tablet won't stand up to that sort of treatment. And if you are going to have to mount it on the wall, because you need both hand to do your work, then there isn't any point in have the portability of a tablet. Plus there is usually so much steel around the slaughter room, that you will never be able to adequately and reliably distribute a wireles networking environment, so you will be stuck with having to use some sort of dongle to get it connected to the ethernet network.

Give me a real keyboard any day.

I think he's over reaching a bit.

From my perspective, Apples biggest stumbling block is still their itunes/ios ecosystem. Despite having had two iphones and an ipad, it drove me away. I don't use any Apple devices now, especially since Android devices started using Jellybean and newer.

Even if that was not the case, it's still a far cry from using a conventional PC or laptop.

I like real keyboards, but even those days are numbered. Apple already do a trackpad that has no moving parts - it used a haptic engine to provide a feeling of a click. A keyboard which is a solid entity which uses haptics to give the impression of being pressed is likely the next development of that.

There's nothing stopping you connecting a 'real keyboard' to an tablet. Arguably then it's not a tablet any more of course.

Blackberry had that back in 2008/2009 on their touchscreen smartphone. Didn't sell well though.

Not entirely sure about this - the travel of a key is not simply about haptic feedback, it's also about the mechanical process of pressing a key. It's about 'damping' the act of striking something with the end of your finger.

A while back there seemed to be a lot of noise about laser 'projected keyboards' that allowed you to type on pretty much any flat surface. But of course such a keyboard would likely have zero travel, as to the virtual keyboards on tablets. I tried one and had to stop after about ten minutes as my fingers were hurting - there was nothing to damp the act of striking a solid surface with in fact a very sensitive part of my anatomy.

Give it a try if you like - close your eyes and just try typing gibberish on a table or something. See how long you can last before you have to stop.

The current apple keyboards are probably about the bare minimum of travel it's possible to type on from a purely ergonomic point of view. Unless any such 'haptic keyboard' was made of a soft material with some give in it, I don't think it'd succeed. And if it has some give in it anyway, you're pretty much back to a mechanical keyboard in some form..

Haptic keyboards are ok for "hunt & peck" typists but I would argue a fair number of people who are fairly fluid, if not touch, typists, will prefer the feedback from a proper "mechanical" keyboard. I not limiting that to mechanical switch keyboards - even bog standard rubber domes offer immeasurably more feedback than a flat surface.