Tablets Will Take Over

The thing to remember about this story is he's an officer of a major corporation. He's not coding all day. He's checking his calendar, reviewing documents prepared for him by other people, sending brief responses to hundreds of email messages, etc. He's basically the best case primary use scenario I can think of.

"The thing to remember about this story is he's an officer of a major corporation. He's not coding all day. He's checking his calendar, reviewing documents prepared for him by other people, sending brief responses to hundreds of email messages, etc. He's basically the best case primary use scenario I can think of."

I ain't coding, (though I do script.) I read/write my calendar. I browse the web. I read/write email. I write documents.

My own use case scenario would regard replacing a laptop with a tablet as my prime device as disastrous for all of those purposes.

You also have to look at this from your history of use. I find myself still preferring my iMac or Air for most computing tasks, versus the iPad. Like Michael, I use it mainly for reading or playing games. Over lunch today, I did read a couple of e-mails, and a column linked from an e-mail, but that's more of a rarity for me.

Contrast that with my eight year-old, who uses the iPad for just about everything (not that he has an e-mail account that he uses, or a calendar, contacts, et al), as opposed to the Macs in the house. I think the tablets will become the de facto main system for the younger generations.

"Contrast that with my eight year-old, who uses the iPad for just about everything (not that he has an e-mail account that he uses, or a calendar, contacts, et al), as opposed to the Macs in the house. I think the tablets will become the de facto main system for the younger generations."

Well, your eight year old probably likes candy and fart jokes more than you do too. But those tastes may not not hold for your eight year old as adulthood takes hold.

I have no problem with the concept that tablets are here to stay, and that they'll keep selling like hotcakes. They're nice toys with a larger potential market than work machines. But that's a different matter than what you are positing.

Chucky,

CEOs of major corporations don't script. They don't "write documents." They review documents, attend meetings, and make strategic decisions. I don't know you, but I suspect your work day is not like Tim Cooks'. Which is why the iPad is less useful to you - you need to generate text. That's all I'm saying. It may be great for "work" if the work you do mainly involves reviewing other people's work, but if you have to create stuff it's got limits.

We spend a lot of time reviewing documents and then adding notes, meta data, filing them away, and perhaps sharing them. At least I do. The iPad (and iOS more generally) has been great for me as a professor. We're going to have poorly formatted for tablet PDFs of old journal articles for a long time. To me, the iPad handles those as well as any other device though perhaps some would prefer a big desktop display. The iPad is also great for grading and editing papers. It's wonderful in a seminar and okay in a lecture hall. I need to be at my desk for statistical research and coding, but that's it.