I love my iPad mini also. I use it every day. I also have a smart phone and a laptop. I use the phone every day but not the laptop. I used to have a full size iPad, and I used that daily too. But the iPad mini is the perfect size. The full size iPad was too big and heavy. The iPad mini is big enough to make reading and typing easy, much easier than on my iPhone 6S, and yet it’s small enough to be easily portable.
The one beef I have with tablets is that you usually need two hands to hold it for reading. Even with the mini, holding it with one hand isn’t very secure. I solved that by using some 550 paracord. I have a small loop that my thumb goes through to hold the iPad mini securely, and that loop goes through the iPad’s case. It is very secure now, and much easier to hold — secure one-handed holding for reading, freeing the other hand for typing. Or drinking coffee.
Same here! Have a mini and love the thing. It’s kinda perfect for what I need. A tablet would be too much hassle to tote around, the mini is big enough for viewing photos, video and text, but small enough to go everywhere. Can’t beat that!
They’re just stock devices now, nothing to get especially excited about. The next generation will have a nicer screen or more powerful processor but the basic “magic slate” concept hasn’t changed and we’re used to it.
I use my tablet multiple times a day around the house. Alarm clock, morning news reading, bathroom reader, lay on the couch after work and read my web comics, books, movies, web browsing, etc. It’s lighter and easier to position than a laptop and has a larger screen than my phone (I have, and like, a 10" screen). It excels at media consumption which is what I want it for – if I need to make a spreadsheet or type multiple paragraphs, I’ll use my computer but it’s pretty rare that I feel compelled to get up and do so while doing tablet stuff. My younger kid has a tablet and can truck around the house, watching videos or playing games (and games are more fun at 8" than on a 4" phone screen). Easier to put a rubber bumper on an $80 tablet than on a laptop.
In the construction business, it’s very common to see bidding specifications require that we have a current/recent generation iPad available so our project superintendents can pull up plans and documents in the field.
The only times I wish I have a tablet is when I take a flight somewhere. A tablet can be used on a plane more comfortably than a laptop and more ergonomically than a smartphone, and takes up less luggage space. If I’m driving somewhere I may as well just bring my laptop, ditto for when I’m at home re: my desktop.
But I’m never going to get a tablet because those situations happen only once a year or so. I prefer the larger screen and keyboard of the laptop.
Ludovic I agree with everything you say. But I’ll add that when reading or SDMB’ing in bed, the iPad mini beats the laptop, hands down. I fly a few times a year, as often as 20x, but I’m in bed about 365 times a year.
Surprised nobody has mentioned that their kids use school-issued tablets every day at school. My local school district is far from the most rich but also not poor, and I know that entire grades are issued tablets (not iPads, some sort of Android-based tablet) and they keep them for several years. It might just be 5-8th grades, or all the way through high school. I don’t have a kid myself so I don’t know.
I ran into a neighbor yesterday who is a young (20s) artist. He was carrying around his Surface Pro.
Mac zealot here. Extremely unlikely that Microsoft is going to succeed in selling me on a Surface, or that Google is going to convince me to buy an Android phone. But I have zero interest in any iOS device either.
I want full-blown MacOS X on the first smart phone that I buy. I want it to be my main computer. It has to be able to run Photoshop, FileMaker Pro, etc. I want to be able to dock it when I’m in the office and hook up 3 external monitors, an external keyboard and mouse, an audio headset, and get to work just as I do with the laptop now. Then at lunchtime I pluck it from its cradle and stick it in my pocket and it’s a phone that can take pictures, let me send and receive email, edit that expense account spreadsheet if I feel like it, text my coworker that Chili’s is having a good lunch special, etc.
iPad: too limited to be a comuter, too bulky to be a good portable
iPhone: too limited to be a computer
MacBook Pro: makes a lousy telephone if you aren’t on a WiFi network at the time; too bulky
Still trying to outwait these interim half-solutions
I just picked up a Surface Pro on sale and its little Type Cover keyboard with some of my performance award (that’s like a public servant version of a Christmas bonus except it comes around Thanksgiving). Had wanted an iPad Pro for its native iTunes support but my Win 7 box refused to install the proper drivers and I gave up on getting Windows to talk to the iPad at around 4:00 Saturday morning.
We’ll miss messing around with Garageband but the Surface Pro has a USB port. I had already moved most of my Steam library to an external HD to free up space in the desktop. Just need to add a USB hub so I can use the external drive and gamepad at the same time.
IMO you’ll have a (very) long wait. And not because of anything Applish vs. non-Applish.
What you’re essentially demanding is a machine with the hauling capacity of a Freightliner and the maneuverability of a Corvette.
It’s easy now to build a single vehicle that exceeds the hauling and the handling capacity of 1920s vehicles; maybe even 1950s vehicles.
But whatever the level of tech, you’re never going to stretch it to the edges of the current envelope in diametrically opposed goals. Specialist equipment of the same tech level will always beat the pants off your crappy compromise. And rest assured your personal desire for performance, however you define it, will closely track that specialized bleeding edge.
To some degree cloudy storage solves the capacity problem. All your devices can store all your content because actually none of them are storing any of it: it’s all in the cloud save a small and ephemeral cache.
At least theoretically the same kind of thing could happen with processing cycles. Chromebook certainly leans that way. But color me real doubtful that generalizes from lightweight activities like browsing to heavyweight activities like vid editing.
What happened to them? I pretty much do all my non-desktop computing (which is mostly browsing, reading magazines, watching movies, sending emails, listening to music, etc.), on a tablet (an iPad). Just the regular one, the mini is too small for me. I like my phones small (I have an SE) and my tablets of a reasonable size. In the past few years, I’ve almost weened completely off using my laptop. The iPad is just much better for my purposes, and the battery life is hours and hours beyond what I get on my laptop, so it wins.
Tablets are basically everything I’ve ever wanted them to be, and suit my purposes perfectly. I love them.
I think they are all harder on touch screens. Dragging and positioning handles or text cursors, in particular, is fiddly and error-prone. As I say, people apologise for it because they’re on a phone or tablet. I have never seen anyone post “sorry, no link, I am using a mouse and keyboard.”
Why not carry a laptop? It’s bigger, heavier, and has to be charged a lot more often. Moreover, mine take a lot of time to power up and power down. My iPad is always on. I don’t need “power.” I need to check my emails, and browse the web. It’s easier on the plane, in my car, or walking around my house. I only use my laptop as a mobile office set up in hotels when I need Word or Excel.
My iPhone is great, but I can’t really use the small screen for anything lasting more than a few minutes. (My eyes are old).
I have my iPhone with me at all times, and my iPad with me almost all the time.
I’d settle for a TB of storage (thumb drives can do that nowadays) and the processing power of a single 1 GHz G4 chip or equivalent in “mobile mode”, as long as when cradled it accesses auxiliary drives and additional processing power.
I have a couple of tablets, one I was given and the other (a somewhat better one) I paid for. I originally got them with the idea of writing a little wireless-connected app to handle the cards for the board game Eldrich Horror (which has thousands of cards and wants you to shuffle them every twenty seconds); it would be affordable and convenient for every player to have a tablet on the table next to them. But that didn’t pan out and after trying to get interested in playing simple stupid games on them, the remaining spark of interest died and now they just sit unused.
Based on what I see of how my niece uses her tablet, the one and only niche for tablets is to serve as a laptop which can actually used comfortably in your lap, with no table. Actual laptops are hot and heavy and their screens make them backheavy so they tend to slide and tip off your lap, so if you’re going to be trying to entertain yourself while sitting in a car or movie theater tablets may have some legitimate use. But in other situations, forget it.
How many users know all these things? All modern personal computers of all sizes have a zillion things you can do with their UI’s just by pointing, clicking, poking, speaking, etc. Do any of these devices come with user manuals any more?
On-line documentation always seems to be scattered and sketchy, consisting of little user-contributed essays and how-to’s on one topic or another that you have to hunt around on-line to find. Don’t any manufactures write unified complete user manuals with all the instructions in one publication (even if you have to go on-line to find it)?
Or am I just another of those iggornt users who hasn’t found the on-line goods yet?
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually own any mobile device and haven’t had any motivation to go looking myself for docs. But I don’t see user manuals laying around in obvious places any more, like on my friends’ bookshelves where I can easily browse them before deciding what to buy.)
ETA: I never even heard of the “long press” before.
Gotta agree on that. Those and as e-reader are my same main uses for a tablet. I happen to go more for an inexpensive Android model. Doesn’t hurt as much if I drop it or it’s stolen.
My full-featured laptop has actually become my fixed desk unit.
