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> This shouldn't be a massive surprise

Except for the "economics" "institutes" which extrapolated the first-year sales onto the next 20 years and were adamant that tablets would soon™ replace desktop, laptops, phones, cats, and, finally, hydrogen atoms in the sun, because somehow "infinite growth" and "crash" are the only possible business models.

Same crap as with the netbook "boom" that was supposed to revolutionize EVERYTHING!!1 for about a year.

The netbook did change laptops to be smaller and (Windows) cheaper then they were before they came out. I bought my wife an EEE netbook and it was super cheap at $499.

Meh. Subnotebooks were a thing before netbooks and after (until they were killed by cheap ultrabooks), and $250 notebooks faster than the eee crap existed before, if you bothered looking.

To my recollection, you could buy a small laptop or a cheap one, but the combination was almost impossible to find until netbooks came out. Before them, it was the UMPC/Project Origami craze, and they cost $700+.

Even in '09, the cheap subnetbook market was very badly served. I got a 12" HP DV2, but it cost me $500, and that because it was on sale, since it originally retailed for $730.

Toshiba Libretto, Compaq Aero. Ok, that's long ago but those were netbooks in just about every sense of the word.

I'm not sure what exact models you're referring to, but the one's I'm seeing were all $1500-3000 machines.

That's not what I paid for them. Even so, computers back then in general were more expensive than they are today and 'inexpensive' is a fairly relative term for something that you earn your living with. The last one in that formfactor that I bought was an acer aspire one, probably also not a netbook by some definition but extremely convenient (especially with the built in cellular modem).

Since when is $500 "super cheap" for a netbook? The original EEE was ~$250 (depending on Linux or Windows).

Chromebooks are $250 new, with a haswell proc.

Though you can get real Windows laptops for less than that....

EDIT: for whoever downvotes simple statements of fact... Lenovo - Ideapad 100s 11.6" Laptop $199.99; HP - Stream 11.6" Laptop $199.99; New! Dell - Inspiron 11.6" Laptop $199.99. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&st=l...

Those "real" Windows laptops have smartphone CPUs (and less RAM than recent smartphones, to add insult to injury); and run in the same price spectrum as Chromebooks – there's $200 ARM Chromebooks, too.

Actually useful versions cost around $250+ in both cases.

Which laptop & smartphone CPUs are you talking about?

I haven't kept up with news lately. Could you post some links

Some smartphones surprisingly decent specs.

  1440 x 2560 pixels 
  Quad-core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57
  3 GB RAM
  32/128 GB SSD
  And 2 cameras / other smartphone features.

But, they cost 2-3x what a netbook does.

New Atom chips are actually quite fast -- certainly they're much faster than the ones in netbooks. Also, Windows 10 runs quite well in 2GB of RAM, for most ordinary purposes.

In my experience, these machines browse faster than Chromebooks, support more tabs (in Firefox), let you use non-Google browsers (eg Vivaldi), and run lots of stuff that Chromebooks don't (eg Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc). They also work much better offline.

You can save a trivial amount of money by buying a cheap Chromebook, but you lose a lot of performance and capability.

I'm not saying that Chromebooks don't have advantages for some use cases, because clearly they do. However, they're not significantly cheaper than comparable Windows 10 laptops, which is where we came in....

Entry level Windows laptops and Chromebooks are competitive on price and specification. OEM Windows licensing is essentially free on these machines. The very cheapest Chromebooks (~$150) undercut the cheapest Windows laptops by using a Rockchip ARM processor, although this limits performance.

Users understand the value proposition of ChromeOS - it is more limited than Windows, but it is more reliable and secure. For many users, this is a very worthwhile tradeoff. Two of the ten best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

The later iterations on the concept were vastly superior to the original Eee and Eee clones. Netbooks in the $500 range typically had dual core Atoms (a big deal since the CPU was the weakest link), 10.1" screens that had a resolution that was actually usable (1280x720 instead of 1024x600), and usable amounts of storage.

That market didn't last very long as hardware costs dropped so quickly that full size, full power laptops suddenly cost the same with the only trade off being battery life.

The original EEE 700 was $399.00 and the 900 was $650. My 700 for my wife had extra memory for $485 or something.

EDIT Reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

The netbook boom was nipped in the bud by Microsoft licensing. They gave away a free version of windows on it with heavy restrictions. Consequently hardware manufacturers brought out new models but stopped improving them (they topped out at a measly 1GB of RAM, upgradeable to 2).

They quickly died out because of course they did. That's a ridiculous restriction.

After my old one died I scoured for ages trying to find one that didn't adhere to those ridiculous restrictions to no avail. There were ~35 models available with a 2GB RAM restriction and zero without. The next year there were none.

> They gave away a free version of windows on it...

Not true. It was a low cost version of XP, for which OEMs paid $11 to $15.

> ... with heavy restrictions.

That's certainly true (as defined by Microsoft and Intel). However, it was arguably better for users to have machines with 2GB or 4GB of RAM and without letterbox screens, and there was no restriction on making those.

Today there are dozens of "netbooks" with 10in screens that outperform the old netbooks, run full Windows 10, have touch screens, and cost a lot less than the old netbooks.

> "it was arguably better for users to have machines with 2GB or 4GB of RAM"

Microsoft intentionally restricted the RAM in netbooks during the main growth period for netbooks. This article shows that RAM was limited to 1GB for Windows 7, I'm pretty sure the same restrictions applied to Windows XP:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-windows-netbook-h...

Yes, as I've already said, that was part of the deal. OEMs could choose to design whatever they liked, or choose to exploit a netbook/nettop design package that provided some discounts on Microsoft/Intel technologies.

Netbooks were originally intended for school uses (see Intel's Classmate) not to replace consumer laptops. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education-solutions/c...

IIRC the Intel Classmate was announced after the first Asus Eee PC, so I wouldn't say they were originally intended for schools.

The original Asus Eee PC was designed for schools and was launched first in the UK by the then leading education supplier, RM. I was there.

It had a Celeron inside.

It was part of Intel's response to the threat of the OLPC.

Chromebooks are netbooks and they seem to be doing just fine. To me they're a bastardization of what the concept what's supposed to be but that's beside the point.

I thought they had a shitty hd? The netbook was awesome because it was a full-stack dev station that was wicked portable. It wasn't the best dev environment, but I could do whatever I needed- from mysql script updates to javascript to whatever else.

And MS&Intel choked the life out of them because they threatened to undermine those expensive ultraportables.

No, they didn't. In fact, under OEM pressure, Microsoft foolishly prolonged their life by providing support for a next generation of netbooks with Windows 7 Starter.

Fact is that that you could get a proper laptop for the same money as a netbook, and this was much better for users.

Note that the original netbook (from Asus) had a 7in screen, and this was a substantial part of the cost saving. However, market forces drove bigger screens into the netbook market: 10in became the standard, and some had even larger screens. Prices went up to match.

The netbook actually died because OEMs reduced laptop screen sizes from 13.3in (which used to be very popular) while retaining the extra RAM (2GB or 4GB) and the extra screen resolution (1366 x 768).

At this point, many real laptops with 11.6in and 10.1in screens were cheaper than netbooks, so you had to be an idiot to buy a netbook. Or to manufacture one, which is why they disappeared from the market.

This had nothing to do with Ultrabooks.

Note that Ultrabook is an Intel trademark and Ultrabooks were also required to follow Intel's specification, which made them premium products.

But every OEM was and is able to make whatever thin-and-light laptops they like, regardless of the Ultrabook spec.

Thing is that to get XP, and later 7 Starter, OEMs have to follow strict specs defined by MS. This then choked off any potential differences the OEMs could experiment with.

Similar restrictions came out of Intel, iirc.

Yes, that was part of the deal. OEMs could choose to design whatever they liked, or choose to exploit a netbook/nettop design package that provided some discounts on Microsoft/Intel technologies.

OEMs were not obliged to market netbooks. They did it because they thought they could make money that way.

I loved my eeePC back in college - either a 700 or 701 running, I think, Xunbuntu. Perfect for taking notes in class, which a tablet, or even the Surface RT I have now, would be garbage for. Not bad for light hacking either.

Still, that's a pretty small niche.

> Still, that's a pretty small niche.

A niche that existed for years before and was filled by (slightly less useless) subnotebooks like the Macbook Air, or Thinkpad X series.

Still, I could buy 3-4 of my old eeePCs for the price of a Mac Air, and neither is really in the same form-factor. When you're working an $8/hour work-study job for your discretionary income, that price differential matters. The eee was also great for fitting on those comically tiny lecture hall chair-desk surfaces that a 10-13 inch laptop would swallow up, with room to spare for a honking big container of bad, strong coffee.

They would also fit on an economy-seat airline seat, and I didn't have to worry about the douche (no offense) in front of me breaking it by slamming his seat into recline mode. Was awesome.

so the macbook air is useless?

I still have two of the original eeePC machines, which I use to run antique Teletype machines. The Linux version is crappy. The WiFi connection system gets hung up if anything at all goes wrong, and the "union" file system leaks inodes, which have to be cleaned up with a script every few weeks of use.

You can get a tablet for $39, which is useful for little dedicated applications.

I'd probably get a Chromebook with an SD card slot and get ~144GB out of that. Throw on Kubuntu and I'm good to go.

To make matters even worse, the ones that did have adequate RAM suffered from those terrible 8/16GB SSD drives. Heck, I bet even my 32GB SDHC card is faster than those drives were.

I'd argue that the netbook boom was nipped in the bud by the introduction of the tablet. Netbooks, tablets, low-end laptops, and phablets that are too big to fit in a pocket are all the same market. They serve a person who wants to browse the web, check e-mail, instant-message, take notes, and do other information consumption tasks with a device that is small enough to carry around in a handbag or backpack but too large to fit in a pocket.

I suspect that the decline in tablet sales comes from category confusion at the edges of this market. At the low end, people are buying phablets to stick in a handbag instead of 7" tablets. At the high end, some people have gone back to lightweight laptops like the Macbook Air, Microsoft Surface, or equivalents. The "market" - defined as the group of people with similar needs - continues to grow, but a growing percentage of people are picking products from a different category to satisfy it, as more such products become available.

And now Chromebooks are eating some of the tablet market, and are absolutely replacements for the original netbooks, and are the most popular form factor of new notebook sales now.

Which economics institutes did so?

Gfk was the leading hype driver over here in Germany.

I've been exclusively using netbooks for personal use since they came out. Now that I've switched to RK3288-based netbooks, all the problems I had with the Atoms are long-gone.

I know I'm a minority, but some of us did jump on the revolution and stay.

I thought tablets would replace a bigger chunk of the desktop market, but I also assumed that at some point they would get proper mouse/keyboard support and better multi-tasking, so you can actually get things done. Nope.

As much as people were hollering Post PC, you'd think, but alas, it didn't happen.

Yeah, the only way to get desktop style multi-tasking and keyboard+mouse support is one of the many Windows 8/10 tablets that are floating around, but that isn't ideal for some tablet use IMO so you have to compromise one set of needs to cover the others. It works for me though (my table has for a while been a cheap Win8 machine for which I have a stand and bluetooth input devices for when I need to use it for something that needs a keyboard).

Ah, yes, the "post PC era" where we would do all our computing on a tablet.

I agree entirely with your first paragraph. I didn't realize how much I wanted a tablet until I had one, but my current tablet is almost 4 years old and I'm not in any hurry to replace it. Compare to me just having gotten my 4th smartphone in a bit under 6 years.

I think a lot of people have also been burned by utterly crap cheap tablets. There are thousands of sub $100 tablets, and I don't think any of them are worth while. Some are downright off-putting in their uselessness and lack of speed. I figure there's a subset of super-non-techies out there who've bought one of these at TJ Maxx and have now sworn off all Android tablets.

To be fair, there aren't even really great experiences to be had with a good android tablet. The OS and app ecosystem simply isn't good enough for big screens.

I agree. I was pretty stoked when I got a Nexus 7, but it was basically killed by system upgrades slowing the system down to nothing. Apple has done an okay job keeping the older models still functioning even if they do not get all the functionality of latest iOS.

I don't know what you mean by "big", but I've loved the experience of my Nexus 7 (2012). Great for reading books, good for reading comic books, good for watching movies/TV by yourself. Not really any better for social media than a phone. Haven't tried any content creation on it other than a few memes, and sshing into an emacs session on a real computer.

I'll replace it this year because of hardware problems (does not recognize charger except when turned off). But it's run up to Android 5.1.1 with no trouble.

My Galaxy Tab S is a great ebook reader. The screen is the best I've seen, and it's a joy for art/photo books and graphic-heavy PDFs.

But it doesn't get much use as a browser - not least because of Google's bizarre decision not to include a PDF reader.

I bought an Android tablet last year. I was holidaying in South America for six weeks and did not want to carry a full laptop with me.

I basically used it as an Ebook Reader / Mp3 player /way to upload photos from my camera to cloud while travelling.

Since I returned to Australia it has been gathering dust there is no use case for it in my day to day life. As a cheap almost disposable laptop for travel it was great for anything more then that I don't see the point.

Funny, I didn't realize how little I wanted a tablet until I got a brand new iPad as a signing bonus. I gave it away after half a year to a friend of mine, as for just two millimeters more, I'd have my MacBook Air, with a real operating system, a decent keyboard and an implicit stand that will hold up the screen upright when I'm watching something in bed. Never looked back, tablets just didn't make sense for me.

> a real operating system

Must say that the notion that some OS is more "real" than another is odd. I could kinda understand it back in the featurephone days. But these days the distinction seem arbitrary at best.

The distinction between a locked down mobile OS and a relatively open desktop OS is really not that arbitrary IMO.

If you cannot install a native program you wrote for the device without hacking the firmware on the device, you do not have a 'real' operating system. I mean, of course you have an operating system, it's just one that Apple, Microsoft, or Google controls in the strict sense what you can do with it.

And what would native be in the case of Android?

Flip the "unknown sources" setting and you can dump any random APK onto it.

The tablet market neither begins nor ends with iPad.

Being that endymi0n was talking about an iPad, it certainly relates to the conversation.

And dismissing the whole product category after having encountered only the most restrictive entry seems hasty.

I will admit that Android has issues as well, but running arbitrary code is not one of them.

You can do that on iOS, insofar as you can attach any arbitrary iOS (or tvOS, or watchOS) device to Xcode running on a Mac, and pressing Run in Xcode will launch the "native program" you wrote on the iOS device (and keep it installed afterward.)

It's distributing binaries to others that's the hard part of these mobile ecosystems. Running your own code on your own device has never been restricted.

To me a real OS is something where you can have root access on the command line out of the box.

Depending on what we define as "root access", OS X might no longer qualify, considering the restrictions imposed by SIP[1], which comes enabled out of the box.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection

The problem is see is that Google has been back and forth about their tablet commitment.

Back when Android 3.0 shipped, they introduced a single bar UI that could be compared to the Windows UI that has existed since Windows 95.

But then as later version of 3.x, and then 4.x was released, Google was introducing new restrictions and slowly rolling back the 3.0 UI.

For example with 3.0 you had one storage permission, "external". But come 3.1, they introdced another, "media". And only system apps could gain write permission to "media", unless the OEMs went in and changed up key files.

Thing about "media" was that it got applied to all removable storage. Be it SD slots or USB drives.

Then as 4.3 shipped, anything smaller than 8" got a "hybrid" UI that looked like a phone, but acted like a tablet in various ways. And with 4.4 the tablet UI that was introduced with 3.0 was fully replaced with the phone UI.

Odd thing is that with 6.0(.1) they seem to be moving somewhat back towards the 3.0 tablet UI. rather than having the 3 bottom bar buttons always centered, they split up and move to the bottom corners on larger tablets.

>(why carry a 7" tablet when you've got a 6" phone screen everywhere you go already?

I'm not so sure about that. Phones are always battery starved and even the big ones are small compared to the tablet experience.

Heck, I have a 6p and an iPad Mini. The mini is "only" 2 inches wider than the 6p but its a massive difference in perception and a completely different experience.

If anything, my larger phone has kept me from buying a kindle. It makes for a decent ebook reader anywhere I go.

That sounds right. Slates are great for children to play games on and watch video, they're also great for grandparents who want to read their news app and want to email or have facetime with the grandkids, but for other adults, they want something akin to the detachables which offer more flexibility.

There are also a ton of business uses like kiosks, point of sale, and field work. These users aren't going to be upgrading every year, but they are quite sticky.

That's true. It's my impression they use "ruggedized" embedded systems and elo screens.

Exactly. So many people focus on the consumer use cases, but I still feel like so many of the commercial ones haven't been realized yet. A failed startup I was part of in 2009 was working on a tablet app before iOS came out, and it was specifically for mechanical engineers and similar folks walking around buildings quickly, without having to stop and type on a laptop. Now I'm working on a tablet app to be used by nurses and doctors who are on their feet. No doubt there are numerous cases of people who need something they can use on their feet and who might also appreciate a slightly larger form factor than even a 6-inch phone screen provides.

>it is pretty obvious the market hit saturation point

The market just turned out to be much smaller than people expected. In hindsight it makes sense, many of the things people where expected to do on their tablet works just as well on the phone.

They're simply not seen as quite the necessity smartphones are.