My $220 Mini 2 in my Bimmer puts $2K+ BMW navigation system to shame.
Downloading all those map tiles can potentially eat through your data plan and is sometimes kind of slow. I'm fine with the BMW nav system. It worked as advertised the few times I have used it, and because it is integrated into the dash it is a nice clean look. I'm not sure how people mount an iPad in a BMW.
I seldom use my iPads. I have purchased 3 in all starting with the original. I was using my iPad mini last night to visit AI via a cellular connection. The page had so many ads that it would not even load with 2 bars of AT&T LTE. They really need to allow extensions in mobile Safari so I can block ads. I use Ghostery and Click to Flash, as well as some custom Javascript I wrote to eliminate the crap on AI's web page on my Mac so I never see ads. I literally could not use the AI site on an iPad over cellular.
Use the mobile web version. You lose some functionality, but few to no ads.
This is just a natural leveling of the whole product category in the marketplace. Rate of growth is slowing but the total installed base is still rising - significantly. The iPad flushed out a lot of low end of the PC market where PCs were being used only for content consumption and low demand productivity tasks like email, browsing, and web surfing. Convertibles and other contraptions like the Surface will grab some more of the PC usage market immediately above the one taken over by the iPad. The iPad paved the way for devices like the Surface because it convinced a lot of buyers that they no longer needed a 90 lb tower, keyboard, and massive monitor to get real office/student work done. Compared to a conventional PC with a 24-30 inch monitor (or two) and terabytes of storage the Surface is pretty anemic. But the iPad changed the game and people are willing to sacrifice sheer power for portability and mobility and some applications have moved downscale to meet the new normal for the 80% of the market.
What this means is that tablets are PC replacements and you should expect their replacement cycle to be closer to that of PCs. For Apple products you have to push the envelope out even further because they tend to be well built and have a longer service life.
The new MacBook is really Apple's answer to the convertible/Surface and should be considered part of a new product category. It will definitely eat into iPad sales going forward.
How about inventing a category called "Laptop"! Because, you know, it is smaller than those "Portable" KayPros so you can put it on your lap to work, and we can even build in a totally new concept of pointing device and call it a "Trackpad". If we removed the keyboard completely - so futuristic! - we could call it a "Tablet" and then allow you to use the screen directly for interaction. Or, for tweeners that like to swing between strict typing and freewheeling fingering, we could make the keyboard detachable and call it a "Convertible"!
Comments
My $220 Mini 2 in my Bimmer puts $2K+ BMW navigation system to shame.
Downloading all those map tiles can potentially eat through your data plan and is sometimes kind of slow. I'm fine with the BMW nav system. It worked as advertised the few times I have used it, and because it is integrated into the dash it is a nice clean look. I'm not sure how people mount an iPad in a BMW.
Use the mobile web version. You lose some functionality, but few to no ads.
No surprises here.
This is just a natural leveling of the whole product category in the marketplace. Rate of growth is slowing but the total installed base is still rising - significantly. The iPad flushed out a lot of low end of the PC market where PCs were being used only for content consumption and low demand productivity tasks like email, browsing, and web surfing. Convertibles and other contraptions like the Surface will grab some more of the PC usage market immediately above the one taken over by the iPad. The iPad paved the way for devices like the Surface because it convinced a lot of buyers that they no longer needed a 90 lb tower, keyboard, and massive monitor to get real office/student work done. Compared to a conventional PC with a 24-30 inch monitor (or two) and terabytes of storage the Surface is pretty anemic. But the iPad changed the game and people are willing to sacrifice sheer power for portability and mobility and some applications have moved downscale to meet the new normal for the 80% of the market.
What this means is that tablets are PC replacements and you should expect their replacement cycle to be closer to that of PCs. For Apple products you have to push the envelope out even further because they tend to be well built and have a longer service life.
The new MacBook is really Apple's answer to the convertible/Surface and should be considered part of a new product category. It will definitely eat into iPad sales going forward.
How about inventing a category called "Laptop"! Because, you know, it is smaller than those "Portable" KayPros so you can put it on your lap to work, and we can even build in a totally new concept of pointing device and call it a "Trackpad". If we removed the keyboard completely - so futuristic! - we could call it a "Tablet" and then allow you to use the screen directly for interaction. Or, for tweeners that like to swing between strict typing and freewheeling fingering, we could make the keyboard detachable and call it a "Convertible"!
So this just looks like seasonal sales with a bit of a factor of new product introduction. Where actually is the data to so “shrinking” sales?