Tablets are the new darling of consumer technology. The burst of fanfare generated by the iPad’s initial release never faded, nor have sales. According to IDC, 27.8 million tablets were sold worldwide in the third quarter of 2012. Though still short of the 87.5 million PCs sold during the same period, tablets have only been serious competitors for a few years. Their rate of growth is impressive and seem unlikely to slow.
Dramatic success has encouraged definitive proclamations from industry prophets. The PC is dead – long live the tablet! Recent sales figures seem to back up these arguments – but a challenger approaches. Hybrids, a category so small that its sales are not individually tracked, is the real heir to the PC’s throne. Here’s why.
Why do tablets sell?
Before we talk about why hybrids will rule, we must first understand why tablets have become so successful. Hybrids will be forever pushed to the margins if they can’t match or exceed tablets in these areas:
Touch – Let’s start with the obvious. Touch. There’s a beautiful simplicity to the direct physical interaction that tablets offer. Content consumption is more intuitive and more intimate with a hand-held touchscreen device. Productivity is more difficult, but consumers aren’t using a personal device for productivity most of the time. Tablets are also well designed for touch because they are thin, light, and small – traits that touchscreen PCs of all stripes have yet to match.
Portability – Portability is also important, though not for the reasons most guess. Consumers want portable devices for use at home, not for travel. Laptops proved more popular than desktops because they didn’t tie the user to a desk and instead allowed use wherever a person could sit for a few hours at a time. Tablets take that a step further by offering days of use from anywhere before the battery must be charged.
Price – And let’s not forget the price. Cheap stuff sells more than expensive stuff, and tablets are among the most affordable consumer electronics devices on the market today. Even the iPad costs no more than mid-range laptops, and some Android tablets can be had for $200 or less. Anyone looking for a PC in that price range will be forced to purchase a Chromebook.
Hybrids aren’t great tablets, but they can be
All of the current hybrid and convertible laptops on the market fail in the important areas mentioned above. They are bulkier than tablets, they fall short in endurance, and they are much, much more expensive. Models with the ho-hum Atom processor sell for between $499 and $750, and most products with Core processors are sold for $1,000 or more.
With these problems holding them back, hybrids will never overcome tablets. Fortunately, they’re all solvable. As the processors available become more efficient and more powerful, hybrids will inevitably become just as thin and light as tablets. Intel’s hybrid reference unit shown at CES 2013 was as thin as some stand-alone tablets – and it was running a Core processor. Devices built on the upcoming Atom quad-cores will be even thinner.
These same improvements will also close the gap in battery life. Large hybrids with 11.6-inch to 13.3-inch screens will probably overtake 7-inch to 10-inch tablets because they have more internal space to dedicate to a battery. A similar distinction already exists in both the tablet and smartphone markets. Big screens are usually compensated for by much larger batteries.
And then there’s price. While certain high-end hybrids will no doubt remain expensive, low-end models will surely become more affordable as the technology they rely on becomes less expensive. Solid state memory, touchscreens and processors are areas where hybrids could see substantial savings in the future. A capable $500 hybrid is not a dream. It’s inevitable.
Once hybrids are as capable and affordable as tablets consumers will no doubt begin to wonder why they’d want a tablet instead. The main distinction between them will be the docking capability a tablet lacks – in all other respects, they will become identical. Consumers (particularly those on a budget, which is most) will realize that a hybrid offers more value.
A pair of wild cards
While hybrids seem likely to take consumer electronics by storm at some point in the future, there two more notable problems that will need to be fixed. These problems could delay hybrids because, unlike hardware, the companies that could conjure solutions sometimes have a problem with execution.
No operating system is currently capable of doing the hybrid justice. Windows 8 is a step forward, yet also deeply flawed. A few hybrids ship with Android instead, which is even worse. Consumers won’t accept hybrids until an appropriate operating system is available.
Another obstacle may be the manufacturers themselves. Imagine that you’re the CEO of a major electronics manufacturer and you’ve learned of a device that could replace two or three of your products but sells for half their combined price. Does that sound like good news? Of course not. Manufacturers may have their vision clouded by potential red ink, but designing the proper hybrids will require a committed effort, not a half-hearted attempt from companies petrified by profit margins.
Then again, the winds of fortune may blow in the hybrid’s favor. Apple might replace its entire MacBook line with a new hybrid device, or Google could turn Chrome OS into a truly capable do-it-all operating system. Either would give these fledgling devices a boost.
One hybrid to rule them all
Hybrids are a step towards a vision of future computing that replaces the PC with a dockable device that connects to a wide variety of peripherals. Future consumers will forgo a wide range of partially redundant devices in favor of a master computer that can do almost everything.
Most enthusiasts dreaming of this future peg the smartphone as the heir to the PC’s throne. This theory is interesting, yet unrealistic. How can a powerful processor and sufficient battery be crammed into such a small space? How can a user fully enjoy a device with such a small screen? There are no easy answers to these questions – which may be why Samsung’s Galaxy Note II has become popular despite jokes about the junk in its trunk.
The future of computing will be a story of convergence, not divergence. Multiple devices will fuse into a single master computer. This will not be tablets or smartphones, which are incapable of replacing modern PCs – hybrids will rise to take on this new role. The tablet will remain, but it will be pushed into low-cost markets or sold as an add-on to a computing ecosystem built around the hybrid. Viva la hybrid!
I can’t really get behind this article. I really like my iPad2 and have found uses for it, both personal and professional, that I had never though of. It has become much more a part of my life than my notebook ever had. A hybrid, or splitting the difference, just seems like an ultrabook, which didn’t really take off, that folds over backwards.
I am having a tough time believing this too. I think tablets will always be around, at least until hybrids come down in size and weight.
Cryptic and slow compared to iOS? iOS is a consumer OS for super-basic applications. It’s a non-starter for creative endeavors or “real work.”
If you don’t read news and opinion sources because they disagree with your favorite product’s direction, then you’re not looking for news and analysis — you’re looking for validation of your own viewpoint. You might as well start watching FOX (or MSNBC) News for “real news analysis.”
And finally, this quarter’s returns for all the major tech companies has PROVEN that the “PCs are dead, being replaced by Macs and tablets” thing is dead wrong. Windows grew 24% while the Mac shrank 21%, Google had strong results, and it looks like RIM will have a blockbuster with BB10. All of which go against the prevailing wisdom out of Cupertino.
Dear arrogant tech bloggers. Stop trying to tell us how things “will” be. You’re almost always wrong. Thanks, James.
That’s his job, James. One definition of arrogance is telling someone else how to do their job. A second defining attribute o arrogance is a defacto assertion that you have a right to express your opinion, while claiming a writer who is better informed than you regarding technology has no right to express his.
No.. Maybe for the social aspects, but someone that is using a computer for more than facebook is going to want at least a laptop, the people that really use a computer are going to demand a desktop.
Can’t do true web design on a tablet, will a hybrid run adobe master collection?
Yes. That is the point. It’s a fully capable x86 (or maybe ARM, though I doubt it) laptop, but it also can be a fully capable tablet. There’s no compromise.
I think hybrids will get passed up. I think the future for the next 3 years will be smaller and thinner tablets, and then ultra-books. Both working in conjunction.
In the near future, I think we will see cell phones as a laptop replacement, much like the Motorola Atrix (which was ahead of it’s time). As long as cell phones continue to grow in power and there is a good storage solution, this could be the future.
Have you handled an iPad Mini or Nexus 7? Does anyone care if their tablet is thinner than that? I think the answer is no.
I do no think phones will be a laptop replacement because they’re the outsider. Tablets, hybrid, notebooks, desktops – all of these could use very similar hardware with a similar OS. I don’t think smartphones can, however, which means they’ll always be a secondary device.
I think you have to look at concepts as an example of where engineers might be going with things. Flexible displays, see-through monitors etc. Will they take off? Maybe not, but we can’t predict that at this point in time. I also have yet to read a review where a tablet has been criticized for being too thin or small, and that tells me we have not hit our point of diminishing returns yet.
If you read the reports out there, tablets are cutting into notebook sales. Why? Because most people can use a tablet for basic functions like email, browsing the web etc. I think it would be foolish to think that cell phones could never replace a laptop for the same reasons as to why tablets are cutting into their market share. And just because we have yet to see how a smartphone can do this, doesn’t mean someone will not prove otherwise. Steve Jobs made the tablet relevant despite others failing before him.
Yes, but now you’re relying on the “anything is possible” argument, and I don’t really like that.
Maybe something could come up and make smartphones competitive as a primary computing device. But what that may be I don’t know because I’ve not seen it. What I do know is that the size of a smartphone puts serious constraints on its processing power and the small display size is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of OS that will work on a tablet, laptop or desktop. Those are serious barriers and I have not witnessed any current tech that even begins to address them.
I do know, however, that we’re not far away from the point where an x86 dockable (i.e. a hybrid) will be as thin as and light as any other tablet on the market. Intel is making very rapid progress, so looks like it is going to happen soon. And that will be significant for the industry.
On a long enough timeline anything seems possible and in that sense, yes, a smartphone might some day be a primary computing device. But that’s a long way off. On the other hand, hybrids could to become popular within just a few years.
Or hybrids could die like every other Intel concept out there. Cough Netbooks
Intel did not put out netbooks! They made Atom for these weird things called Mobile Internet Device that really did not pan out. Then ASUS decided to slap one in a small PC.
If you ask me, Intel intentionally killed netbooks by refusing to significantly update the Atom architecture for years. They wanted those things gone, pronto.
It’s tough to think about replacing your tablet with a hybrid – I love my Nexus 7. But considering a “hybrid” could be as simple as a tablet docked to some kind of keyboard/case, the master device paired with various peripherals does indeed, sound inevitable.