Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
It’s Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
I think it’s more to do with phones - people are just more likely to do most tasks on a phone rather than a laptop.
Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still… “suboptimal”), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.
There is no way it’s “mostly fine”.
Small screen for consumption, large screen for creation, - only way it’s fine if you don’t create anything and just consume, which is I guess what most people do.
At best I’ll use Termux as I am not in the mood to boot my pc and I juat need to edit some config file.
According to StatCounter tablets never breached 7% market share, and even that was in 2014. Nowadays they are below 2%. Windows’s lost userbase seems to be mostly about people using their phones for everything.
I bought a tablet and I feel like the money has been wasted. I use it maybe once a month.
Me and my Steam Deck
Mostly used it in 2023 or so when I was sick on the couch. And yeah some hours on the trip I’m currently on. But it would just have been fine without.
Sometimes I see people post pictures use it in the most scenic locations, similar to the promotional video. And all I can think of is that if you want to play game so badly, you can just stay home. Much easier and also probably safer for the deck.
To each their own. Just hard to understand for me
I just barely used my first one for the longest time, since I mostly played games or programmed on computers. Then I started to use it to read books and watch Netflix. I am on my 3rd one now and probably spend 60% of my computer time on it.
Tablets are kind of in the middle of nowhere in terms of functionality at the moment, bigger and less practical than a phone, while being less capable than laptops. Its a shame, because on paper they look pretty great and they are insanely powerful nowadays
Are people really actively using tablets? I thought that was more of a hype and is now something that lies around and gets occasional use on the couch, but not really productive.
Your average computer user is mainly using it for interacting with various web based services and playing media. Don’t need good input methods for that so tablets are a cheaper and easier to maintain alternative to a laptop.
I’ve been using tablets since the first generation (Galaxy tab), and I must say that it kind of veered to that side after a while, since getting a convertible laptop. A few years back I got a Huawei tablet with a pen and keyboard, that had impressive battery, and it took the place of my convertible. While I’m a Linux-Android-occassional Windows guy, I now use an ipad (As much as I hate to admit, in the tablet space they are vastly superior), with keyboard and pen, for most of my away needs, and for general around the house stuff. I do a lot of graphic design and photo stuff, and thanks to Affinity’s suite, I can actually do real work on the thing.
As a student, yeah, I see lots of people using tablets for their work instead of laptops.
please tell me they have those little external keyboards which would make them basically a shitty laptop
Some do, but a lot also use it with a touch pen for notes.
Honestly tablets are perfectly sufficient for most education related things, plus they’re thin, light weight, and don’t need to be plugged in constantly unlike the goobers who bring gaming laptops.
I would’ve sprung for an iPad and done the same (though used a BT mechanical keyboard instead a chicklet one) if I wasn’t in a CS degree that requires me to have a real OS that can run compilers, interpreters, multiple browsers, and uses a real folder structure.