this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
1002 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
72315 readers
3920 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It's broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it's familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.
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.
oh thank goodness. An image of students typing their notes with the on screen keyboard flashed in my mind and i was scared
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 bought a tablet and I feel like the money has been wasted. I use it maybe once a month.
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
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.
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
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.