Gloom and doom is the forecast for tablets these days. Sales are dropping, even for iPad, the king of the tablet hill—which is a small hill, to be sure. With bigger smartphones coming at it from one side, and tiny, ultralight laptops coming at it from the other, where does the tablet go? Why spend $400 on a tablet, when you can get a perfectly good laptop for a little more, or a perfectly good Chomebook for a lot less? Tablets are a luxury! They’re a niche product! They’re doomed to be an also-ran in the computing space!

For now.

The Childhood of the Tablet

We’ve only been in the tablet computer era for five years, at least If we go by the launch of the original iPad as the birth of the modern era of the tablet. There were plenty of computers in a tablet form factor before the iPad, but most were just giant, thick laptops with no keyboards, and with interfaces optimized for keyboard and mouse. The iPad was the first tablet to provide a specific, finger optimized interface, which is exactly what you want for a handheld device. The iPad was the basic form and UI of a tablet computer, done right.

To make a clunky analogy, tablets, pre-iPad were giant IBM PCs. The iPad was the Mac—a refined product with a new, user-friendly UI with some restrictions that the IBM PC didn’t have. Back in 1984, when the Mac launched, there wasn’t much need for the average person to have a home computer. They were the province of hobbyists, geeks, and hobbyist geeks. It wasn’t until the rise of the Internet in the mid–90s that home computer ownership became a real need, though that was primed a bit by the CD-ROM Multimedia Gold Rush. If 2010 was the tablet equivalent of 1984, then we’re only in 1989, where computers are a useful home accessory, but not even close to a necessity.

There’s a ton of potential in tablet computing as a form-factor that we are only just beginning to unlock five years in. It’s not hard to envision a future for the tablet that sees it, not just as a secondary device, but as the primary computer for most people. With the right developments, the tablet could even become the primary computer for developers and other power user laptop and desktop computer holdouts. What does this future look like? Come with me, as I explore the Tablet of Tomorrow.

A Day With the Tablet of Tomorrow

The year is 2025.

You wake up, shower, dress, and scroll through the morning news and email on your tablet at the breakfast table. Nothing new here. Time to leave, and you toss your tablet into your bag, and head to work. Your desk at work has a 24" display at retina resolution, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a small docking station with a lightning port. At your desk, you whip out your tablet, plop it on the docking station to charge, and get to work.

How? The tablet has instantly connected, wirelessly, to your keyboard, mouse, and display. It knows you’re on your office Wifi, and switches to what you were last working on, be it your email, the Henderson report, or an HTML file in an editor on one side, and a web browser viewing the file on the other. You work, switching between apps as you need, occasionally setting up your tablet to show something you need to work with you—maybe a chat window for Slack, or your email if you’re expecting something important. Maybe the stream of the Sportsball Playoffs, if you’re not.

After a couple hours of work, you have a meeting, so you grab your tablet off the docking station, fully charged, and the optional stylus. You switch to a note-taking app and write down stuff, or sketch and doodle as the meeting goes on, waiting for your moment to present. When that happens, you switch to your presentation app, swipe the slideshow over to the meeting room’s projector, and do your presention. People ignore it, because it’s a meeting, but hey, you’re done. Now it’s time to go back.

You return to your desk, and plop your tablet down. The 24" display lights up with everything you were working on before you got up for your meeting, while your meeting notes display on the tablet. If you want, you can swipe those notes up as a pane on your desktop, or just leave them on the tablet and mark them up while you work. Use a stylus, or use your finger. In the meantime, you get back to work.

Soon, quitting time rolls around, so you throw your tablet in your bag, and head home. On the train (or in your self-driving car if you must), you catch up on the news and email. At home, you drop your tablet in a charging dock at your desk, where it connects with your own home desktop monitor, keyboard, and a trackpad, ’cause that’s just how you roll at home. You catch up on your work and personal email, then edit and post a couple photos and videos to Facebook from your trip to the beach over the weekend.

When you’re done with all of that, you take your freshly charged tablet off the desk, swing downstairs, and drop it off in the living room while you eat dinner. While you eat, your tablet wirelessly connects to the 48“ TV. After dinner, you plop on the couch and grab your tablet. It’s already showing you your TV app of choice, and so you swipe through your options. Settling on Season 16 of Game of Thrones, you tap the latest episode’s listing, and suddenly the 40” screen across the room lights up and the theme thunders through your speakers.

Then, you realize you have a form you need to fill out for a doctor’s appointment, so you switch to your email and fill it out. You use your fingers to fill in the checkboxes, and for text, the haptic Force Touch keyboard on the glass is good enough for a little bit of touch-typing. You’ve been known to compose emails, take notes in meetings, and even write the occasional short blog post on it, but for longer work, you use your wireless keyboard at the desk. Meanwhile, as you fill out your doctor’s form and mail it off, the TV screen doesn’t skip a frame of bloody, sexy, fantasy action.

After Game of Thrones, you throw on some tunes over the home audio system, have a videochat with your special someone, and then play a video game. Realizing it would be cooler if your game was on that big 40" display, you shoot it over, and it doesn’t skip a frame, while your tablet turns into a custom controller with more features and a mini-map. You play for a while, and with 50% battery remaining, realize it’s time to turn in. On your way to bed, you plug your tablet in with the cable you keep on the sideboard.

Getting to the Future from Here

You know what’s not in the picture above? A traditional computer, desktop or laptop. The only presupposition is that, eventually, we get fast enough, power-efficient enough Bluetooth-like short-range wireless, and fast enough home wi-fi to send 4 to 5k video to a display at real time. Ten years might be an optimistic timeframe. It could be fifteen or twenty, but it’s not an impossibility. The obstacles are just wireless transfer speeds, processing power, haptics, and battery life. These aren’t problems we’re close to solving, but ones we’re making huge progress on. Everything else is stuff we can do now, at least in terms of software. Cloud storage handles the heavy lifting of storing documents and photos. The closest thing to a conventional computer in the home that I see in this future is a small home media server.

In a way, this vision of the future isn’t dissimilar from the idea behind Microsoft Surface. Surface tries to be all things to all people, but limits its ambitions to a device that’s all compromise—a hybrid touch/desktop UI that nobody likes, a crappy hardware keyboard, and an awkward form-factor. It’s gotten better, but it’s a device that carries with it 30 years of legacy computing baggage.

Could you do all this with a powerful enough phone? Maybe, and I could even see that being an option for people who have giant 6" Samsung phones. However, the tablet has a much more flexible form factor. A phone form factor isn’t great for multitasking, while a tablet has enough display space for multiple apps. A bigger form factor means a bigger battery, and more space for storage and RAM that are naturally constrained on a phone form-factor.

Imagine the ability to do computing work everywhere and anywhere with a screen you can carry in a small bag, or even in a big enough pocket. Imagine turning any big screen into your desktop. This is where the tablet could go, and what the tablet could become. The potential for a tablet to replace the conventional personal computer for the vast majority of people is immense.

People who worry about the future of the tablet are thinking too short term. It doesn’t matter what happens next quarter for iPad sales. It matters what happens in a longer-term scenario where the tablet becomes more capable, more connected, and more powerful—enough to replace the box on your desk, and yet still connect with all the extra stuff you need to live your digital life. We’ll get there in time. Until then, don’t panic, and start working to build that real post-PC future. Or, stick to your old, legacy computing device. It’s not going to go away, but the balance will certainly shift given enough time and development. I’m looking forward to it.

In her latest Metafoundry newsletter, Deb Chachra wrote a bit about her, and others, fascination with infrastructure:

“I think it’s in part of a reaction to the atomization of technology. So much of new technology–and certainly media coverage of it–seems to be focused on making individual lives better while our common infrastructure decays. Uber instead of public transit. Airbnb instead of affordable housing. MOOCs instead of publicly-funded higher education. Spending time with infrastructure is reminding myself that it was once possible to work collectively for the shared good, something we need to figure out how to do again (and globally) if we are going to address planetary-scale problems like anthropogenic climate change.”

I’m not an infrastructure fanatic—though as my Twitter followers can attest, I love the subway, or at least complaining about it. I can still sympathize with Deb’s point of view. It nestles nicely with a recent piece in The Atlantic on the real sharing economy. This means organizations like tool lending libraries, Baltimore’s free book store, car sharing instead of “ride sharing,” and—of course—infrastructure. Or, to quote a quote from the Atlantic article: “When I think about the true sharing economy, I see libraries, parks, and common roads.” Exactly the opposite of the stuff getting all the press and VC funding.

People have long complained about technology’s isolating effect on us, especially in the age of the smartphone. I’ve been long skeptical of that attitude, but there is a real isolation problem in technology. It’s narrowed the scope of ideas away from things that benefit everyone to thing that benefit individuals. And not just any individuals—individuals with money, access to personal technology, and the privilege to not worry about the people providing their services. I’m including myself in this group too, by the way.

I don’t think we’re quite heading for a future where Uber is going to rip up the subway lines like what happened to the Los Angeles street car system in the ’40s and 50s. We are in a present, however, where spending money, private and public alike, on things for the common good is passé. Not everything needs to be a profit center after all, and solving problems on a global scale—the ones you can’t solve by another on-demand service startup—aren’t going to make anyone any money.

Maybe I should get into infrastructure tourism. Might as well see it while it lasts.

Apple’s historically been a company that treats the privacy of its users as a high priority—iCloud hacks not withstanding. The encryption on their proprietary iMessage platform, for example, is strong enough, and common enough to piss off the US government. And it’s not just privacy from the government that Apple’s known for: it’s protecting user data from advertisers, best expressed in Tim Cook’s angry invictive at EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in June. It’s not a new thing for Apple, extending back to Steve Jobs’s tenure as CEO, but it’s gained new focus under Tim Cook. And I think I know why.

Tim Cook is 54 years old, born and raised in Alabama, and gay. For a gay man growing up in the Southern US in the 60s and 70s, the idea of being outed, or being out yourself, comes with huge, huge risks. In 2015, it’s a lot easier to be open about your sexuality—at least in some parts of the Western world—than it used to be. It’s still no guarantee of acceptance from your family or friends. While I’ve kept my own sexuality fairly private, I only came out publically on this site recently, and there are still people in my family who (I think) don’t know—and my family is, for the most part, open and supportive. In his excellent talk, “How Designers Destroyed the World”, Mike Monteiro tells of two gay people outed to their homophobic famlies due to Facebook privacy changes. Because of Facebook’s negligence, these two people have now lost their famlies. It’s getting better and safer to be LGBT, but the risk of losing families, friends, and jobs is still higher for LGBT people, even now.

The attitudes and priorities of the founders and CEOs of companies filter into the products they make. The risks of being outed aren’t going to be on the mind of your average straight, white, male CEO. When you don’t have to worry about what people think of you, when you carry no secrets that risk you losing your family, friends, or livelihood, it’s easy to assume the rest of the world has the same luxury. It’s not hard to see a CEO who knows what is at risk, as much in 2015 as it was in 1975, to have your secrets shared with those you need to keep them from. And if you’re going to be keeping your secrets private from them, you’ll want to keep them private from advertisers too. Nothing like an automated ad serving algorhitm to show you something that jeopardizes your secrets, without the awareness and compassion of humanity behind it.

One huge benefit of increasing diversity in the technology industry is to have more points of view into solving problems. Would Facebook have opted to reveal memberships in groups publically if one of the decision makers in the process was gay, and knew the risks? It’s hard to say for sure, but I can imagine knowing the risks would give them pause. We’ll never know for sure. Apple under Tim Cook is only one data point, and there’s other things that set it apart beyond just the CEO’s sexual orientation. They’re also not perfect, but they are taking the lead on privacy in a space where the focus is on forcing users to be more open, and algorithms to be more secret. I know which side I would prefer to be on, regardless of sexuality.

Everyone’s talking about ads, and tracking scripts, and web performance, and ads, and ads, and ads. As someone who works in media—albeit niche, specialized media—and someone whose job involves setting up lists and tracking codes for targeted advertising, it all hits home. It’s the part of my job I hate the most, even more than the gross pictures of dermatological disorders that end up in my inbox at least once a week. [1] Yet, as someone who also uses the web, who makes things for the web, who genuinely loves the web, and who wants to somehow make a living with making things for the web, I’m genuinely conflicted as hell about the whole thing.

Let’s face it, advertising is a necessary evil—only not actually evil, at least in theory. Someone has a product they need to sell. Someone has a need for a product to do something for them. Advertising is often how that gap is bridged, and there is nothing wrong with that. Yet, some people roll their eyes and view advertising as an affront to all it means to be human. Sure, many ads are bad, and advertisers in the digital age want more and more data so they can get closer and closer to the creepy world of one-to-one advertising—which both evil and unnecessary—but advertising as a general concept is not.

Speaking as both a digital media employee who has to deal with ads, and as a web user who uses an ad blocker and a tracking script blocker at home, the frustration—and the conflict—arises, when advertising becomes more important than content. We’re not going to The Verge, or iMore, or wherever to look at ads. We’re going there to read cool stuff, and the ads are getting in the damn way.

I’ve taken to unblocking the ads on sites that use ads in a respectful, polite manner. Stuff like The Loop, Six Colors, Daring Fireball, Metafilter, etc. Usually these are places that use ad networks like Fusion and The Deck, who also don’t target and track users. These ad networks, however, don’t work at the scale needed to support a site like iMore, or The Verge. So, they’ve gotta go for the more gross, and intrusive ads.

But what’s the alternative? The content model on the web is broken. Nobody wants to pay for anything—who do you know who has a digital subscription to the New York Times, anyway? The only way to make money at media scale with ads is more intrusive, obnoxious ads, and it’s clear audiences are fed the fuck up. It’s unlikely that online audiences are going to start coughing up money for commoditized content. With Apple, Facebook, and other tech companies creating content platforms that free readers from the burden of obnoxious ads, content is only going to be more commoditized, and harder to make money from.

I don’t have a solution, but I can’t help but think people would be less inclined to block ads if the ads weren’t so obnoxious. We’re a long way from the days of egregious pop-up ads that spawn more pop-up ads, flashing neon-colored “YOU ARE OUR 100,000th VISITOR” banners, and “Punch the Monkey” garbage that could crash your entire machine… but that’s a small blessing. There’s going to have to be a reckoning and a pushback against the current ad model, and it won’t be pretty when it happens. I just hope I’m in a place far from ground zero when it blows up.

[H]ow many of us are asked to design things that have the potential of causing harm to the people who come into contact with our work? How many of us will work on privacy settings for large social networks at some point? Will we think of how those settings affect those who interact with them? How many of us will design user interfaces for drop cams? Will we think of the privacy violations they might cause? How many of us will design products that put people in strangers’ cars? Will we consider those passengers’ safety as we design our solution? And will we see it as our responsibility to make sure these products are as safe as possible?

And if we come to the conclusion that these products cannot be made safe, how many of us will see it as our responsibility to raise our hands and say “I’m not making this.”

— In Praise of the AK-47 — Dear Design Student — Medium

All of us who make things, words, websites, products, we’re responsible for what we make and the effects they have—intended and unintended. The sooner we learn this, the sooner we focus on the people who use what we make over the profit we can make, the better the world will be.