Tablet manufacturers let us all down, or, why Windows 8 flopped.

[liam_on_linux]

Everyone hated the Win8 UI. I used it for a couple of months, until it timed-out and wanted to be activated – at which point I went back to Ubuntu. I learned Windows on a machine with no mouse – at the end of the 1980s, my employers didn't own a single PC mouse – so I drive it using the keyboard far more heavily than most sighted people. Launch an app: Win+R, binary name, enter: Win+R, control, enter. Win+R, cmd, enter. Not sure of the binary name? Win key, type a few letters, glance to check, return. Same UI as Spotlight on a Mac. I didn't care that there wasn't a Start menu, or that the launcher was full-screen. I barely saw it.

I had a brief play with a couple of Win8 tablets and several phones. It was actually a bloody good touchscreen interface, more powerful and capable than either iOS or Android, and with some good touches taken from Blackberry 10 and the short-lived Palm WebOS.

Resizable gadgets that convey live info without opening the app. Gestures to summon launcher and switcher without wasting any screen space – swipe onto the screen from different edges.

At the time, I too thought tablets were manifestly going to be the future. MS has made good business from betting the farm on the next gen of tech. WinNT was barely usable on the contemporary 1993 kit – it was designed for 1998 tech. Win2000 was designed for 2003-4 kit.

But tablet makers didn't deliver. Apple sat on its hands: iPads got slimmer, faster, higher-res and with more storage, and nothing else. Google failed to commit: Android Honeycomb looked good, but almost all the big-screen UI enhancements were gradually dropped from later Android versions. Why? No answer ever came. Hardware makers didn't produce tablets with lots of ports, multiple storage media, and expandability – all the things laptops had. So everyone bought a tablet & then kept it, because the later models weren't much better. They got replaced when dropped or when the battery failed. Massive early adoption then it flatlined.

The Win8 interface was genuinely very good, if you had a touchscreen. But the hardware didn't follow suit, so it was beached, high and dry, on mouse-and-keyboard desktops and half-assed laptops with touchscreens.

If your hands are on a keyboard and your thumbs on a trackpad, then it becomes better to make the trackpad multitouch and give it rich gestures -- which is what Apple did. I've been using OS X since v10.0. I'm typing on it right now. The way kids with it use multitouch is amazing. No menu bar, no dock, no "desktop" as such, just fast fluid gestures to flip from fullscreen-app to fullscreen-app, or flip to a tiled overview of all of them then zoom back in. It's a mode of usage from someone with a high-end laptop and nothing else (partly because the laptops are so expensive, of course) and it's profoundly different to desktop windows-icons-mouse-pointer usage. You simply can't do this stuff with a mouse.

Apple were right: don't bolt a touchscreen onto a laptop. You get "gorilla arm", constantly moving the hands away from their natural position, etc.

Or, just make it all screen. Segment your market on whether people want expansion etc.

This left MS in a corner, so it had to DIY. The Surface devices are the result. Everyone I know who has one loves it. But it was too little too late to change the course of the whole industry.

Google is experimenting with ChromeOS tablets, but it's crippled because the good kit is coming from China – behind the Great Firewall, with no Google, so ChromeOS can't work. Chuwi could make amazing Chromebooks -- they have cheapo convertible Surface-like tablets, running both Windows and Android, on the same device if you wish. But they're in China so they can't adopt ChromeOS.

The PC market has always been driven by price. Some loyalists will pay thousands for a Surface, just as others will for an iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. I won't. I am a keyboard fetishist (apparently) and I'm also cheap, so I use 2nd hand Thinkpads with good keyboards that still work fine.

I have a Chuwi tablet, a Hi9 Air. It was £250 new, with tax & duty, for the spec of a £1000 Apple or Samsung at the time. It's 3Y old & still fine.

If I could have a convertible ChromeBook with a high spec for that kind of money, I'd try it. But I can't. I can have disposable plastic crap, or I need to pay £1000 or something absurd for a Pixel. Yeah, no. Hard no.

And of course the Linux desktop is woefully neglected and nobody is even seriously trying tablet operations. What do you expect? These folks like stuff like Vi, Emacs and tiling window managers. They took years to adopt anti-aliasing. Only Canonical had the vision to go for a converged desktop/tablet/phone UI, but bloody HackerNews didn't like it, so they ditched it. IMHO the only mistake they made was going for their own display server – Mir was a step too far. Wayland was already clearly the future. If Unity 8 had run on Wayland, they might not have been stretched so thin and they might have got it out the door in reasonable time.