When the iPad launched just a few years ago, it didn’t immediately attract global approval; it didn’t fly off the shelves faster than production could handle for months and months.
Sure, there was the initial rush as Apple’s early adopters fought over those first few iPads off the production line, but the earliest incarnation of the tablet simply wasn’t that great.
It wasn’t until later models were introduced, with better connectivity options and so forth, that the iPad really began to find its place in the market, not to mention in the hands of almost every TV presenter in the world (or so it now seems).
For a short period, everything was truly golden for Apple, with their device the only option in a newly created niche – one that had existed before, but only for specialist users, and was never previously intended as a mass market option.
Now though, other manufacturers are launching tablets of their own, and many of those come with the possibility of a detachable full keyboard, helping to make them seem a little less alien to traditionalists.
So what’s stopping these other devices from making it to significant levels of market penetration? The answer is inertia; the mass market has become accepting of the fact that iPads are the only tablets, and nobody on the consumer side is especially keen to make the effort to change that.
The same situation exists in operating systems, where even people who dislike Microsoft with a passion will continue to use Windows indefinitely; and with search engines, where there is growing mistrust of Google, yet few people want to have to relearn how to search efficiently – and how to interpret Bing results quickly.
But you don’t have to think like everybody else, particularly if you are interested in getting a tablet that isn’t an iPad – and, significantly, this is still the case if you already have an iPad that doesn’t particularly matter much to you.
I get through a lot of gadgets, and because of that I think I am much more accustomed than most people to simply disposing of them once I am done with them; I don’t get sentimental, I simply get what money I can for them on the second-hand market, and move on.
Even if you don’t own or use a lot of devices, you can still do the same – and the money you get from selling your iPad could be put towards a tablet with a full keyboard from another manufacturer.
Some people will always be critics, whatever you choose to do, so there’s no point worrying about what other people say; if you don’t love the iPad, get rid of it, and you’ll probably end up much happier as a result.
About Gavin Tracey
Despite being an early adopter of tech, I try to dispose of devices that don’t impress me. This led me to sell my first iPad when I realised that, to me, it was little more than an expensive gimmick.