THE HISTORY AND PURPOSE OF TABLETS, THE TABLET VS LAPTOP WAR, AND HOW APPLE AND SAMSUNG CHANGED THE MARKET

What are tablets for? For gaming? For studying? For watching movies or for online meetings? I answer: for all of these. But what were tablets first used for? Why do they exist? In this article, I will address this question. It's going to be a long article, but it will worth it.

Tablets was first developed in 3200 B.C. to write and save the important informations of that time. The ancestors of modern notebooks and tablets, these tablets shed light on the present.

First examples of modern tablets worked as portable computers. There was no such thing as Laptop back then, there were computers with separate accessories like current iMacs, and since they also have cables, it was almost impossible to carry them and take them anywhere. Therefore, a portable device was needed that could do almost anything that computers can do. Because people needed computers in various places. In the kitchen, living room,, kids' room, maybe even bedroom, and for each of these rooms, buying a different computer and setting them up one by one was both expensive and difficult.

This is where the need for tablets was born. The first examples of modern tablets were for simple functions like calculators, they got better day by day, and with the launch of the iPad, the tablet market completely changed. And then, there have been modern tablets with home buttons that could access the Internet, take pictures, and draw.

After the launch of the first iPad, people began to ask, "Is the age of laptops over?" Because in those years, iPads could do everything that laptops could do, and people began to ask, "Why would I use heavy and large laptops when there is a portable and small device called iPad?" Laptop manufacturers, who are aware of these questions, started to add powerful memories, storages and processors to laptops, but they could not keep up with the iPad. iPads flourished when laptops prevailed, and laptops flourished when iPads prevailed. In last 6 years, brands such as HP, Asus, Lenovo, whose names we hear frequently, have made different agreements with different companies, and thus laptops stayed as the winner of the iPads VS Laptops war for a long time. Of course Apple still have been alone, because Apple have not been making deals, it have been owning brands secretly.

In recent years, Apple's keyboard covers for iPads a.k.a Magic Keyboards have become very popular and competition has heated up again. Apple hit the laptop companies hardest in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022. In 2018, Apple introduced the iPad Pro without a home button. If you connect the 12.9-inch version of this iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard, it looks like a laptop, and this iPad Pro is almost laptop-powered. iPad Pro, which is like a laptop in terms of both appearance and performance, crushes laptops of the same price, even 2-3 times more expensive laptops could not perform close to the performance of iPad Pro, but that was the first step.

In 2019, at WWDC 2019, Apple launched a new OS exclusively for iPads. Thanks to this OS, iPads became independent from iPhones, and now only iPad-specific features could be developed. And Apple, who wanted to turn the iPad into a laptop, have been able to do so thanks to iPadOS.

Book cover keyboard, infinity and 12.9-inch display, iPadOS. What more to turn the iPad into a laptop? The chip, the iPad Pro still used the Bionic chip whch had in iPhones. Knowing this, Apple introduced the M1 chip for Macs in 2021, again in 2021, M1 chip placed on the next-generation iPad Pro. Yes, a chip have been in a laptop now on the iPad Pro.

And this year, at its event on March 9 in 2022, Apple announced that it has also placed the M1 chip in the iPad Air, which is way cheaper than the iPad Pro. At the time of writing this article, the 5th generation iPad Air, which will be available for pre-order soon, has the M1 chip. In this way, Apple has been placed the M1 chip in an iPad that more people can easily buy. Who knows, maybe soon with iPadOS 16, Apple will offer an UI just like Samsung Dex and the lapop VS iPad war will heat up even more.

Speaking of Samsung, let's talk about Samsung. Because what Samsung does is worth telling and inspiring. Samsung also has an innovation that changed the tablet market: the S Pen. The S Pen, which was first used on tablets with the Galaxy Note 10.1, increased the reasons for using a tablet. Samsung, which started to challenge even with the graphic tablets with the S Pen on the tablet, did not even compete with the graphic tablets, but beat the graphic tablets with the first S Pen compatible tablet. I remember it, it had been so fun to draw and take notes with the Gaaxy Note 10.1. Yes, as you may have noticed, the first tablet with S Pen did not have the phrase Galaxy Tab in its name. It have been launched as a larger version of the first Galaxy Note.

And in 2018, Samsung also introduced the first infinite display Galaxy Tab, the Galaxy Tab S4. And in 2019, the Tab S5e became the first Galaxy Tab that came out of with the One UI 1 in the box. And in 2020, the Galaxy Tab S7 | S7+ became the first Galaxy Tab that has a dual camera and S Pen slot on the back. And in 2022, the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra became the first tablet that has a notch and with this notch, the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra became the first tablet that has a dual front camera.

And you see, the tablet market is came from where to where. We're still counting at the beginning of 2022, let's see what tye of "world's first..."s will be experienced in the tablet market this year. And i'll be very excited t share these firsts with the people via my blog and YouTube channel. See you.