Microsoft Tablet PC

~ the obituary ~

the tablet pc was the kind of thing engineers in american offices got issued, and i did not work in an american office. anyway, the years overlap mine almost perfectly though. xp tablet pc edition shipped in november '02, my engineering undergrad started a year later in ankara. what i was using was a commodity desktop my dad bought from a local shop on bestekar caddesi (close enough), then a generic acer laptop with no stylus for years. the convertible-with-pen tier was a $2000 enterprise sku class that did not move in turkey.

then. bill gates announced the platform spec at fall comdex in november '01 and the os bundle, windows xp tablet pc edition, shipped on november 7 '02. the concept was a normal-looking windows laptop with a wacom-style digitizer under the screen so you could use a pen for ink notes or screen rotation in slate mode. lenovo's thinkpad x-series tablet was the most loved of the bunch. hp and toshiba shipped their own convertibles through the same window.

the os bundle outlived the brand for a while (or whatever it was called). vista folded tablet support into most editions in '07. windows 7 in '09 kept the api but dropped the separate sku, which was the moment the tablet pc as a distinct windows variant stopped existing. the ipad shipped in april '10. microsoft started building the surface internally. the touch-first reboot landed with windows 8 in '12. honestly the original tablet pc concept was already a museum piece by then.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the comdex demo was bill gates handing a slate-format device around the audience and saying "within five years i predict it will be the most popular form of pc sold in america." for some reason. it did not happen on that timeline. the corporate it buyers who actually bought tablet pcs used them in hospitals and on construction sites. consumer demand never showed up at the price point microsoft was asking.

the digitizer hardware was genuinely good. wacom under-screen pens with pressure sensitivity arrived in '03-era laptops earlier than any other consumer category. illustrators and onenote users formed a small cult. it just never became the mainstream way to use windows.

~ the slide ~

the convertibles weighed about as much as a regular laptop and cost $400 to $1000 more. the bezels around the screen were thicker because of the digitizer underneath (or whatever it was called). the stylus added one more accessory to lose. handwriting recognition in ink was decent for english but not for any language with diacritics, which made it a hard sell across most of europe and asia.

the ipad in '10 reset the conversation about what a tablet was supposed to be. touch-first, no stylus. two pounds. apple's pitch was opposite to microsoft's on every axis, and consumers picked the apple one. microsoft watched the ipad's first year of sales and started the surface project the same year.

~ what it became ~

the surface line that arrived in late '12 is the visible descendant. detachable keyboard, optional pen, touch-first windows. it kept the pen-input ambition of the tablet pc and dropped the convertible-laptop chassis. the surface pen is direct lineage from the wacom digitizers on the early thinkpad x-series. the brand name is the only thing that did not survive (close enough).

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