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iPad heavy?

It will not be very heavy. It's sealed and filled with helium !
Will weigh less than a pound !
 
And yes it's not rare for a survey to include a question with multiple possible answers (trust me on that).

OK, suppose:

70% of people ticked 'at home' and one of the other three boxes,
20% just ticked 'at home'
10% just ticked one of the other boxes.

... i.e. 80% of people used their tablet away from home. That completely contradicts your position but could produce exactly the same chart.

Of course, the chart doesn't give enough information to actually support that position, any more than it supports yours, although it is pretty plausible that most people with a tablet would use it at home, regardless of where else they used it.

...and in any case none of this provides any evidence of the proportion of time spent using the tablets in each place ('use at home' could be 10 minutes on Plants vs Zombies of an evening after spending 8 hours iPadding your way around coffee shops and and public libraries), what importance they placed on each use, and whether size and weight was a factor in their home use.

As I said, maybe the chart is valid in its original context - although publishing a chart with a claim in its title and no specifics as to what it actually shows is a bad idea, but I went through 3 layers of websites that had cherry picked it to mean what they wanted it to mean, and never found the original source.
 
OK, suppose:

70% of people ticked 'at home' and one of the other three boxes,
20% just ticked 'at home'
10% just ticked one of the other boxes.

... i.e. 80% of people used their tablet away from home. That completely contradicts your position but could produce exactly the same chart.

Of course, the chart doesn't give enough information to actually support that position, any more than it supports yours, although it is pretty plausible that most people with a tablet would use it at home, regardless of where else they used it.

...and in any case none of this provides any evidence of the proportion of time spent using the tablets in each place ('use at home' could be 10 minutes on Plants vs Zombies of an evening after spending 8 hours iPadding your way around coffee shops and and public libraries), what importance they placed on each use, and whether size and weight was a factor in their home use.

As I said, maybe the chart is valid in its original context - although publishing a chart with a claim in its title and no specifics as to what it actually shows is a bad idea, but I went through 3 layers of websites that had cherry picked it to mean what they wanted it to mean, and never found the original source.

I don't disagree with you about that chart. I was in a hurry during my lunch break and I admit that I did not do any research about it and just pasted it here.

I still think (without any evidence to support it I guess) that the a good percentage of iPads are not used outside the house, so the weight aspect when travelling doesn't automatically applies to everyone's usage patterns.

Also I focused a little too much on the "crossing legs" position while there would be other ways to use it without having to hold it with one hand, like putting it on a desk/table. And then the debate turns into "if you have to put it on a desk, why not buy a desktop?".

Like I said some people (like me) prefer to use a touch screen interface whenever they can and consider it to be more important than portability. Of course an optional precise pen input would be nice for pixel perfect input, as long as applications don't become unusable without it. But still even without a pen there's a lot of productivity/content creation applications that don't need pixel perfect input and would benefit from a larger screen.

Problem when debating something like this is that the applications that would benefit the most are found in the long tail which means that while there is a non-negligible number of them in total, specific examples only apply to a small subset of users which alone might not look that significant. It's also not easy to find hard numbers to support specific claims about all those small market sub-segments.
 
I still think (without any evidence to support it I guess) that the a good percentage of iPads are not used outside the house

I'm inclined to agree that a fair percentage of iPads are rarely used outside of the house. However that doesn't mean that (a) occasional use outside the house isn't an important consideration for those people or (b) light weight and mobility isn't important inside the house.

And, yeah, you're focussing too much on 'crossing legs' vs. 'holding in one hand'. Bottom line is that the current iPad is sufficiently small and light that you can hold it however the hell you want, depending on what you're doing with it and where.

iPad 3 is, ball-park, the same weight, height and width as a hardback novel. Maybe there's good reason to think that it is in the goldilocks zone.

If I were to use a larger iPad, I'd want more sophisticated 'creative' software, and then I'd be concerned about the typing issue - I've tried using a physical keyboard with an iPad and it totally kills the ergonomics.

As I said, stylus-based graphics could be a sweet-spot - with an active stylus. I'm currently working on a project using Samsung Note 10 tablets, and being able to distinguish between pen-strokes and finger gestures really opens up the UI possibilities.
 
Absolutely agreed. They've also lost me as a customer - if they don't reintroduce the 17" line (with a 4K screen, obviously), I'm off to purchase a similarly-specced, high-end, 17"+ PC laptop or tablet capable of running OSx86.

I can almost agree with this, but with the increased resolution that the smaller displays now have that give you more screen real estate(or comparable) to the 17" with longer battery life, I don't see why that would be a reason to abandon a line of computers that you obviously rurally like and decide to go with something less quality.
 
There will never be 12" iPad like there is no iPad mini.

I would need one. For music production iPad Air is just too small.
 
I own and iPad and an iPad Mini.
99% of the time I use the mini simply because its easier to hold in one hand for long periods. Its not just a weight thing, it is also a "torque" issue where if you hold the iPad by a corner it has a rotational torque which is MUCH higher for the iPad than for the mini.
Did you try an iPad Air ?
I think it's best of both worlds .... Easy to hold but with a big screen.

Btw, back to topic, I can't see the use for a 12" tablet and I don't think Apple is going to release such a niche product.
 
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