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How We Know the iPad, Tablets, Are Now Mainstream

This article is more than 10 years old.

This will no doubt come as something of a disheartening shock to the hipsters and creative types who are thought of as the first adopters of new Apple products. The iPad, indeed tablets of all kinds like Amazon's Kindle, the Kindle Fire, Samsung's Galaxy, I'm afraid they're just mainstream now, about as fashionable and cutting edge as sliced white bread.

For the statistics agencies are now starting to put them into the standard basket of consumer goods which is then used to calculate the inflation rate:

Tablet computers such as Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tab have been added to the basket of goods and services used to calculate inflation rates

You really cannot get any more mainstream than that now, can you?

What does interest though is that clearly it's the iPad itself that has propelled this type of computer into the index. And yet the iPad is only two years old....not quite even that in fact. So here's a question: has any other product made it into the consumer index so quickly? Ever anywhere?

Even if we go back to the Microsoft Tablet as the start, that's still only a decade. I wouldn't be at all surprised that nothing has made it that quickly either to be honest.

And to think, there are some who are claiming this is the age of The Great Stagnation.