Welcome to the A16Z podcast. This is Benedict Evans, and I'm here with Steven Sinovsky, and we're here to talk about tablets and smartphones and the future of devices.

So, Stephen, one of the things that we've been talking about looking at the kind of what looks like

the flattening of iPad sales at Apple, at least for the moment, is this question of the sort of

the screen size and the device that people want and that people need. And all the pushback

against the idea that tablets were the future really kind of came from people

saying, well, you're still going to need a PC because you can only do the stuff that you need

to do on a PC. And a tablet is a sort of a luxury or an accessory or an optional device. But actually,

if you look at what's happening in the market, it seems like actually what real people are doing

is leapfogging tablets and going

straight to smartphones. So not only do they decide that a tablet is good enough, they actually

decide a smartphone is good enough. And so you've got this kind of funny dynamic where

maybe there's the big screen device that does certain things. And first that was a desktop,

and then it was a laptop,

and people said laptops are toys, and you needed a desktop.

And now you've got tablets, and people say tablets are toys,

and you need a laptop.

But they're kind of fighting it out in one space of a semi-portable, big-screen device.

And then you've got a smartphone,

which is a totally transformative thing

that puts the internet in everyone's pocket everywhere.

And maybe thinking about laptops, sorry, thinking about tablets and smartphones as the new category,

is an incomplete way of thinking about it.

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