Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

You Spend a Lot of Time With Your Mobile Device at Home — Even More if It’s an iPad

jobs_ipad_demoWe’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating: Your phones and tablets are amazing multimedia devices. But just because they’re mobile doesn’t mean you’re using them on the go.

Here’s the latest reminder, via the broadband usage report Sandvine put out earlier this month. The Internet services company said that mobile devices now account for 20 percent of traffic on home broadband networks. That’s up from 9 percent a year ago.

If you own an iPhone or an Android tablet or whatever, you know exactly why this is: You spend a lot of time with these things on the couch or at the kitchen table or wherever. (Remember how Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, after all — on that comfy leather chair.)

And a lot of that time you are watching or listening to something — Sandvine says that 25 percent of all audio and video data sent to mobile devices now happens at home.

Here’s Sandvine’s breakdown of entertainment traffic to mobile devices at home. Missing from the chart are two interesting Apple factoids: Sandvine says that the iPad accounts for more home traffic than any other device, at more than 10 percent; and it says that if you added up all of Apple’s devices (iPads, iPhones, Macs, etc.), the company ends up with more than 45 percent of home broadband usage.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work