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Are Tablets Just Too Expensive?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at PCWorld they're asking a simple but valid question: Are tablets just too expensive? They point out that, weight-for-weight, pure silver is cheaper than most tablets, and that, like jewelery, tablets are highly thievable. The worst thing might be that the nascent tablet platform gets written-off as a high-priced niche for people with more money than sense."
I don't think they are "too" expensive. I just don't see why I would buy a tablet that does the same thing my HTC Evo already does...
Doubtful. Silver is pretty cheap. Even if it doubles in price, lots of things will still be more expensive than silver, by weight. Heck, a good kitchen knife is more expensive than silver by weight.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They point out that, weight-for-weight, pure silver is cheaper than most tablets,
I've also noticed that compared to a microwave oven, tablets are mediocre at thawing frozen dinners.
The worst thing might be that the nascent tablet platform gets written-off as a high-priced niche for people with more money than sense.
I wrote off the IPad precisely as described as soon as it was announced!
Last time I tested my brick of silver could not connect to the 802.11 network that we have here, until they do I find the tablet much more useful.
It should also be noted that owning a hunk of silver doesn't cost you an additional $30/month data plan.
Yes, tablets are too expensive. But it's early days for them yet. Blame Apple's marketing department for making a bleeding-edge gadget into a mainstream must-have item. They'll stabilize in price eventually.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
pure silver is cheaper than most tablets
What is the point of that argument? It is a worthless apples to Volkswagens comparison.
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It looks like PCWorld may be trying to get page hits by jumping on the tablet bandwagon, and they are just trying to say something different, anything so long as it is different. Unfortunately for PCWorld, they forgot to make their article relevant.
Film at 11.
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I work with baseball players and it's extremely helpful to be able to put some clips and pictures on a tablet and take that out to the field to show them what I want to do. I used to do that with my iTouch, but an iPad is better because of the bigger screen. An iPad is also lighter and cheaper than a laptop.
Maybe a tablet is overkill for some applications, but it's not for the ones I use it.
This is the general problem with cost-based thinking rather than value-based thinking.
I'm not sure what the motivation to ask the question "are they too expensive" comes from, when tablets (in generalities) are one of the hottest selling segments of the computing market right now. Can you imagine how long a marketing guy at Apple would have a job if he stood up in a board meeting and suggested that the iPad was too expensive...all while they're selling them by the millions.
Now if the question were different, like "is tablet 'x' too expensive", then it might be an interesting conversation. I've seen several new tablets poised for sale at costs HIGHER than the ipad...which seems like a ridiculously short sighted move. You don't enter a market with a "me too" product priced higher than the established leader (unless you're Apple), unless you have something markedly better to offer. And frankly, "it's android" doesn't rise to that level.
Unfortunately right now we have to kinds of tablets in the market - those which are useful and those which aren't. Most Android based tablets currently being sold are absolutely worthless due to poor software, poor screens, and extremely poor battery life. Then on the other side you have things like the iPad and a very small selection of "premium" Android devices.
In the future you might see tablets come down in price but just like everything else they will be held back by batteries and or components which draw less power. Ultimately cheap manufacturers cannot cut corners when cutting power consumption since good modern batteries are expensive to make and good efficient components use rare earth metals.
Indeed.
Tech like this.. money actually doesn't play much of a part. There is enough diversity in tablets, that if someone really wants one, they can probably find one in their price range.
Personally, I have no interest in a tablet. It has nothing to do with money.. it's just not something I want or need. The fact that a tablet costs more than the same weight in an arbitrary precious metal has nothing to do with anything.
I think another element is that tablets are primarily oriented at content consumption, which places them into the same category as standalone DVD players, MP3 players, handheld game consoles, etc. And within those categories, yes, a tablet is at least double the cost of other devices. At least with a notebook the possibility of productivity exists, whether or not it is always utilized in that manner.
As a comparison, you can purchase a rather nice and large LCD television with built-in internet connectivity such as Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, etc for the same price as a premium tablet. It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
Better known as 318230.
Yes, if you want mass penetration. No, if you're trying to create an elite super-class.
On its own, gasoline won't get you very far. Ideally, you should have a car or motorbike to put it in.
Although I imagine that cars are also cheaper per kilogram than tablets.
Great call, the things are selling like hotcakes. Gartner says sales will quadruple in 2011.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Salt.
Pepper.
I say yes but the market may say otherwise.
It may be that many people have uses for computing devices that don't fit into the desktop or laptop or smartphone models. For example, the iPad can be used to review pictures taken on a digital camera, without the need for a heavy laptop. I've seen them used for task training in industrial plants, and as a handy portable process monitor in a similar plant. Something the size and weight of a clipboard is a lot easier to deal with than a laptop. A thin tablet is easy to handle - particularly if you're not sitting at a desk while you're working.
I don't like how some (iPads) are offered as Wifi only or for 100 more you get 3G. I was under the impression you need to sign up for a plan.
I want both WiFi and cell data for later short-term use like a vacation. Price the one model in the middle of the two and be done with it.
I'm not sure what you don't like about giving the customer the choice of not paying for a 3G radio if they don't want one. For example, a company can save a fair amount of money if they buy the Wifi-only model for use in an industrial plant.
The Wifi-only models don't have a 3G radio in them. The 3G radio costs something. Most likely not $100, but certainly not $0. At some point, there has to be a price difference.
The 3G model can be used without 3G service. You don't have to sign up for anything if you want to use a 3G iPad only over wifi.
It sounds like you're not the target market for this type of product, or you simply don't know much about them.
Putting moderation advice in your
Tablets are currently closed systems for the most part.
Give me an open system and we'll talk.
I don't understand gold either.
There are many reasons for it. NPR's "Planet Money" did a podcast asking the question "Why Gold?", and came to the conclusion that even if they had it to do all over again, gold is pretty much the best metal for using as a currency. It is rare, but not too rare, it is very inert, and it is easy to identify.
Podcast: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the-tuesday-podcast-why-gold
I didn't get it before until I listened to that.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
You can get Android tablets at $100...I would hardly call that expensive. However, like anything else, you get what you pay for too. This article only focuses on high end tablets...which just like any other product, will always be more expensive than their low end counterparts.
The iPad has been worth every penny so far. $50 a month (500+tax)/12 is less than my smartphone bill, and it's well worth not having to lug around the laptop most of the time. I've saved a ton of money on magazines and books which are now always available in one 'book'. And it's a great little gaming device so I've saved a lot of money I would have spent on much more expensive DS games instead.
Now I'd like to escape the Apple ecosystem, so a ~$500-600 10 inch tablet with Honeycomb would be extremely attractive. And certainly justifiable, especially with the sale of the iPad which is still worth quite a bit used.
The ones without any sense here are the people who can't even imagine the huge number of ways you can use a tablet to improve your life. Unless you're one of the people who really needs a full laptop with you constantly - then it's arguably too much for too little gain.
In fairness, a gallon of gasoline and a match can get you to prison, or the afterlife, even without a vehicle to put it in. That could be pretty far.
A year before the iPad came out, a friend of mine spent well over $2,500 on a MacBook. She saved money from her $10/hr job to buy it. A year later, asked for help writing a resume to try to find a better job -- and it turns out that she didn't even know if she had a word processor installed on it. Literally all she had ever done with it was use iTunes to play music and use Safari to check her mail, look at web pages, and watch music videos.
My friend really wanted an Apple product. She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.
I'm not sure if this can be generalized to all tablets in general, but I think it speaks to exactly the right price point for the iPad. It was a brilliant move for Apple to introduce the iPad at a time when people were starting to have less money to spend on computers. People who hesitated about buying, say, a MacBook Air could still buy the cachet of having the latest Apple product. And it hasn't seemed to cannibalize Apple sales at all.
(Disclaimer: I've used a MacBook Pro as my main computer for years, and I really like it. That may or may not have colored my opinion.)
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Right, like the iPhone and iPod. As a shareholder, I can live with these 10-year "fads."
I'm sure you are putting your money where your mouth is and shorting Apple r buying puts, right Nostradamus?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
IMHO the best is the tablet with the physical keyboard. i.e. those nascent laptops where the lid (screen) can swivel 360 and fold back down so it looks like a thick tablet. That way you have a tablet when u want one, and a Real keyboard when u want to enter lots of text. Pat
Tablets are currently closed systems for the most part.
Give me an open system and we'll talk.
What is there to to talk about? You don't seem to be the target demographic of tablets. "Open" brings nothing to the table for an end "user". Absolutely nothing. It also is no substitute for a rich and powerful API with deep access to OS functionality.
Speaking as a developer of enterprise systems, I would always prefer access to a complete API that allows me to do what I need to get done rather than having to rely partially on API calls and partially on direct calls to the internal database/private APIs. The main reason why you want to stick to a public API is that have a much higher chance having your code break when a update or new version comes a long when you access unexposed internals than sticking with the public API.
Open systems tend to encourage programmer laziness on the part of both the third party developers and developers of the platform and end users end up suffering because of it with bugs and incompatibilities when a new update is released.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It is rare, but not too rare, it is very inert, and it is easy to identify.
That's why fiat currency is so great. It's exactly as rare as we decide it should be. It can be made easy to identify and hard to forge. It's not exactly inert, but in a paper currency, that's a benefit, as the supply can be reduced through attrition. To link a paper currency to gold just removes our ability to adjust its rarity. Gold is great in a collapsed society that can't rely on a central authority to limit the money supply, but in a civilized country, it's just too limited.
The only problem comes in when people can't agree how rare the currency should be. Some people think we have too much, some think there's too little, others think there should be no choice in the matter and it should be set based on a pile of gold bars stashed away being unhelpful to anyone.
Our fractional reserve banking system gives us a debt backed currency. People borrow money by putting up stuff they value as collateral. Now they need to work to earn money keep their collateral. Because those people are willing to work to earn money, people without debt are willing to work to earn money so they can pay those people. Round and round it goes and our fiat currency is worth something.
If no one had debt, our money would be a problem. Luckily, property tax creates annual debt.
Our money isn't backed by gold, but it is backed by houses and cars and a bunch of other stuff.
So, do you understand Fiat Currency any better? Why Fiat Currency?
The problem with Fiat Currency is that it has no basis in value, except the faith of people in it. You think that is any better way of valuing something?
It's the same way of valuing something. Gold only works because we agree on it, just like any other kind of fiat currency. Gold is a bit more primitive and reliable, but otherwise it's the same. If people stop accepting gold, it loses its value. It has no inherent value. Unlike a functional device. Or food.
Last time I tested my brick of silver could not connect to the 802.11 network that we have here...
Sure it can. Once. If you throw it hard enough.
wrong disaster, you need the werewolf apocalypse to have any use for your brick of solid silver
People, what a bunch of bastards
Gold is of little practical use. If people didn't use it for jewelry it would have no attractiveness at all. It is hardly ever used in dentistry any more. Only very small amounts are used in electronics, and only for it's conductivity and anti-oxidation attributes. And as an actual currency (as in coins) people used to file small amounts of gold off large numbers gold coins, effectively stealing money from the money itself!
The only reason gold is valuable is because there are enough people out there that have been convinced that it is valuable. The expense of extracting it from the earth doesn't mean it has any value. Fossilized dinosaur shit is rare, very inert, and easy to identify, but you don't see people using it for money. Maybe if Steve Jobs hyped it as the new currency for Mac users it might gain some traction....
Not to mention that, like diamonds, slave labor is used to extract most gold and the market is controlled by cartels with ties to all sorts of human rights abuses all over the world.
Gold isn't money.
Gold is simply a marketable commodity.
The value of gold as real money is a myth perpetuated by people who have a lot of it to sell, while paying maybe 1/10th of the worth of it when they go to buy it back.
My AAPL stock is up like 40 fold in the last 20 years. So yeah, I'll go with Steve Jobs' vision instead of yours, if it's all the same to you, Nostradamus.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Oh my god, a Xeon X5690 weighs only a few grammes and costs $1700, that's 4 or 5 times the price of gold! How dare they make them so expensive!
No the problem with Fiat Currency is that Fiats are made in Italy and are quite small vehicles, so we are limiting our capacities..
Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.
~Mayer Amschel Rothschild (alleged)
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Unless you compare it to gold, platinum, prescription drugs, silicon chips, rare earths, truffles, or caviar. It just doesn't seem like silver is the, ah, gold standard of expensive things. As you say, many processed and finished products (such as tablets) are more expensive than silver bullion, which is what the article compares it to. It seems nonsensical to compare tablets to silver bullion and conclude that tablets are too expensive.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I am not sure if that is a car analogy or not.
Our money is backed completely by faith in the U.S. government. Its value is based on the belief that the federal reserve will artificially limit its supply.
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Actually the value of gold as a currency increases over time, which causes deflation. Deflation is bad for the economy since it provides a disincentive to work, invest and spend since your money can become more valuable by just leaving it under the mattress.
"We" are the people who elect the government who appoints the "asshole" who decides what it should be. I don't have enough data, or training, to be able to decide what the total money supply should be, but it's my job to vote for someone I can trust to look past their ulterior motives and do what makes sense economically. If that means not voting for Liberal or Conservative (I'm Canadian), then so be it. We can protest, but for the most part, we're unqualified to have an opinion on the matter and are just respouting someone else's talking points. If we trust their opinions, then we need to try and convince them to run for office and elect them, so they can have a direct hand in policy. If, on the other hand, we wouldn't trust them in office, then maybe we shouldn't trust them out of office. Anyway, too far off topic. Yeah.... tablets are a waste of money.
By adjusting the fractional reserve requirements for banks in a gold-backed currency, you can increase or reduce the money supply just as easily as with a fiat currency. This is why the goldbugs are such total morons: They imagine that there's some limit on the money supply based on the limit of the gold supply; unless you have a 1:1 correspondence between gold and dollars (an economically crippling thing in itself), there's no effective limit because you can always adjust the ratio--just like with a fiat currency.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Actually, they were using Solomn's gold to cover up fake theft.
The bad guy's plan was to get Newton executed for devaluing the currency by planting coins with less than the required amount of gold in the 'randomly selected samples' box, so during the test they'd come up light.
To counter the lack of weight in those coins, they had to put in something that was denser than than normal gold. Enter Solomn's gold, collected as part of some other scheme to gain immortality or something, but used here instead to save Newton's life.
Trying to figure out exactly what was going on in that series was pretty hard, though, so I could be entirely wrong.
Actually, this is exactly the reason that gold stayed as currency for so low. As we know from Archimedes, you can easily calculate the volume of things by displaced water, and gold was, for about 10,000 years of history, the densest material known to mankind (imaginary Solomon gold aside), so it was utterly impossible to forge or water down, and trivially easy to check the purity of with just a tub of water and a scale.
While we have since discovered denser things, gold is still cheaper than them (And a good percentage of them are radioactive!), so it still can't be forged in any useful way.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Actually, they do exist. I have one. It's an HP tc1100. Fujitsu also makes them. However, they are rare and the reason they are rare is the same reason other other tablets are rare: they simply suck. For a laptop, they are expensive due to the special screen. As a tablet, they are heavy and thick. You have to write on them with a stylus and it's fairly hard to do that as they are so thick. On top of that, it may have some tablet features, but it's still a desktop OS. Add on that they are usually sluggish and slow since they use a lower power processor to keep power and weight down. The swivel screen sounds neat, but functionally, it just doesn't really work well enough to provide any sort of demand. That's why they "don't exist".
Also from NPR on Gold:
"Every self-respecting tenured faculty member in economics this country, almost without exception, would laugh [the gold standard] out of court."
"Most economists agree that the gold standard was one of the causes of the Great Depression."
"The world only emerged from the Great Depression when countries started going off the gold standard. And he rattles off this long list of countries — Britain, the U.S., Japan, France and others — that started to recover from the Depression just after going off the gold standard"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/133662179/a-wingnut-argument-for-the-gold-standard
These are different conclusions than your summary.
Fiats are indeed rare in the US, but not too rare, and easy to identify by their cheap-yet-econmical styling.
It's like if someone was saying they didn't have a problem focusing on the analogy except that they don't like the Focus.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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That's why fiat currency is so great. It's exactly as rare as we decide it should be.
You mean the government can do so; it's called currency/market manipulation, and it tends to not work out so well for the little people.
It can be made easy to identify and hard to forge.
Money is historically very, very easy to forge. Gold, on the other hand, can't be in a fashion that some simple tests can verify.
It's not exactly inert, but in a paper currency, that's a benefit, as the supply can be reduced through attrition.
How is that a benefit? It then takes value out of the economy (again) to print more. You've absolutely no way to get a positive ledger simply through the operation of the system, without stealing/pulling from someone else's ledger.
If you view "currency" as something to trade for goods, fiat currency is bad. IF you view it as a tool for manipulating markets, fiat is great.
The only problem comes in when people can't agree how rare the currency should be. Some people think we have too much, some think there's too little, others think there should be no choice in the matter and it should be set based on a pile of gold bars stashed away being unhelpful to anyone.
And this is pretty much the exact reason we (and other countries) are having economic issues right now. Governments have been manipulating the economy through fiat currencies for the better part of the past 100 years, and it's starting to hurt due to how accurately it represents reality.
And who said gold bars stashed away was the way to do it? Gold itself, as currency, seems to make sense to me. If you need a smaller denomination, break it up or encapsulate it in stamped epoxy, or something. Prices and denominations could be in fractions of an ounce (or whatever metric you want to use).
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We've a few faculty that have purchased iPads. For all of them it is just a toy. They all continue to keep and use their desktop and laptop computers, one of them even has a netbook in addition to his laptop that he still keeps and uses. I've never seen them do any work with them, never even use them for a presentation which seems to be where they'd be most useful. They always travel with their laptops since they need them.
So the tablets are just tech gadgets, just toys. None of them have presented a convincing case as to what they want it for, what they'd use it for.
Nothing wrong with toys, but call it what it is. I've heard lots of hype about how amazingly useful they are in terms of productivity and so on but I've never met anyone who replaced their laptop with one for doing work. In actuality they all just get used for noodling around with, and often set aside.
Our student is the funniest. He's a big time Apple zealot and of course got one as soon as it came out. Talked up a storm about how awesome it was and how it would revolutionize so many things, including gaming because "You can use all 10 fingers!" (apparently I don't on my keyboard according to him). He'd bring it to work all the time and usually use it to do e-mail, it was amusing watching him use the on screen keyboard at about 10-20wpm when he can type 80+ on a real keyboard.
However these days, the iPad is not seen at work. He doesn't bother to bring it in anymore. Apparently as "revolutionary" as it may be, a normal computer is still what is called for here. The reality is, of course, he got it as a toy and it isn't useful to carry it in and now that the shiny new factor has worn off it just sits around his house.
You know what else is "too" expensive? Fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy food... basically, anything you don't want to pay that much for is, by definition, too expensive.
And the comparison to silver is just plain dumb. OK, so silver is cheaper, and you know what else? It does FUCKING NOTHING but sit there, displacing its volume in air, and reacting passively to Earth's gravity. Can it show you pictures? Send messages? Play movies and music? Can it do anything at all other than hurt your foot when dropped?
Saying that printer ink costs more than gold is interesting because printing is such a mundane task and ink has been around for centuries. (In fact, homo sapiens were using ink before they ever placed a value on gold.) Saying a ridiculously complex device, packed full of the finest microscopic circuits China can produce in volume, costs roughly the same as the least valuable "precious metal" by weight, isn't quite as interesting.
The one interesting thing is that you can indeed trade twenty pre-1964 silver dollars for a base iPad. :-)
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How about the ability to use VLC or other GPL programs (banned on iOS, OSX, and Microsoft "app stores")?
VLC was pulled off the app store because of a guy named Remi who also happens to work at Nokia demanded it be removed. He was the main developer and demanded the removal of VLC from the Appstore. The GPL is not incompatible with the appstore but Remi still retains copyright over the majority of the code so he had a right to request it pulled from the store. The GPL does not trump copyright.
How about applications implementing functionality that goes beyond what the OS developer thought of?
There is nothing in the rules that prevents you from reinventing a new and better wheel. You just cannot call iOS private APIs because they can change from one release to the next.
Your comment about APIs is framed badly; no API is perfect, and so rather than being denied access to the functionality of a broken or buggy method call, being able to work around it is better. How about being able to use programs written in more than one language?
You can use C/C++ and Objective C in the official app store. All of those are C based and can be compiled with the GCC compiler. What are you looking for exactly? If you cannot develop in any of those languages then you have no business developing for mobile platforms in the first place. I have had to work around a missing API in my day job and I hate having to do it because I know that I would have to do a major rewrite if we ever upgraded the software we are integrating with.
How about not needing asinine "jailbreaks" to get full hardware access?
End users care about VLC and Firefox. End users care about tethering. End users don't want to wait for a program to get translated completely into another language before it's ported (or wait for any reason, really). End users want to pick their own applications for certain tasks, just like on their desktop operating systems.
How are jailbreaks any different than rooting an Android phone? How do either apply to "end users"? They only apply to nerdy enthusiasts. VLC not being available is the result of the main developer not wanting it on the platform. Most end users are not clamoring for Firefox. The last I heard, it was buggy and slow.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Who's this "we" that you speak of. Fiat currency is as rare as some asshole with ulterior motives decides it should be. I'm not trying to imply that gold is the solution, ...
Having owned a few Fiats, I think a Fiat backed currency is a terrible idea. The damn things just don't last. And convertibility? Hah! It's all one way. You spend currency to buy one, lots more to keep it running, and then you can never get squat for it if you want to sell it. Gold is a much better choice.
:-)
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You're making the same mistake again. Price is not the same as value.
Just because people have placed a high "value" on gold for thousands of years does not make it any less a scam. The problem is, there's so much power tied up in gold now, there's a lot of incentive to keep the bubble inflated.
You know you're close to the end, though, when the people selling gold as an investment have to use fear as a motivating tool. As in, "If the economy collapses, you'll need gold to buy food!!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
"You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction.
For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money.
Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?"
Taking that for what it is (and as far as I've googled around, its a reasonably accurate statement of values of the various entities), despite the what the libertarian echo chamber says, gold is way OVER valued, not under...
Oh, no! Get the gTablet. Then post back and let me know what you think.
I can't justify one myself, but as a geek I can enjoy one vicariously. :)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I've always thought tablets were way too expensive. They cost more than a laptop for something that does less than a laptop. Most tablets are about $500 and are about 800 MHz, and 1 Gig? of RAM, with 4 GB of storage. My currently notebook was $400 has dual core 2GHz, 4 GB Ram and 320 GB of storage. And can run full programs, not just apps. A tablet is basically a toy, that only fulfills a few small needs, but costs more than a computer. Sure its a little more portable, but still not small enough to put in your pocket. So you are left carrying a backpack or shoulder bag. At which point you might as well bring your laptop with you. The ones you can get from China for $100-$150 seem to have the right price point, but I wonder about the build quality. Plus most are missing out on key features like multitouch.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Yeah, I was an iPad doubter when it came out (and still haven't bought one, or any tablet for that matter - I agree with TFA that they're too expensive), but I've seen a few killer applications for them:
1) Travel. I carry my laptop on planes, but it's so much of a pain to get them out, cram them into the minuscule space you get in economy, and put them away 30 minutes before landing that I usually just pull out a book and read the whole flight. (Not to mention on longer flights my laptop will run out of juice.) But an iPad is well suited for that use. Click it on, click it off, and plenty of space to go around.
2) Education. Currently, schools use netbooks at a lot of sites, which gives them enough of a charge to last a whole school day, but at middle and high schools, the time spent booting up, shutting down, etc., cuts into the amount of time you can spend doing stuff during a class period. Additionally, things like iPads autosync with iTunes every night, so they essentially wipe and reformat automatically, meaning your machines can be modified by kids during the day (though you keep the marketplace shut down) and then reset to a pristine state at night. It also allows pushing updates to the machines to be done very easily. With PCs, you have to buy expensive software to do the same thing.
3) Notepads. When I am in a meeting, I tend to just take notes by hand, or punch it into my smartphone. iPads work better at this. Again, much faster than pulling out a laptop and booting it up to take a couple lines worth of notes, but faster than a smartphone, and more readable and persistent than a physical notepad.
4) RPGs. They're great for pen and paper RPGs. You can use a digital character sheet interactively, and can pull up your (totally legal) PDFs of the rule books if you want to look it up. Whenever WOTC gets its act together, they'll allow the iPad to do character creation, treasure and reward tracking, and virtual tabletop gaming as well.
The downside, of course, is that they're expensive, and that it's one more toy you have to lug around. I haven't found any of the above compelling enough for my own use, but if our iPad-in-education project goes through, I'll probably have to get into it, as I'm supposed to be the technology guru. =)
I bought a Thinkpad X41 Convertible Tablet 6 years ago with Emperor Linux on it. It's quite light, and has all the virtues of a tablet and all the advantages of a laptop. It's the first computer I've ever had that I feel emotional about.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.