My $200 Laptop Can Beat Your $500 Tablet

Roblimo writes "Yes, we know tablets like the iPad are the wave of the future and that PCs and laptops are dead. But some of us see tablets as laptops with their keyboards missing and a few hundred bucks tacked onto the price."

Comments

Table.

[Seumas]

Yes, but I can't rest my feet on a laptop, like I can my table.

Anyway, the cost of the device is hardly relevant. Aside from portability, the real differences are consuming versus creating. So far, tablets are basically giant consumption devices. Listen to music, read books, watch videos, visit other people's websites. Not so much made for creating (unless the limit of creating, your case, is writing blog updates).

It's kind of like comparing a television with a video camera.

Re:Table.

[Tom]

The iPad does give you a nice user experience, if all you basically want to do is consume. However if you want to do anything more than play with a toy, you may need something different.

I'm afraid you don't get what Steve Jobs does: Most people today and certainly the vast majority in the iPad target audience, already have a computer. You can try selling them a new one, or you can sell them a totally new device that satisfies needs that their existing machine doesn't.

Take me, for example. I'll be buying an iPad 2 when it comes out this week in my country, even though I already have two computers in this house, and my girlfriend has another two, and two out of those four are a notebook and a netbook. But none of them allow me to lie down on the couch and ready a PDF book comfortably. Or take with me when I go on a trip in much the same way I'd take a book.

It's not a pressing issue - if I had to build my household from scratch, a computer would come first, long before a tablet, but neither is a tablet simply a notebook without keyboard. Whoever writes that disqualifies himself from the discussion as not having understood a thing about why the iPad sells as quickly as the factories can make 'em.

Re:Who thinks this?

[pushing-robot]

The future is convertible laptops. Mark my words.

Wow, if someone ever tried that I'm sure it would change the entire industry!

Hint: The reason why tablets are popular is not because of their features. It's because you can carry the damn things around with you without your arm falling off. Slapping a tablet screen on a notebook does not fix this problem.

Tag as flamebait

[psergiu]

Please tag this story as flamebait because that's what the TFA is.

Re:Who thinks this?

[GameboyRMH]

Modern notebooks/netbooks weigh very little. If you put a fancier hinge and a touchscreen layer on a Macbook Air's screen, how much heavier would that make it? Don't forget, almost all laptops use li-ion batteries instead of the much lighter and more space-efficient li-pos.

The big question is whether it will be a PC-like laptop running a desktop OS, or an Atrix-4G like device, basically a convertible laptop body for a phone, running a less functional OS. It could go either way. Assuming this walled garden fad wears off soon (every walled garden in the history of general-purpose computing has failed so far), I'd say it'll be an Atrix-like device, otherwise it will be a PC-like device. Either way it won't weigh significantly more than a tablet and will be far more useful.

Re:Who thinks this?

[peragrin]

um Apple is kicking the crap out of every manufacture on price and you call them greedy? When apple first annouced the price of the ipad every other CEO shit bricks as they were expecting a $1000 price tag from apple and they would be in a good position to undercut on price.

No one can touch Apple's price points because the factories don't yet exist. In 5 years they will be lower, but it takes time to retool factories.

maybe you should learn something about economics, before mouthing off what things "should cost" you have no clue.

At what?

[theJML]

So what can your $200 laptop beat my $500 tablet at?

Web surfing? I don't know, the tablet interface with it's ability to just click, rescale, scroll and everything without having to use a mouse is quite an upgrade personally.
Gaming? You mean, you have a $200 laptop with a good graphics card in it? I'm pretty sure an iPad 2 or Tegra 2 powered tablet could blow the socks off your $200 intel integrated graphics card.
Size? I think the tablet's gonna win, unless you attached a brick to the back of it. 1/4"-1/2" thick tablet wins every time. Especially when I'm in a cramped coach seat flying for 6 hours and can't open the laptop up all the way because the screen hits the seat in front of me.
Battery Life? We're talking about a $200 laptop here... not a netbook. And even then try getting 10 hours of good use out of a netbook or laptop.

And who makes a New, powerful $200 laptop in the first place?

Face it, There are cases for each item. They're not meant for the same tasks. We're trying to compare apples and oranges here and I'm starting to get tired of it. Although, I will say that I got a tablet because I don't want to have to take care of another laptop. the tablet just works for what I need, I have a perfectly powerful PC in my home office I can use if I want to do anything I need it for... and if I'm just doing simple things like web browsing, facebooking, some gaming, youtubing, etc the tablet works perfectly. (and if I felt like it, I could sync my keyboard to it or use a stylus to do text input.)

Re:Additional tablet feature

[Abstrackt]

I suffer from the same problem so a continual problem with tablets that I don't see going away.

I just started using a napkin.

Re:Table

[gstoddart]

A tablet is an oversized PDA with a focus on bells and whistles instead of useful functions. Do not want.

Define 'useful'. And, for that matter, define 'bells and whistles' since I'm not sure my iPad has anything I'd call that.

I'm not going to use my tablet to code on, or to write a technical document or create visio diagrams, that's true.

But, for getting into a more comfortable chair, or sitting in the back-yard or the hammock at my parents place, or at the hotel bar or in the airport ... I actually find the form factor to be usable in a lot of circumstances where I wouldn't want a laptop. For me a laptop is mostly something I put on a desk and use it like a desktop.

I can sit in a comfortable chair in the hotel lobby, cross my legs or slouch in my chair and still check my email in several different accounts, check the news, and maybe play sudoku or Pocket Frogs or something. It's used more for consuming content than doing anything like my professional work. But it's become something I get quite a lot of use out of, and on business trips I use it far more often than my laptop (which I still drag around with me).

To me, they're very different devices, and used very differently.

Re:Who thinks this?

[Duradin]

A long time ago when getting prepared for hiking at Philmont someone told me "By the end of the day an ounce will feel like a pound."

At first, we laughed at the nuts who cut the handles down on their toothbrushes. After a week we wished we had done so as well.

A a few pounds difference may not be noticeable during your basement to kitchen table commute but for others ounces can make it more comfortable to carry.

Re:You're missing the point

[MMC Monster]

Spock doesn't use a tricorder tablet because it has a million features and CPU to spare. He uses it because it is handy and can connect to the Millenium Falcon when it needs to perform more CPU-intensive calculations.

Wow. I think you managed to cause a stroke in all the Sci-Fi nerds on /. at once.