Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic

jfruh writes "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen an array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of the cheap components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."

Comments

WTF?

[Jaysyn]

My cousin has had an HP that did this before the iPad was a thing. It runs WinXP for Tablets.

Re:WTF?

[idontgno]

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Data General One. 1984 (predating Macintosh Portable by 5 years and Powerbook 100 by 7). Precisely equivalent to many desktop systems of the time (IBM PC/XT standard: MS-DOS, Intel 8088 processor, floppy boot) except portable, battery-powered, and clamshell laptop format.

Sorry. The Powerbook 100 represents an incremental evolution of the laptop idea, but it's not really ground-breaking by any unbiased standard.