Are Tablets Replacing Notebook Computers? (Video)

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the application and the user. We're seeing tablets advertised like crazy these days, and a trip to any busy coffee shop with free wi-fi will make it obvious that while there may not be as many tablets in use as notebooks, you see a lot more of them than you did five years ago, when it seemed like Bill Gates was the only person who had one, which he tried to show off as often as he could. In 2010, Apple debuted the iPad, and before long tablets were all over the place. So, on behalf of people we know -- and there are more than a few -- who either sneer at tablet computers or aren't sure they need one, we turned to David Needle, editor of TabTimes.com, for advice on what kind of tablet to buy -- assuming we need to buy one at all.

Comments

No.

[NoImNotNineVolt]

No.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's qualify this "no" answer. If you're a power user, a tablet isn't (today) going to get the job done. But if all you want to do is check email, browse websites, maybe play a few games, and so on, a tablet is just fine. I know many people that have quit using their desktops and notebooks because a tablet is all they need.

Desktops and notebooks have a place in the corporate world and other small businesses, and I don't see many geeks replacing their workstations with tablets. Certainly you can't effectively program on them yet and there is still a lot of software that requires a full Windows, OS X or Linux install. There may be a day when the tablet is the workstation and acts like a desktop when you're at your desk, and a tablet when you're not. But that is not quite here today for most people.

The desktop is not dead, and tablets have not replaced notebooks. But I think we can all envision a day when that is a distinct possibility.

Re:No.

[mlts]

I might add a cautious exception to this. There are some x86 tablets (like the MS Surface Pro) which are coming along well enough that if they have a decent docking station that supports USB (for backup drives, keyboards and other HID items), a plug for a monitor, a Thunderbolt port or two for faster drives, it may be that a tablet can function as someone's sole computer. The video on newer x86 tablets won't handle the next Crysis iteration, but for most gaming, it is OK. With 8GB of RAM, that will do for a number of tasks, similar with the onboard SSD storage. To boot, it provides decent security, as BitLocker [1] is easy to enable.

So, for most tablets, I'd say "no" with qualifications as the parent. However, one can make an x86 tablet running Windows function identically to a desktop, so that would be a cautious exception.

[1]: Until MS gets a new BIOS rev, be careful on enabling the TPM PIN, as it won't be enterable on the display, and you will need to hit the volume-down (minus) rocket for the Surface Pro to scan for HID items. BitLocker will work just with the TPM, or with the TPM and a USB flash drive as usual.

Re:No.

[hairyfeet]

Correct but there is A REASON why sales are down, something that none of the pundits seem able to grasp and the reason is thus: The PC went from being "good enough" to insanely overpowered while the user's jobs? They didn't change.

I mean look at the kits I sell on the low end, we're talking triples and quads with 4Gb of RAM, GPUs that do 1080P, and 500Gb HDDs....now how many of your average folks is gonna be able to slam that chip hard enough to require an upgrade, much less a new PC?

The PC industry (and MSFT) got spoiled by what was a bubble, the MHz war created a bubble because increased single core performance? Trivial for a programmer to take advantage of while taking advantage of an 8 thread CPU? Insanely HARD and many jobs simply don't scale across cores well. The same will happen to tablets, we are already seeing quad tablets in the sub $150 range so it won't be long until everyone has an insanely overpowered tablet that wants one, which will be followed by smartphones.

What will happen to the industry then? Who knows but the days of just throwing a new PC on the market and having it sell itself are over, the industry is just gonna have to adapt and try to come up with new markets.

Wrong

[The Cat]

Two different tools for two different tasks. Tablets are consumption tools. Computers are production tools.

The end.

News for Nerds?

[Golgafrinchan]

What a strange article to post on Slashdot. I wasn't aware that a fairly basic "this is what tablets do, and here's a brief buying guide" article qualifies as "News for Nerds."

Re:News for Nerds?

[SethJohnson]

I thought exactly the same thing. It's like the staff at Slashdot don't recognize that its audience would collectively know a million times more about this topic than the goofball at "tabtimes.com" would.

This kind of post is disrespectful to the audience. It's the kind of thing that drives it away and then you're left with mainstream audience who doesn't know crap about tablets. How profitable is advertising to them? Probably not as much as advertising to people who routinely configure Cisco routers or select cloud platforms for enterprise application deployments.

Re:News for Nerds?

[ColdWetDog]

Who cares? It's not like we read TFA (or for that matter, TFS) anyway.

They could just post "Boo" and we'd go on about ... something.

Maybe not replaced, but ruined the market

[dalias]

Ever since tablets got popular, it's been almost impossible to find a decent notebook. Everybody's playing conservative and going for bottom-level pricing, ugly oversided junk models, and/or the gamer market. What happened to the 10" models with 8-12 hour batteries? Or anything with a screen resolution over 1366x768? I'm waiting for a notebook (real keyboard, usb ports, etc.) with DPI and battery life that come anywhere near what tablets have nowadays, and it looks like I'm going to keep waiting... P.S. Please refrain from replies referring to any sort of fruit...

Re:Maybe not replaced, but ruined the market

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Indeed. I'm a big netbook fan, and good netbooks have all but disappeared. I dread the day my 2 current netbooks die because I fear I'll have nothing to replace them with.

The arrival of tablets and their touchscreen UI also have another nasty side effect: it's completely impossible to find a laptop with a matte (frosted, non-touchscreen) screen. All the screens out there are shiny and extremely nasty to do actual work with, because of reflections.

All this would be good and well if tablets could replace laptops (as in: buy a tablet, a keyboard and a mouse, and you have a laptop). Trouble is, you can't: their very touch event-driven UI makes using a mouse with them completely stupid - try hovering over something with a bluetooth mouse connected to a tablet: nothing happens. Keyboard locales too are handled catastrophically, since most of the work is done on on-screen soft keyboards.

So, tablets are great if used strictly as tablet. Trouble is, tablets aren't any good to do actual work, save for very specialized applications. And the tools to do real work have been killed by tablets.

That sucks...

Re:Maybe not replaced, but ruined the market

[samwichse]

Netbooks haven't disappeared, they were just renamed Chromebooks. Pick up an Acer C720, you won't regret it.

Sam

Timely article

[grub]

Only a few weeks ago I was in a meeting. There were 2 laptops and 6 iPads in the room. I think that was the first time I saw 3x more tablets in a meeting of that size (or at least that I remember noticing)

Actually, Yes and No.

[Penguinisto]

For most ordinary home users who go online to consume content and do brief chats/facebook/such, the answer can be a fairly easy "yes", so long as they're willing to ditch their old programs in exchange for apps. My wife did this in July by swapping to an iPad, and hasn't looked back. I think she used the bluetooth keyboard twice... meanwhile, it's replaced her PMP, camera, gaming console, and she watches movies with it on long road trips.

For crabby old tech types like me the answer is "hell no!" - I have way too much invested in CG/3D hobbyist bits and tools, I need the horsepower to render with, I type way too much, and in my estimation, screen real-estate is king. I'll stick with my MacBook Pro, thanks much.

In-between? Depends on whether or not you primarily consume content or primarily create it; therein lies your answer.

Re:Actually, Yes and No.

[TheRaven64]

I have an ASUS TransformerPad which has the advantage of a dockable keyboard with an extra battery in it, which is great for when I'm going to be spending a long time on trains / at airports / on planes, because the keyboard also works well as a stand and fits on the tray table in most places. It can play back films for 7 hours and can show PDFs and run vim. There's actually a nice LaTeX app for Android that will load the packages you use on demand (a feature I'd love to have on the desktop, to avoid the 2GB TeXLive download for the few MBs of LaTeX that I actually use, without having to manually work out what they and their dependencies are).

It doesn't replace a laptop, but it does augment it nicely.

Um, yeah

[roc97007]

From the first link in the summary: Last July, during an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Gates explained that Jobs "did some things better than I did. His timing in terms of when it came out, the engineering work, just the package that was put together. The tablets we had done before, weren't as thin, they weren't as attractive."

Well yeah, plus, anyone who has used Windows XP Tablet Edition will tell you, it really didn't have tablet support. The "tablet features" were repurposed Accessibility features and they really didn't work very well. What Apple brought to the table was that a touch-only interface, to be intuitive and easy to use, couldn't be merely a bunch of cabalistic gestures that mimicked the actions of a three button mouse. Had Microsoft started *then* on a touch-only gui, instead of trying to shoehorn in the KVM-centric GUI of XP, maybe things would have been different.

This plugin is not supported

[symbolset]

Let me guess: flash video. Not that I mind missing out on this particular video. I just wanted to remark on the irony that I can't watch this video about tablets replacing notebooks on my Nexus 7 tablet. News for nerds indeed.