I’ve literally re-written this entire post about four times now so hopefully this time I’ll get it right. I was reading some comments on an Apple rumor site the other day and they got me thinking about the whole tablet, laptop concept. With everybody telling you that your tablet can replace your laptop and all this two-in-one stuff I just needed a second to take a step back and think about everything for a minuet. . . and then share my thoughts with you.
So I spent the last three iterations of the blog post trying to talk about how an iPad and an iMac could replace a laptop for someone who needs computing power but doesn’t need computing power on the go. Then I started thinking about all the different MacBook / MacBook Air options and what market / user base each one fits into and then I realized that none of this was really answering the question I had in the first place: Why does everybody want a tablet-laptop (or ‘lablet’ as I like to refer to them)?
The answer I came up with is that people (including myself) are seriously confused about the basic concept of a tablet. After a little thinking, I was able to gather my thoughts. If you already have a desktop machine and are just looking for a way to browse the web, check Twitter, or edit a couple of text documents or presentations (Office and iWork are both on the iPad) then a tablet is what you want. The tablet can also sort of stand in as a very low end notebook, for people who just need to surf the web and maybe type a few things. But if you already have a laptop then a tablet is basically pointless. You already have all the function of the tablet and now you’ll just have an extra thing to carry with you. I think this is where the two-in-one market is trying to put itself. They are trying to sell you the actual computing power of a laptop with the cool new touch interface of a tablet. The problem is they end up making these things as small as possible so you can hold them in one hand like a tablet, but then they have no where to put any actual processor, ram, or storage. In the end you end up with something that’s still to heavy to use as a tablet and still too slow to be an actual computer.
In the end, I think all of this two-in-one non-sense simply comes down to the fact that people are confusing a touchscreen laptop for a tablet. They’re not adding a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop, they’re adding touchscreen to a laptop and trying to call it a tablet. So even though a touchscreen laptop makes absolutely no ergonomic sense, people want one because it has the fancy new touch screen.
Anyways. . . I hope this post wasn’t too confusing. It took me about two days to write this so I’m glad to finally just have it written. If you have any thoughts about this feel free to leave them in the comments, I’d love to hear them.
As always, thanks for reading
-Matt.