10 Reasons To Buy A Tablet (And 5 Reasons Not To) | Hacker News Reader

10 Reasons To Buy A Tablet (And 5 Reasons Not To)

techcrunch.com

11 pointssolipsist20 comments

I'm interested by the nosedive in attention to netbooks.

Obviously the media has gotten bored and moved onto tablets, but have consumers really moved past netbooks? I thought they filled a real niche and would be significant for a lot longer

I see a lot more real people using netbooks as opposed to tablets. Tablets still seem like a toy for older rich folks while netbooks are a viable cheap computing option for a lot of people who don't need a machine that does any heavy lifting.

I see netbooks all the time. I'm the only person wandering around the local coffee shops with an iPad.

There's a difference between significance and buzz. Netbooks were refinements of the laptop at a better price point. I don't think either category is going away anytime soon. Heck, given that even netbooks let you drive a desktop widescreen display, it's astonishing that desktop machines are still kicking around.

I'm obviously not a member of the iPad's target audience -- they can have my keyboard when they can pry my cold dead fingers from it, etc. But I appreciate the appeal of computers that can be held in one hand. Over the years I've had several mini-laptops (anyone remember the Toshiba Librettos or the Sony Picturebooks?) In most respects the netbook has hit the sweet spot for me.

Apple never made a netbook because the profit margins weren't good enough, and tech media geeks, even if they weren't all Apple fans, would still probably spend 5 times as much on their laptop because they're often geeks who travel a great deal on business. So online buzz was limited to actual customers.

This led to the strange spectacle of Apple pundits fainting at the ability to watch Youtube in bed on their iPads, which ordinary poor folk had been doing for years with much loved netbooks.

If you notice extreme negativity to netbooks online, it's usually coming from Apple-centric folk dealing with the cognitive dissonance of Apple openly and clearly sacrificing their customer's utility for profits. People who use them seem to love them. (See also the love for the MacBook Air, summed up by this comic: http://classicfun.ws/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bill-Gates-a...)

I just switched from a 13" macbook pro to an 11" macbook air.

Budget aside, I see no advantage of a netbook over my macbook air. It's the ultimate ultra-portable machine. The comment everyone has about netbooks is that they are slow. The Macbook air zips along fine (the advantage of an SSD and a real processor...), and the high res screen makes my old 13" macbook feel cramped.

Once again, this is budget aside. But budget isn't the only reason netbooks were a hit. Their highly portable nature and great battery life were two other big selling points.

Their reasons not to buy a tablet are somewhat flawed.

They essentially say that...

   1. Tablets aren't portable
   2. Tablets don't have hardcore games
   3. Tablets can't do "real" work
   4. Tablets aren't better than laptops when it comes to surfing the web,
      watching movies, etc.
   5. Tablets will be replaced with other tablets (who would have thought!)

Reasons 1-4 are all based off the assumption that tablets should be able to compete with laptops and phones at the same time. However, tablets are in a different market than phones and laptops for a reason. Apple and some other companies have come along and created something that people have been longing for a while: an intermediate device between a phone and a laptop.

Tablets are portable, but not the same way phones are. That's because people would rather carry around something of bigger size with more functionality than a phone.

Tablets don't have hardcore games, because the majority of users are casual gamers. Hardcore games are for people who sit down at their computers for hours while leveling up on a game. Casual games are for people who want to play games in short spurts for quick fun. No long term commitment is needed.

Tablets do the work most people need to do on the go. "Real" work is done at a desk on a laptop or desktop. Tablets are there to fill in and help get the basic work done when you're on a taxi, plane, etc.

Tablets let you surf the web and watch movies anywhere, with ease. Instead of some distant interaction with your laptop using a mouse, tablets offer direct control using touch. They give you the features you need and no more. Content consumption and entertainment has never been better than it has with the tablet.

I will refrain from discussing the last argument listed in the article, as another argument will come along in a few weeks and replace that argument. There's no worth wasting my time doing something like that. :)

In my experience, the iPad (and, by extension, all current 10" tablets) makes a mediocre e-reader. I found the form factor uniquely uncomfortable for casual reading in bed or in a chair - it's too heavy to hold comfortably for more than 5 - 10 minutes. I liked the portability, but ultimately there was no use case where I wouldn't prefer an ultraportalbe laptop or a Kindle. I sold mine on Craigslist after 4 months. If they can shave a quarter of a pound off, I'll be interested again.

I wouldn't mind it because in bed, I don't even hold books. Instead I place it on the mattress and lean to it. So the weight is unimportant. What's imporant is that its flat and relatively short like the size of a large tradeback novel.

I've never really understood tablets.

I'm of the opinion that if I was going to carry around something too big to fit in a pocket, I might as well just make that thing a laptop.

I love mine. I never carry it around, but I use it all the time. I guess I sometimes carry it from the nightstand to the sofa, or to the kitchen, or to my desk to sync. Those journeys are too brief for a pocket.

Yeah, I do that with my laptop. It does everything, and I can use it for hours without discomfort.

I like to lay flat on my back - with my 14 month old son napping on my chest - watching some tech presentation video (or browsing, or even playing the LASW RTS. These are sublime moments that my laptop can't bring me.

I'm having a hard time picturing this being comfortable (or more comfortable than having a laptop sitting next to you). Are you holding the tablet above your son the entire time? Don't your arms get tired?

I had to watch myself do it because I had never noticed the specifics. Turns out it varies. Sometimes I'm holding it over him, but the weight is being transferred through my forearm to the sofa beside my body through one or both elbows. Other times my hand is just balancing it and little Henry's diaper-padded posterior is propping it up. I have a cover on it that flips behind the tablet,like one would fold a magazine cover behind a magazine, and sometimes I hold the thing with my index finger extended horizontally into this hinge, with a moment of force being applied by the side of the device into the palm of my hand.

It's never been something I had given much though to. The idea of craning my neck and reaching my arms to operate a laptop on the table beside me strikes my as uncomfortable, though.

To each their own, I guess.

I don't "get" them either... I have a smartphone and a netbook, and I don't see what a tablet would bring to the table. Apparently my netbook "isn't better at anything", I must have missed the release of Eclipse for iPad /s

They should make great viewers for non-reflowable nonfiction PDFs where you want to jump around the document a lot. Laptops don't fare so well with documents that want to be in full-screen portrait orientation, and e-ink devices have a large display latency.

That was one of the main reasons I bought my iPad--it let's me read/annotate PDFs. This is great for when I travel!

> I'm of the opinion that if I was going to carry around something too big to fit in a pocket, I might as well just make that thing a laptop.

If I want to go out to a coffee shop and do some writing I have a netbook bag that I throw my iPad, a set of earbuds and an apple wireless keyboard into. It's great because it's a lot easier to focus on writing than it is with my laptop. I use Elements which syncs to dropbox. I also use that bag if I want to just hang out, sip coffee, and read the latest book I downloaded.

I love my iPad. It makes so many small tasks so much easier. Right now it's streaming a SomaFM station. I can look through and pick stations on the SomaFM app faster than I can dig through their website. It also makes a wonderful remote for my Apple TV.

Edit: I haven't had much exposure to smart phones aside from a blackberry that I didn't care for. I have owned an IBM ThinkPad 750 which is basically ye olde netbook. (Yay 14.4 modems)

Interesting that your chosen alternative was a laptop rather than a netbook. Along those lines, if you think in terms of the evolution of personal computers as desktop -> laptop -> netbook -> tablet, that last step is a puzzler.

If you take the author's 10 reasons and strip out the stuff that's a retread of previous products ("Look, it's portable! And OMG you can watch movies!") it seems to me you're left with one key point: the user interface makes it fun & easy to use. I don't think it's an accident that the only two tablet platforms that look viable so far, Apple and Android, are based on years of usability testing in the smartphone arena. Tablets may be computers inside, but in terms of product design they're consumer entertainment devices.

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