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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

> And even programmers, the audience who would most need all the power and flexibility of laptops, are switching to tablets.

programmerS? the link is the only guy I heard of so far, and I even know die-hard ipad fans who laugh at the idea of a tablet being a serious workstation.

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Just looking at his setup gave me back pain. I mean, why settle for a small tablet screen with a separate keyboard when you can have several huge screens giving you so much more screen space? What is the point there?

Of course a portable device is great to use when I'm away from my desk, but that's the exception not the rule.

I quite agree with Derbasti; my dream device would be a tablet that I can dock at my desk and have it transformed into a full blown workstation. Even better, make it a phone with a large-ish screen.

This is where dropbox has changed the game for me. If I can get at my stuff from anywhere, I don't care if it's the same device accessing it. Sure, there's some overhead to configuring multiple devices, installing software, etc. But this overhead comes with the advantage that if they are two different platforms, they have different strengths.

I have a desktop and a tablet. Needing to stay flexible between platforms means that switching the OS on either one is not nearly as painful as it used to be.

I would never consider working on a tablet, even if it could perfectly run my development environment. I absolutely need a keyboard, and I might as well take the laptop if I'm going to pack a keyboard with the tablet.

Agreed, it's not only the keyboard but also the blazing fast application switching (at a keyboard shortcut distance), decent code editors.

The only thing that come near that for me are the asus transformer series running ubuntu, but I'm still encountering multiple fatal issues (plus the touchpad is sub-par).

Also the storage space. Tablets and ultrabooks still don't give you enough space if you need to install a lot of development software, database servers, etc.

Oh, and if you need to develop in more than one OS, then a tablet isn't going to cut it, and the 128/256GB SSD in an ultrabook is a pretty tight squeeze for dual boot.

Those factors, the RAM and the back pain are the reasons I stick with larger devices for now. I do have my beady eye on the forthcoming Asus U500 though.

Several people have told me they do the same. It might not be thousands, but there are programmers out there working like this.

It works for programmers because the iPad isn't your workstation, it's just your connection to a remote workstation. I'm not sure this is applicable to e.g. graphic design.

you know, working on a terminal (thin client) is nothing particularly new. and when you attach a keyboard and a mouse/touchpad to assemble a kind-of-laptop-but-not-laptop terminal it's by strict measures no longer 'working on a tablet', so what's the point of it exactly? carrying around a keyboard to say you don't use a netbook, it's a tablet? trying to prove something?

He explains the reasons pretty well in the original blog post http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...

I hate to disagree with you because I abhor the idea of using a tablet for my work. However, it's still a machine that gets longer battery life than a laptop, is smaller (so theoretically more portable), lacks a lot of the power of a laptop, etc. It isn't the same as using a laptop. It's both more and less convenient.

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