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Comment by pulmo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Microsoft is doing this to themselves. Instead if being the best in one market they try to create a new one which competes with the tablet and ultrabook market. But their product can be never as good as a tablet or ultrabook. I just don't think that there are many people who are willing to accept that trade-off.

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Being the best on one market isn't always as beneficial as being good in a couple of markets. Apart from that you're looking at it from a single perspective making you see only certain trade-offs (which are only there for those expecting a tablet or ultrabook anyway) and not the other side of it. Other people might just see a full-blown laptop running a desktop OS with touch and Wacom. And when you get rid of the keyboard you're left with something that's quite usable as a tablet ans still runs a full desktop OS.

There are professionals on the go who want to carry one device, not two, and have both the use-case for a tablet and a notebook. You can't use a notebook standing up, and you can't run real Windows software on a tablet.

I'm surprised every single doctor in a hospital doesn't own one of these yet, for example.

I guess you mean why every doctor doesn't own 2-3 of these, because battery won't last a day...

That's what the power cover is for.

That's what the power cover is for.

And now it's too heavy to carry around all day every day.

Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the 'Windows' apps I've seen for healthcare are really, really bad (and have UI much too small/complex to use on a touchscreen), whereas the iOS apps I've seen are much more polished, user-friendly, and accessible because they're designed for touchscreens from the start.

It would be impractical in a hospital. It's relatively heavy and where would you put it when you don't need it without risking theft? And how would you prevent unauthorized access to hospital records when stolen? I think the whole tablet at hospitals thing is a fantasy.

All of those concerns exist with a clipboard of papers, and you can't encrypt those.

Right. But who would want to steal a clipboard?

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