Posted on 04/01/2019 7:58:02 AM PDT by dayglored
You make good points, but I will stick with the SUV and fancy pickup principal on this one. People in the United States like toys like mopeds, motorcycles, quads and snow mobiles, and they also like small vehicles for speed and economy. But when it comes to their primary vehicle they want something that has the capability to do whatever they might ask of it.
How many $70,000 3/4 and 1 ton crew cab diesel 4 wheel drive pickups do you see running around town by people who only imagine that someday they might by a fifth wheel to tow behind it? I will tell you that there are quite a lot where we are at. But even more common are huge AWD SUVs with 300HP engines and some little Asian lady driving it with no one else in the car. I am talking Cadillac Escalades and Buick Enclaves. They may not even have any kids at home, but they are ready for the two or three times a year when their relatives show up.
It is the SUV principal and it says that laptops are not going anywhere for a good long while here in the good old USA.
Still running Win XP SP3 here ... never installed an update, except that one ‘patch’ a couple years back on account of that one vulnerability ...
Authoring some S/W, images, videos, etc. as if it were the year 2006 ...
Having just recently purchased (on eBay) a used identical shelf-spare for my aging (2011) Fujitsu Lifebook, I suppose I have scant room to opine about laptops going away. :-) I love my old PC laptop, and will keep it alive as long as possible, but I don't foresee replacing it with a new one when it eventually gives up its silicon soul and joins the rubble pile.
Okay, and do be careful. I have a fondness for motorcycles, chainsaws, and similar potentially dangerous toys, so I'm not being righteous. Just sayin', I wear a helmet and use goggles...
Well, most of the time anyway. :-)
I like a large screen for CAD and also for having multiple programs running simultaneously (though I haven’t gone for multiple screens yet), run a LOT of VMs, program PLC’s and hard and PC-based UIs, so tablets aren’t going to replace a laptop/desktop for me any time soon, if ever.
Now the CAD/development/VM use probably make me an edge case, but I bet there are a substantial number of people who like plenty of screen space to keep multiple windows open.
I do like using a tablet or phone as a mobile HMI via Team Viewer though. That’s kind of my view of tablets vs. PCs in a nutshell, both good tools for their strengths but neither capable of replacing the other.
My "real" computers are high-core-count, lots of RAM, dual-1920x1280 24" monitors, etc. And multiple dual-pane workspaces (8 on Linux). But that's because I do serious engineering work on them. It's a waste to just web surf on them, so I generally use a tablet for that.
We agree. :-)
Last year I purchased 2 new laptops for my wife and I and 3 new tablets. The laptops have the latest architecture Core I-5 processors which are considerably more powerful than I-7s from just a couple years ago. They have 17 inch screens, 12GBs of RAM discreet video processors and large hard drives. In other words they are the 3/4 ton diesel crew cab pickups of the laptop. They were on sale at Costco for $600 each. They are probably cheaper now. The SUV principle in action. (Principal was a tablet induced auto complete error in my last post that I didn’t catch. Yes, I was actually pecking away on a tablet to besmirch them in my last post and it tried to make a fool of me.)
The tablets were a 10” fire tablets and two 8” fire tablets, the motor scooter and mopeds of the tablet market. But they do what we wanted them for.
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