Tablet or Laptop

By BD Bondy
​Image: Carol Bondy

I frequently hear from someone that they don’t use their computer anymore, but instead, they use their iPad. I understand this completely, as I use my desktop so infrequently, but I use my phone all the time. I’ve gotten quite comfortable using my phone for nearly everything, shopping, reading the news, entertainment.

That said, I still prefer my desktop for writing. I Googled the question of laptop or tablet and found some interesting articles. My experience is that many folks are giving up their computers for tablets. What came up from my search wasn’t quite like that. It makes me wonder if many of the articles are purposely biased towards computer manufacturers.

Let's look at some things. Tablets are smaller, lighter, and extremely easy to carry with you wherever you go. They run a long time on battery, they come with every imaginable app you could want, and as the waiter said to Mr. Creosote, “it is wafer thin”.

An argument can be made that they are less powerful, but my smartphone has as good of a processor as my desktop. Tablets have less storage. While this is probably true, how much storage is your computer actually using? It may have a terrabyte of storage, but you are probably using a tenth of that. Besides, cloud storage solves that issue, along with the convenience of having a very secure place for storage that is backed up by a giant corporation.

Tablets have small screens and no keyboards. This is only true until you send your display to your TV, or other, larger screen, and there are plenty of Bluetooth keyboards and mice that you can use.

There are plenty of reasons to prefer a tablet to a computer. I still prefer to write on my desktop, at a desk, sitting upright in a chair. So I will keep my computer. However, you may feel differently. I am including a couple of links for you to read. On is from a college student that switched to a tablet. The other is from HP. I don’t agree with HP for several of it’s points, but you may.

From HP  
College kid says 

There are some obvious reasons why you may require a desktop, software, and the means to run it. If you are a serious photographer, you can do some amazing things on a tablet, but you need a powerful computer to run some of the major photo, and movie editing programs. Businesses need computers to run their business software. Stuff like that.
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On the other hand, you can use your tablet to remote connect to those computers...