Tablet sales are down; PC sales are up. What the heck?

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in hardware on (#2RYX)
story imageTechcrunch is onto a mystery that should be no surprise to anyone who uses these things on a daily basis: tablet sales are waning, while sales of computers are actually rebounding. Author and former CIO Peter Yared has the solution: Businesses Need Super Tablets.
As the former CIO at CBS Interactive, I would have bought such super tablets in droves for our employees, the vast majority of whom primarily use only a web browser and Microsoft Office. There will of course always be power users such as developers and video editors that require a full-fledged PC. A souped-up tablet would indeed garner corporate sales, as Tim Cook would like for the iPad " but only at the expense of MacBooks.

The cost of managing PCs in an enterprise are enormous, with Gartner estimating that the total cost of ownership for a notebook computer can be as high as $9,000. PCs are expensive, prone to failure, easy to break and magnets for viruses and malware. After just a bit of use, many PCs are susceptible to constant freezes and crashes.
What say the Pipedot faithful: Is this just a twist in the business cycle? Would a super-tablet convince you to dust off the credit card? Or is TechCrunch just grasping at straws?

Super tablets won't be cheaper than PCs (Score: 3, Insightful)

by mth@pipedot.org on 2014-09-01 19:01 (#2RZ0)

PCs are expensive, prone to failure, easy to break and magnets for viruses and malware.
The claim that super tablets would improve on those aspects doesn't sound very realistic to me. If tablet hardware is equally powerful as PC hardware, but has to be lightweight and run on a battery, it will be more expensive. A stationary PC is also less likely to break than a portable tablet of equal build quality.

How prone a machine is to viruses and malware depends on a lot of factors, such as OS, obscurity of the platform, level of clue from both the admins and the users etc. None of those factors are related to the hardware: if a tablet OS is easier to secure and still flexible enough for the users to get their job done, why not install a tablet OS on PC hardware?

The only advantage of a super tablet over a laptop is the form factor: it is easier to carry around. That can be important in some companies. But it will cost extra, not less.
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