The Future Has No Place For Tablets

Tablet devices really irritate me, I can’t stand them. I own an iPad, but it just lays around collecting dust occasionally it’ll be moved to a safe place, otherwise it just sits on my desk and sometimes even my cat will sit on it.

The iPad was a gift for Christmas from my employer, I had every intention of using it to use on the train rides in the morning on the way to work instead of carrying around my Dell XPS 15z laptop, but I never actually ended up doing that for you see, all tablets have one problem: they’re touch screen devices. While the Surface from Microsoft has an optional keyboard cover, it’s still a touch screen device at the end of the day.

You often hear the words “Post PC” being thrown around by the likes of Techcrunch and other tech blogs. They’re refering to the misguided statement that tablets will eventually replace computers but I seriously doubt that will ever happen. The world has a place for tablets; the medical industry, car salesmen, door-to-door sellers and petitionists collecting signatures and purchases orders, casual web surfing and playing the occasional game but I think it’s rather limited.

As a web developer I could never see myself being able to code on an iPad or other tablet device and while some tablets have addon keyboards and the Surface has a fancy keyboard cover, the money you spend on an iPad or Surface can get you a pretty decent Core i7 laptop with large hard drive, sufficient RAM, larger screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution and the kind of performance that a tablet could never touch.

While Apple might have emitted false illusions of a post PC world, that’s all it is: an illusion. Tablets will never truly replace computers, you can’t beat the experience of a mouse and keyboard regardless of what anyone tells you.