/Monday Grumpies ON
I think the concept is flawed. Tablets have a long, *long* way to go before they hit the realm of (say) a power graphics laptop. Just brushing it off as ‘well it’s just a matter of time' doesn't apply here. What are tablets for? Mostly games and internet. They are convenient information and entertainment machines. For the hardware to escalate to doing sims on it, you need the market to drive the hardware development in that direction. I don't think that's going to happen, who out there wants a tablet on par with a workstation with all the inevitable heat and (primarily) battery issues? Sure as hell not the masses. What's happening out there is workstations are being marginalized. They won't die, there will still be people that need to do real work on workstations, but it will be nothing like the huge volume that the tablet market will generate. And the way things in mass computing are going now is ‘good enough’. People aren't buying Bluray's, they're subscribing to Netflix. Landfill media is dying, people want a small convenient and powerful information machine(tablet), *maybe* a workstation(altho fewer and fewer), and people who need to write a lot for a living will stick with laptops. TVs are getting smarter. The people buying all these things are driving the market, and they aren't willing to pay for the R&D to build a practical workstation in a tablet.
More than anything, battery technology needs to take a profound step forward for even the current projections to work. The Chinese government is dumping huge amounts of yuan into battery tech R&D, and that's smart. That's going to drive what happens next.
This isn't even discussing the fact you can't practically use Houdini without a keyboard.
For the record, I have a Xoom, and I love it. This isn't about tablet hate. I use it every day, a whole lot. I just don't think this is an accurate perception of where the market is going.
I'll pop back in a few years and read this post and wince, betcha.
Cheers,
J.C.