Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they’d be absolutely incredible.
Comment on What are your technology mispredictions?
Meron35@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.
When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn’t see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.
Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.
Tbh I personally still don’t see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Zak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.
QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I thought about that. I should look into this, thanks! :)
Zak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.
Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.
Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”
Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot