Not to burst your bubble, but adding a keyboard to a tablet makes it a touchscreen laptop. It's perfectly fine if that's what you enjoy, but you're not really obsoleting laptops if the alternative is a smaller laptop.
The difference is that you can use for some cases (reading, browsing, quick email) just the tablet. Is not that the concept is really different from a laptop (hey, a portable computer), but I think it brings it to the next level.
Adding a keyboard to a tablet makes it a computer with the power of a PC we had ten years ago.
There is nothing more productive than a good desktop workstation with big multiple screens. I recently purchased a new one for a good price, and I am happy with it.
But not video/audio editing, or any programming of any kind. In other words, you can consume on these other devices, but not create (unless it's plain text).
I started programming on a computer that can be comfortably be emulated cycle exact on the cheapest tablets you can get today, so that's quite obvious hyperbole.
At my first company, we did most of our development work on a server that was shared between four of us, yet had 1/4 of the memory of my tablet, and which was about 1/10th the performance of current generation ARM's. Somehow had no problem doing programming work on it. As well as running paint programs (granted, none of us did much graphical design, but what little we did ran on that shared server using our local, much slower, machines as X terminals).
So did I, but almost none of those programs would be acceptable to deliver today. When hardware is faster and (resource intensive) IDE's and frameworks do more for you, if you don't deliver more for less, you're competition will. How does the convenient form factor help you beat the competition? Working off hours? No thanks.
> When hardware is faster and (resource intensive) IDE's and frameworks do more for you, if you don't deliver more for less, you're competition will.
My "IDE" today is, as it was 17 years ago, Emacs. It hasn't gotten that much more resource intensive. My browser has gotten more resource intensive, but still runs ok on a device like that.
> How does the convenient form factor help you beat the competition? Working off hours? No thanks.
It helps me not having to drag a laptop around and/or rush to find a full size computer when server I have responsibility for go down. It gives peace of mind. And yes, I am very well compensated for being the one who gets the calls if something breaks, as well as the freedom to put in the resources to minimize how often it does.
It's also extremely convenient when travelling, such as when I'm heading out to one of our data centres.
There are lots of creation, done everyday by lots of workers that can be done with the current power of a tablet. Writing a document, work with an not-really-fancy spreadsheet, answer email, etc, etc... Of course, is not as comfortable as using a bigger screen and a keyboard, but in the future maybe a lot of people will have external keyboards and screens (as typically happens with laptops)
