Compare tablet and netbook

The ques­tion “Which is bet­ter to buy — a tablet or a net­book?” For 2019, it sounds at least strange. Both of these seg­ments are grad­u­al­ly dying out. If we talk about AAA-class man­u­fac­tur­ers like Sam­sung and Apple, they release 1–2 tablet mod­els a year.

And net­books have com­plete­ly died out. Instead, cheap Chrome­books and inex­pen­sive hybrid com­put­ers from sec­ond-tier man­u­fac­tur­ers — Dexp, Teclast, Chuwi and so on — came to the mar­ket.

How­ev­er, the seg­ments have died out, and the need for ultra-portable devices for work, mul­ti­me­dia and games has remained. And what about a per­son who decides to pur­chase a com­pan­ion device that will accom­pa­ny him on trips? What is bet­ter to buy — a tablet, a net­book or some­thing else? Let’s look at the sit­u­a­tion tak­ing into account the mod­ern mar­ket.

The Tablet Situation

Tablets were orig­i­nal­ly designed as ultra-portable devices for use on the go. Quick­ly touch up the pre­sen­ta­tion while you go up to the top floor to the man­age­ment; quick­ly fin­ish your notes while you are wait­ing for the lec­tur­er under the door of the office where the exam will be held; watch a cou­ple of fun­ny videos on the bus while you are dri­ving home.

It’s hard to imag­ine lap­tops or net­books being used in this way. You need to work on them in detail — you sit down, pull out a mobile com­put­er from your back­pack, surf there on the Inter­net or “rus­tle” over some report.

The prob­lem is that, while remain­ing devices for “quick fix­ing” and “watch­ing a cou­ple of videos from YouTube”, at some point no one need­ed tablets. And their mar­ket has under­gone notice­able changes.

Now, in 2019, tablets can be divid­ed into two groups — “flag­ship” and “every­one else”. They show how these devices change. Flag­ship tablets are becom­ing pro­fes­sion­al devices for every­day work, acquir­ing pow­er­ful hard­ware and detach­able key­boards. True, they cost more than aver­age lap­tops.

And this is not an exag­ger­a­tion. See for your­self:

1. Apple iPad Pro 2018. Pro­duc­tive, like a desk­top com­put­er. Sup­ports sty­lus or key­board input (sold sep­a­rate­ly). Met­al body, AMOLED True­Tone dis­play, face recog­ni­tion and up to 1TB of inter­nal mem­o­ry. Price — from 670 $ at the time of writ­ing this mate­r­i­al;

2. Microsoft Sur­face Pro 6. This is still a tablet, but in the top con­fig­u­ra­tion it is equipped with an Intel Core i7-8650U proces­sor, 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of per­ma­nent SSD stor­age. Option­al Sur­face Pen and Sur­face Type Cov­er avail­able. Price — from 720 $, not offi­cial­ly sold in EU;

3. Google Pix­el Slate. Chrome­book tablet. It is posi­tioned, among oth­er things, as inex­pen­sive! In the top con­fig­u­ra­tion, it is equipped with 16 GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 proces­sor and a 256 TB SSD. Price — from 600 to 1600 dol­lars, it is not offi­cial­ly sold in EU, but on one well-known ad site you can buy a 4 + 32 GB ver­sion for 400 $;

4. Sam­sung Galaxy Tab S4. 10 core proces­sor, 10.5 inch high res­o­lu­tion sAMOLED screen, 4 GB RAM. You can enter with a sty­lus, and it is includ­ed! You can buy a key­board. The tablet is also equipped with 4 AKG speak­ers, and the screen has an immer­sive effect. The price at the time of writ­ing is 530 $.

Of course, one could argue that flag­ship tablets have always been expen­sive. But! If you look at the sit­u­a­tion on the mar­ket in some 2013, it turns out that:

1. The mar­ket was much more diverse. Top mod­els were pro­duced by both large and medi­um-sized man­u­fac­tur­ers;

2. Tablets did not seek to become full-fledged com­put­ers.

3. Now flag­ship tablets are devices for peo­ple who need to “tweak some­thing along the way”, but this “some­thing” is no longer text, but a 3D mod­el; and the “way” is a busi­ness class flight from one coast to anoth­er.

And what about “all the oth­er” tablets? Oh, this is much more inter­est­ing. The tablet mar­ket is now dom­i­nat­ed by sec­ond, third, fourth tier man­u­fac­tur­ers. If you open an online store with an orange design and green aliens as a mas­cot, and go to the “Tablets” sec­tion, it turns out that most of the shelves are occu­pied by such “famous” man­u­fac­tur­ers as Finepow­er, Dexp, Irbis, Pres­ti­gio, Dig­ma, Ver­tex and along with them. This is “fierce Chi­nese”, which has one advan­tage and two dis­ad­van­tages.

Dig­ni­ty:

1. Price. You can buy a tablet for 30–40$! And it even turns on!

Flaws:

1. Buy a cat in a bag. The device will either work for a year, or even two — or turn off the next day and nev­er turn on again;

2. It is impos­si­ble to repair it. There are no parts for all sorts of Finepow­er and Dexp, so if the screen cracks, then all that remains is to buy a new tablet. How­ev­er, it costs 30–40$ …

3. The fact that such devices will fail, slow down and lag with each more or less dif­fi­cult task is not even dis­cussed and is not record­ed as a dis­ad­van­tage. These are tablets for 30–40$ in the world of tablets for 70–1500$.

4. Only the so-called “sec­ond tier” remains — Xiao­mi, Huawei and Leno­vo. They still release tablets for a rea­son. Of course, their devices cost 150–300 $, but when buy­ing such a device, you can be sure that it will not crash after installing the sec­ond game.

So let’s sum it up.

Should you buy a tablet in 2019?

The mar­ket sit­u­a­tion and the lim­it­ed scope of use have led to the fact that tablets are need­ed only in a few sce­nar­ios. And you should buy them only in the fol­low­ing cas­es:

1. You are a pro­fes­sion­al who needs a high-per­for­mance device that can be safe­ly car­ried around in a purse. For you — prod­ucts from Apple, Microsoft, Google and Sam­sung;

2. You are a stu­dent who lec­tures, books, quick­ly writes essays on the way from the class­room to the din­ing room;

3. Are you a movie buff who can’t live a day with­out a fresh movie or a new episode of your favorite series;

4. Do you have a child who wants to play all the games.

If there is no mon­ey for a flag­ship device (or there is, but its pur­chase does not seem appro­pri­ate), then you can look at the devices of Xiao­mi, Huawei, Leno­vo and oth­er sec­ond-tier Chi­nese com­pa­nies. But tablets Dexp, Pres­ti­gio, Dig­ma and so on are bet­ter not to buy. Gen­er­al­ly. Not in one case.

The situation with netbooks

If the tablet mar­ket is only ago­niz­ing and trans­form­ing into God knows what, then the net­book mar­ket has already suc­cess­ful­ly dri­ven away its own and died. Every­thing. Net­books no longer exist. There are oth­er equal­ly inter­est­ing devices.

How about, for exam­ple, 10-inch sub­note­books? For 8–120$ in any store you can buy a 10-inch sub­note­book from your favorite com­pa­nies Dexp, Irbis, Pres­ti­gio and oth­ers. Most like­ly, the device will be equipped with an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 proces­sor, 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB eMMC stor­age. If you are very lucky, then there will be twice as much mem­o­ry — both RAM and ROM. The device will run Win­dows 10, and this oper­at­ing sys­tem will take up half of the built-in dri­ve. It remains to install “office”, “chrome” and … and that’s it, there will be no more space.

In prin­ci­ple, such sub­note­books are “reborn” net­books. They can only “sit” on the Inter­net, type texts and build tables in MS Office, and watch videos from YouTube. More, prob­a­bly, and do not need most users. And you can also buy such a sub­note­book for a child to study — and he will real­ly study, because he won’t be able to play on it!

Sub­note­books have one prob­lem (as if low per­for­mance is not a prob­lem at all, yes) — they are Chi­nese. And it’s not that the glob­al dis­ad­van­tage. It’s just that these are Chi­nese com­put­ers for 10–120 $, so when buy­ing, you should pre­pare for the appear­ance of glitch­es, brakes and com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed bugs. Or to the fact that one not very fine day the com­put­er sim­ply will not turn on.

Once the author of this mate­r­i­al used such a sub­note­book from Dexp as the main one for a whole year. It’s just that the rest of the com­put­ers broke down in a short peri­od of time, there wasn’t much mon­ey, so I had to buy a sub­note­book for 80 $. The net­book had an Intel Atom Z3735f proces­sor, 2 GB of RAM, 32 GB of inter­nal mem­o­ry.

The device basi­cal­ly worked. It was pos­si­ble to install Microsoft Office 2016, Google Chrome and a cou­ple of oth­er use­ful pro­grams on the hard dri­ve, and there was even a lit­tle space left! Some­times, on long lone­ly evenings, the author played it in Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III HD Edi­tion, and one day he took a chance and installed HOMM V — and it even start­ed!

The net­book is still alive. It is already more than two years old, now it serves anoth­er per­son who is try­ing to install Android on it for some rea­son. And every­thing seems to be fine, but …

1. Watch. This sub­note­book always had a slow clock. Some­times for a cou­ple of min­utes, some­times for a cou­ple of hours. All options were tried to restore their work — but no. The clock was always behind. You “align” them with syn­chro­niza­tion or man­u­al­ly — and after an hour they again lag behind.

2. Some­where on YouTube there is still a video in which you can see that the clock on the sub­note­book pass­es 40 sec­onds, while on wrist smart­watch­es — a minute.

3. And you nev­er know what a glitch will be when buy­ing this sub­note­book. Or maybe there won’t be any prob­lems at all.

Of course, not all sub­note­books are pro­duced exclu­sive­ly by Chi­nese com­pa­nies. Now you can pick up an HP Stream x360, for exam­ple, or a Leno­vo Idea­Pad 120S … But they are rare and are unrea­son­ably expen­sive for their tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Should you buy a netbook in 2019?

I guess, yes. But only in two cas­es:

1. Your bud­get for a new com­put­er does not exceed 12–150 $;

2. You plan on it only to sit on the Inter­net and watch movies.

At the same time, you should be pre­pared for the fact that the sub­note­book will slow down, “fail” in some com­plete­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble way, and in some cas­es even refuse to turn on at some point.

What then to buy?

And now we come to the main thing. If every­thing is so bad with tablets and net­books, then what should you buy for a per­son who just needs a reli­able ultra-mobile device to work any­where?

The mar­ket has such devices! The first type is hybrid com­put­ers (trans­former lap­tops), the sec­ond is ultra­books.

1. Hybrid com­put­ers are, in fact, all the same tablets with a key­board. Only they are based on “nor­mal” hard­ware, pro­duced by large com­pa­nies, and con­nect­ing a key­board expands func­tion­al­i­ty, and not just makes it pos­si­ble to write not only on the screen. Hybrid com­put­ers are of two types:

2. Tablet with switch­able (detach­able) key­board;

3. A tablet with a key­board that can wrap around the screen (so-called “yoga design”).

Such devices are con­ve­nient and func­tion­al. Their prices are very dif­fer­ent — from 200–300 $for Acer and Leno­vo mod­els to 2000$ for Yoga ThinkPad X1 mobile work­sta­tions.

The sec­ond option — ultra­books. These are light (about 1 kg), thin and very pro­duc­tive lap­tops. Thanks to the large amount of RAM, a fast proces­sor and SSD mem­o­ry, they turn on in sec­onds, open pro­grams and files instant­ly. A large bat­tery pro­vides auton­o­my of 5–10 hours.

The only “but” is that they are expen­sive. The cheap­est ultra­books are Xiao­mi Mi Note­book Air and Acer Zen­Mate, and they cost from 300 $.

But these devices are rec­om­mend­ed for pur­chase in 2019. Clas­sic tablets and net­books are hope­less­ly out­dat­ed, and apart from the incon­ve­nience of use and brakes, they will not bring any­thing. Is it worth pay­ing more mon­ey for it?