I just fail to see much of the point of tablets, when laptops like the MacBook Airs exist. I've yet to even bring my tablet on a trip/airplane, because my Air fills the same general space in any bag, and I can run my home Office and Lightroom with it. Plus, the laptop's clamshell design provides a built-in stand that makes it more hands-free.
It's all dependent on your specific application, isn't it? I use MacBook Air, because I can't get along without a computer, and a combination of an Air and an iPhone pretty much handles my needs while traveling. It helps that I prefer paper books. But for people who don't need a computer, they can be convenient, providing back-up and review.
"Paper books are history"
Well, maybe.
Back in the early 80s I used to make corporate films for a computer company called "Wang". At the time this company was rated (by "Fortune" as best I recall) to be one of only three computer manufacturers likely to survive in the market. IBM was another. One of Wang's key slogans and central marketing proposition was "The Paperless Office". I don't recall anyone questioning the underlying assumption.
Been in an office recently?
Roy
People I talk to in the publishing industry (and I do that a lot) think things will settle down so that electronic books become another niche product, like recorded books. Right now the velocity of electronic book expansion is so high that, if you extrapolate it, pretty soon ten thousand percent of all books will electronic, and they will cover the earth to a depth of six feet. That's called the straight-line extrapolation error. There is a very large market of people who read a half-dozen books a year. In aggregate, they account for millions of sales -- but they are not the kind of people who will spend anything between two and several hundred dollars for an electronic reader. They can get a book for $9.99, and if they lose it or damage it to the extent that it's unreadable (and trashing a book takes some work, though it can be done) they're only out the $9.99. An electronic reader may cost them the equivalent of four or five years of typical reading, *before* they buy any books for it, and the readers are relatively easy to damage. If you lose it, of course, you're out the whole hundreds of dollars. What had the book publishers panicking was not the rise of electronic publishing, but the idea that they might lose pricing control over their products -- that the control might shift to a couple of big retailers like Amazon. The "i-store" model has pretty much ended that threat.
We have these keyboards for iPads, for people who need them, and other accessories, which clutter up briefcases. Some things I would like to see...
1. A universal standard for charging ports, so you only need to carry one charger. If I were a major camera maker, I might provide a camera battery-charger that would have, in addition to its regular charging port, a port that would accept an iPhone charger (if Apple would allow that - and since there'd actually by some synergy for both companies, I don't see why they wouldn't.)
2. An Air- (or Ultrabook-) sized computer with a detachable touch-screen that could be read like a Tablet. Or, to come at it from another direction, a Tablet with computer functionality and an attachable base that would provide a keyboard and a wide variety of ports, that could handle some standard software (Lightroom, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc.), and still be Ultrabook-sized.
3. An Air that can handle 3G or 4G connections (like an iPad.) This is *very* convenient when traveling by car.