Tablet-Laptop Redundancy ⇥ arstechnica.com

Casey Johnston of Ars Technica thinks Microsoft’s attempt to merge the tablet and laptop is off the mark:

While the 96-percent statistic seems to support Microsoft’s narrative that tablets and laptops are a redundancy that hardware manufacturers have a duty to fix, overwhelming evidence suggests that is not true. Few people try to or want to use tablets like laptops, save for when they feel like they have to justify the cost and get every last inch of mileage out of it. Tablet popularity arose in a place where people were using laptops like tablets, or smartphones like tablets, but in suboptimal ways that showed a tablet was better.

Time will tell whether Microsoft or Johnston are more correct. But, given that Microsoft’s own research shows that 96% of people who own an iPad also own a laptop, perhaps we like the redundancy.