<p>Has anyone found tablets are less useful/more useful than traditional laptops?
If so-- Preference of brand?
What about the Windows Surface Pro that does tablet and laptop?
Or forget all of that and just get a desktop?</p>
<p>They both have their place, but overall I find laptops to be more useful. I have both, but I honestly almost never use my tablet. </p>
<p>My iPad fulfills all my needs, in combination with a bluetooth keyboard, and is a lot less heavy to lug around. I’m never bringing the lap top again. There’s also some great apps for college students to manage their schedule and even grades, record lectures, take notes, and Office apps now for starting your paper in Word, for example, saving it in the cloud, and retrieving it on your laptop at home later.</p>
<p>I have a tablet which essentially does everything. However. I recently bought a Chromebook for typing purposes. I find decent priced blue tooth keyboards that are on the bigger side are nearly nonexistent therefore making typing papers beyond difficult. Chromebook is only 200$ so it may be worth looking into one</p>
<p>I prefer laptops, I have a tablet but I barley use it. My laptop can do everything a tablet can and more. Tablets are only good for watching Netflix.</p>
<p>Glamorous Gal, would you mind sharing which software you used and have found to be most useful? Our S is going next year, and we are trying to get him to start using software during his senior year of HS to get some practice/expertise ahead of time. One less new thing to learn at college. Thanks.</p>
<p>Laptop or Chromebook if you don’t want to pay as much. Tablets can’t do as much.</p>
<p>I have a keyboard case for my tablet, but I find typing for extended periods on it to be difficult. It’s a much smaller keyboard than the one on my laptop, and it’s harder to type when things are that cramped. You can do a lot with a tablet, but I don’t think they exactly function as a replacement for a laptop. I don’t think I’ve even turned my tablet on in like 2 weeks. </p>
<p>If you are getting one device, get a laptop. Tablets are great for portability, basic note taking, and browsing the internet, but I don’t want to write a term paper on that. Desktops give more bang for your buck than a laptop, but things get challenging if you have a group project outside of a computer lab or want to type notes in class.</p>
<p>I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T440p. It’s a really solid laptop with great battery life. It’s pricier than a cheap Dell or HP laptop, but it also has higher build quality that you can expect to last longer. (My old laptop started having problems right after the warranty ran out - overheating, battery life slowly dropped to nothing, and columns of dead pixels on the screen). Still cheaper than a Macbook, though.</p>
<p>I’m actually a fan of the concept of the Surface. I like that the hardware can function as both a real laptop (video and USB output - can connect any keyboard/mouse you want and USB drives) and a tablet with a digitizer. The software falls short, though. Still not a fan of Windows 8. Like the hardware, it tried to do both tablet and desktop capabilities, but ended up succeeding at neither. (I wish there was something like the Surface that could run Linux…) Also, the price point is pretty steep, even for the entry level model, especially when you consider that you have to pay an extra $120 or so for the keyboard case. I hope others pick up on this idea and improve it rather than dooming it to failure based on its current state.</p>
<p>I have a Chromebook (I’m typing on it now, in fact) and I’ve had it for a year. $250 for everything I wanted. To be fair, even before this I lived my life on Google Drive and I don’t need any design or gaming software (my sister wants an Adobe suite on her laptop so she’s obviously getting a different one- she wants a Mac, but good luck to her affording one…). I never even use a CD drive, though there are USB plug-in ones that work quite well if I were to want one. My laptop is lighter than my mom’s iPad and despite my manhandling still works as well as it did when I first got it (its looks I couldn’t swear to… it’s an _amsung with a lot of scratches). It also takes basically zero time to start up, which is nice, and I can have a lot of Chrome tabs open at the same time (where that would bust my home PC) because that’s what it’s made for.
Definitely recommended. </p>
<p>Laptops are MUCH more usable since they come with a traditional OS. Many of them are incredibly lightweight and thin now too. Tablets are limited by the fact that they don’t use traditional operating systems, so you are restricted to whatever is on the App store.</p>