I agree. Only I wouldn’t limit it to just tablets.
In my younger days, when I had more free time, I was always building and upgrading and tweaking computers. I didn’t have the money for all the latest and greatest components, but I was always looking for components at the price/performance sweet spot and basically building really good budget computers.
Now, a good chunk of that was driven by gaming. I don’t have time to do much gaming any more, so at this point, I’m just playing through old stuff on my PS3.
But I also feel that outside of gaming, as more and more stuff moved into the cloud, it matters less and less what the specs of your machine as long as it’s “good enough”. Android apps have to assume kind of a baseline level of performance, and most of them work fine on my Fire tablet and $30 Motorola phone.
A year ago, I moved my desktop computer into the basement and got a Chromebook. The Chromebook does 97% of what I need from a computer (because 90% of what I need from a computer happens through the browser anyway and I can boot into Linux for other stuff if necessary), and my desktop is primarily used for ripping and serving up movies.
Obviously, my anecdotal experiences don’t mean much for professional techies, but as the primary tech support person for my family, it’s so much easier now that I can just say “Find a Chromebook/tablet that you like and it’ll probably be fine.”
