When the thought first crosses your mind, it's not really a contest. Laptops win hands down when it comes to Tablets vs Laptops. Then you start to wonder, do they really? We actually featured this very same debate back in 2016 as well, Laptops, or Tablets, which one is better for students? Well, seven years down the line, things have changed. Read on to find out if there is indeed a winner in the laptops vs tablets debate.
Performance
When it comes to basic operations, such as checking emails, surfing the web, streaming video or audio, both devices are pretty much on par. As long as you have a fairly decent tablet, or laptop, you can be assured a good experience here.
However, when it comes to multi-tasking things change. Laptops tend to be better at multi-tasking since they generally tend to have more powerful processors. However, certain tablets, like Apple's iPad for instance, can still match up to some laptops in this aspect.
For more specialised use cases, such as video production, and photo editing, you might want to stick to a laptop unless you know you're going for a tablet like the iPad Pro that you know can handle these tasks. However, laptops and tablets for these specialised use-cases always tend to come at a premium.
Display
Laptops have bigger displays. That's a given. However, tablets, especially the pricier ones, have much higher resolutions despite the smaller screen real-estate. Meaning images and visuals on tablets can be a lot more crisp and rich. There's also the fact that the larger your laptop display, the bigger the hit on your overall portability. Not an issue tablets suffer from. So if portability is a very important factor to you, keep this in mind.
UX and UI
This is a more subjective aspect of both tablets and laptops. We can say that in general tablets tend to have a more user-friendly experience overall. This is because the target demographic is casual users. Laptops meanwhile tend to focus more on functionality. You have access to a lot more advanced options with more ease. This applies to many apps that are available on both devices, with desktop versions of the same applications having a lot more features and options than the tablet versions.
Peripherals and add-ons
With laptops, you have a trackpad and a keyboard. If need be you could always plug in a mouse, a monitor, speakers or headphones. Easy access to USB ports, external storage etc. You get the idea. Both laptops and tablets have Bluetooth support.
Tablets on the other hand have virtual keyboards, or touchboards. These aren't as fast or effecient as physical keyboards. Of course, you always have the option of using a Bluetooth keyboard, but that is an extra step and an additional purchase that you need to make.
Software
Like we mentioned earlier, the experience of the same software can be very different depending on what gadget you're using it on. 9/10 times, the experience on a tablet will be more sluggish than that of the laptop. The exception here are of course premium tablets such as the iPad Pro or the Microsoft Surface Pro that come with the hardware to back up that performance.
As of right now, Android and iOS are the leading OS on tablets, and many popular apps have versions for these OS so that you can run them on laptops. The advantage of being in iOS here is that it's far more optimised so you're less likely to have a sluggish experience. But the point that apps and softwares have features stripped for optimal optimisation and performance still stands. Certain apps will also be limited on tablets because of a lack of input methods, which again the laptop has plenty of comparatively.
Portability
Just like laptops have a bigger screen, tablets are the more portable of the two. That is a given. Tablet sizes obviously vary, but the largest and heaviest of them will still weigh less than the lightest laptop, at least for now. We've already seen some incredibly lightweight laptops in recent times, the LG Gram (which weighs under a kilo) comes to mind.
Still, this is still a point that is currently in the tablet's favour. Tablets can be as large as 13-inches, although they're typically between 8-10 inches. Laptops on the other hand can go from 11-inches to even 21-inches in some cases. 15-17 inches is the laptop sweet spot. Of course, at around 1.5-2 kg, the laptop sweet spot weights 2-3 times more than typical tablets which can weigh as low as 300 g and in the case of powerful tablets, like the iPad Pro for instance, 700 g.
Storage
Storage can be an important factor to consider when it comes to picking a device. Most tablets come with storage ranging from 16 GB to 128 GB, however, again, premium tablets can offer much much higher capacities, even as high as 2 TB. This of course, costs a premium, even more than the cost of some laptops.
512 GB is almost the norm now on laptops, and it's easy to use external storage devices like USB sticks, SSDs and even microSD cards to further boost a laptop's storage capabilities.
Battery Life
Overall, you will find that tablets last a lot longer than laptops. Of course, there are some exceptions where laptops have better battery life but in general, expect better battery effeciency from tablets. The number of power hungry components in a laptop is much more than that of a tablet, and as such even with higher capacity batteries, most tablets will outlast laptops.
Gaming
While tablets have access to a lot of games, and even popular titles like Fortnite, PUBG, CoD and Genshin Impact, there's no denying that the hardware will eventually become a bottleneck. Including the weaker cooling capabilities.
Laptops and the OS they come with will allow you to play more modern AAA games (providing you have the GPU to support it) which require a lot more juice to run. Forget tablets, even cheaper laptops can struggle with these.
Price
Finally, we come to the price. In general, you will find that tablets are far cheaper than laptops. If you're looking for a basic device to complete basic work operations, then a tablet will more than suffice without breaking the bank.
Of course, premium tablets can be as pricey as good laptops, but they come with the perks associated with them as well. Which as we've seen in many ways eliminate the cons associated with tablets.
Laptops on the hand, while not starting as cheap as tablets have become incredibly cheap for the most basic models. Of course, this can ramp up to absurdly expensive prices for the highest-end laptops, but the entry bar is very low.
What to go for?
Unless you're keen on the ultra-portability of a tablet, a laptop is still the better option. The benefits and convenience of the average laptop are far too great at the moment to warrant making the switch entirely to tablet. Tablets still have quite a few restrictions in terms of their technical capabilties, despite being the more portable and battery effecient device.
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Manish Rajesh
Manish can usually be found fervently playing video games of all kinds or… no wait he’s pretty much always playing games View Full Profile
