This is a fair point. I've never been much of a gamer, so it didn't occur to me. Then again, I'd think the screen size would be sufficient turn off for anyone with gaming as a priority. This is a mobile device. It goes head-to-head rather nicely in every other area I can think of, though (other than for people with terabytes of videos, etc.).
He did say he plays games on occasion, though.
Just because I'm a gamer doesn't mean I want a huge laptop I can't even lift...
While the surface is certainly a mobile option, the entire market seems to think that touch=mobile=low end specs, because ACPI power saving functions don't exist and having worse specs is good for battery life! The near universal adoption of the intel HD4000 for anything with a touchscreen has left me quite bitter in my latest laptop purchase.
I have been buying convertible laptops since 2007. I love them. My first convertible had a touchscreen, digital pen, fingerprint scanner, dedicated and powerful gpu(!), DVD drive(!), the laptop external PCI port, IR remote for media center, two 3.5mm audio out jacks and a 3.5mm mic jack, a touchpad with physical buttons (god damn the person who decided that getting rid of physical buttons was a smart idea), dedicated media keys and volume keys (who the **** decided using Fn was a good idea?!).... All of this in a neat 12.1" package. It was a portable gaming machine that I could also bring to class and take notes on.
Then the iPad came out and ruined the tablet market, for back in those days, convertible laptops WERE tablets, and the... thing... that apple decided to call a tablet was inevitably the next big hit and no one cared about convertible laptops for a while.
At least, to hold me over for another few years there was a newer model of the same laptop I had, which I bought. Better baseline specs, but no DVD drive, no PCIe, only one 3.5mm jack that doubled as the mic jack, no remote, no dedicated volume or media keys, and the stupid mac-like touchpad with no physical buttons. The performance was improved, but the feature set was greatly reduced to cheapen the cost of making it. And I couldn't optionally just pay more to get the features back. sadface.
Fast forward to windows 8; "finally!" I thought. "More convertible laptops, and this time I'll have a lot of choices instead of being stuck with the one convertible that gets a new model every few years!". Sadly the aforementioned line of models was killed off and the concept of a dedicated GPU+touchscreen died with it. I found exactly one convertible that did not use the intel HD4000: it used some crappy ATI GPU instead, and also had an AMD CPU... overall the specs were *worse* than a standard i5 with HD4000.
And all 8 convertible laptops suffer from the aforementioned regression of features in favor of trying to have the most gimmicky type of hinge.
After looking at all the proposed laptop convertibles that aren't even out yet, I see that there is no hope for this techie/gamer in the near future.* So as sad as I am to part with my beloved touchscreen.... I bought a normal laptop. I might try to do one of those touchscreen kits, but I can't find anything in my laptop's size.
*:Before you run off to contradict me about how amazing post iPad tablets are and how they improved your life and got you married and that my opinion about their usefulness is wrong, please note that this rant is the rant of someone who has no use for something without a keyboard/mouse/touchpad.
Thanks for reading my rant. No you can't have the last 5 minutes of your life back.
Sent from my Windows 8 device using Board Express
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