Will a tablet ever replace my laptop?

AALEK NOWAK, NORTH LONDON

You cannot have missed the hype surrounding the new iPad Pro. Apple is doing its damnedest to blur the lines between tablet and laptop, with the Magic Keyboard (£300) magically and expensively adding a keyboard to the near-£1,000 tablet, and newly founded trackpad and mouse support offering new input options. This is the usual ‘Apple turns up late to the party and claims it invented parties’ deal, of course. Microsoft, for one, has been doing this stuff for years with varying degrees of success.

Remember the Surface RT, that horrible tablet that pretended it was a proper computer with actual Windows but was utterly hamstrung by its non-Intel processor and the fact that nobody wanted to develop for its actuallynot-Windows OS? Yeah. Contrast that with the latest Surface Book 3 (from £1,599), which seems to have the laptop/tablet hybrid thing nailed, giving you a very capable laptop with a screen you can pull off when the mood strikes you. You pay a premium for that luxury, though, and it’s arguable quite how often that’s actually useful – the same is true of the ability of flippy-screen converting laptops.

Honestly, it depends on you. A tablet may well replace your laptop one day, if your primary use case is doing tablety things; adding accessories to transform it into a laptop-type device is all well and good, but that’s more a boost in extensibility rather than the tablet suddenly winning.

GaGu supposes the tablet-tolaptop route is opening up rather nicely, but the same doesn’t work in reverse unless you’ve chosen a laptop with that function, so that’s one in the pocket of the tablet if you can only buy one thing. But we’re not quite at the point where a tablet can hold quite the gubbins that the base of a good laptop can.

Now what’s the shortcut for empty trash again?