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Old 11-30-20, 09:07 AM  
Mopsy
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Location: central New York
tech help - new tablet, laptop or Chromebook?

I need to replace my iPad and I don't know if I want another tablet or small laptop. It won't be my primary device. I only use it when I travel or at home when trying to follow a recipe or stream a workout that I can't access through Roku (and more recently, when the library was closed, e-books). I'd also like to store a lots of photos in it to use as a photo album.

The advantage to the iPad is I already use an Apple computer and phone and the size is portable. Laptops are less expensieve adn have real keyboard, but they are a littel bigger and don't seem to have as much memory, unless you don't need as much emory in a laptop? Do they work differently? Will the lack of compatibility be frustrating, or is it not so bad?

Thanks for any input. Sorry for the typos. There's a cat on my forearm and I'm tired of correcting

ETA: I also wonder if eventually I'll be shiftibng away from Apple altogether. Any thoughts on that?
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Old 11-30-20, 09:55 AM  
Demeris
 
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I have a 10-year-old iMac desktop that I use for web-surfing, web-shopping, and playing my workout dvds, but I have a PC laptop which I use for any consulting gig I get.

BUT I have a Microsoft Surface that I use for travel. I don't know if an iPad has an attachable keyboard, but the Surface does. It functions as a tablet and as a laptop, and I just love it. I've had it for a few years now and like it more and more. When it no longer functions, I'll get a new Surface. I believe they come with a range of storage capacity.
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Old 11-30-20, 11:26 AM  
Mopsy
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Thanks, Demeris. You sound the opposite of me. My desktop is my primary tool, the iPad is secondary. I can get a keyboard for the iPad and I think that's what I'll do. I bought a refurbished iPad (still returnable) with lots of memory for my photos and if I add a keyboard it should be fine. I just didn't know if I should explore other options.
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Old 11-30-20, 02:37 PM  
adawn
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I have a little (11" screen) Lenovo Yoga I use as my "travel" and "move around the house" laptop (I never flip the screen around and use it as a tablet--too cumbersome--but I occasionally use the touchscreen).

My mom has an ipad mini tablet but it only works well for her because she got a non-apple case for it with a keyboard that essentially turns it into a little mini laptop. I think the case is made by Anker and requires charging for the keyboard portion every once in awhile. Hers is pretty old at this point. She NEVER uses it as a tablet; she only uses it with the keyboard case. She also has an iphone and a macbook pro and she likes that all the mac/apple stuff syncs with eachother.
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Old 11-30-20, 03:12 PM  
horsemom2
 
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I never got involved with Apple products but several friends are not able to to do what I can do with much cheaper Android devices.

All of my devices can be synced with a google account.
I have 2 laptops (a Windows7 and a Windows10),
several Android Smartphone Tracfones,
and a RCA Viking android tablet with a keyboard which is my least favorite device because it is so slow to load anything compared to the laptops and phones.
Its only advantage over the phones is a 10 inch screen. Only advantage over the laptops is apps but Windows 10 will eventually enable more apps.

The Smart phones can work like small tablets on WiFi even if a phone activation is not done or expires.
They are fantastic with the Chromecast (better than my laptop) and also enable the ROKU to access websites with the Web Video Caster app
They have cameras and expandable storage with a sd card. I love watching tv shows and movies in bed with them without glasses.
HSN offers some decent cheap ones with a year of Tracfone service if you want mobile data access without WiFi.

On the laptops, I collect and edit video files which are much larger than photos and have never come close to running out of laptop hard drive space.
The laptops can have endless storage expansion with sd cards, flash drives, or even a huge external drive.
Both also have optical dvd drives but I rather play a video file casted to the chromecast (VLC playback render).

I was late to the party with ROKU and Chromecast but the party became even better with cheap smartphones used as tablets.
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Old 11-30-20, 05:36 PM  
BigBadBetty
 
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You can get small laptops with as much or more memory than an iPad so I wouldn't worry about that. However, they would be the same price or more than the iPad (depending on what iPad you are looking at). I have an iPad, but I rarely use it. I generally use my small laptop. I had a keyboard for the iPad, but you had to charge it separately from the iPad. It was a little smaller than a normal keyboard which made it harder to use.

However, since you have bought into the Apple ecosystem, you might be more happy with iPad. Apple now makes it own keyboard so it probably works better than the one I had. I used to use a Mac laptop at work and a Windows laptop at home. I found it frustrating to go between systems. I was finally able to convince my boss to buy me a Windows laptop.
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Old 11-30-20, 07:30 PM  
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Definitely not Chromebook.
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Old 11-30-20, 08:17 PM  
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hdw View Post
Definitely not Chromebook.
Not the OP, buy I would appreciate more detail than just a "not Chromebook."
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Old 12-01-20, 12:34 AM  
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Originally Posted by cataddict View Post
Not the OP, buy I would appreciate more detail than just a "not Chromebook."

I don't know if this is still the case with Chromebooks, but my uncle has had two of them over the years and I checked the specs and they both seem to have inadequate hard drive storage space for my needs, to say the least, even for a secondary laptop/tablet. Personally, I need at least a little room to be able to save short video clips (usually knitting tutorial videos that are less than 10 minutes long), some photos, documents, etc. Oh, and when I used to travel or knew I'd be stuck somewhere with spotty wifi, I liked to be able to download episodes of shows on Netflix through the Netflix app beforehand so I could watch them even when offline. That was a big space hog but convenient.

My little Lenovo Yoga (many years old at this point) doesn't have a ton of storage space or anything. It came with 117gb of hard drive storage (some of which gets eaten up by the operating system and apps I assume) and currently I still have about 39gb free, even with my knitting videos, photos, and some documents on there.

So long as I have 100-200GB to work with, I'm happy and don't run into issues on my secondary/"travel" laptop. My main laptop has over 1TB of storage but that's where all my music/podcasts, photos, youtube video downloads, etc. are stored. (I won't even go into the 5TB external hard drive I use for backup and overflow.)

But yeah, 100-200GB is about as minimalist as I personally want to go for storage on a secondary laptop. Maybe Chromebooks have more storage now? Or maybe there's an easy way to add storage if needed? Or maybe there are other, more critical drawbacks?

My uncle loves his current Chromebook by the way, so they are great for some.

Last edited by adawn; 12-01-20 at 12:40 AM. Reason: Edited to correct the storage amount
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Old 12-01-20, 07:59 AM  
alisoncooks
 
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Chromebooks don't have storage because they're intended to just run off web applications. They store stuff on the cloud. So documents, photos...nope. They're definitely not intended to download/hold videos.

I've been trying to decide what our next device will be. We all have aging iPads and my Mac mini (desktop) is old. So we're basically all apple here (phones, too) but we're constantly fighting the lack of space. I've considered a chromebook for oldest DD to do schoolwork on...
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