https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J5pmkr4Uao

The Surface pro works well for video editing although at home I'd prefer my PC simply because of the much bigger screen, my 'work station' and nice comfy chair... my space. I would guess my Pro would edit faster than your older quad core AMD based system. I've taken some great HD video on Gran Canaria and used my Pro and Sony Vaio laptop to edit for my family.

You can't do this type of editing on little tablets like the Nexus but newer tablets are pretty much full blown PC's but on a smaller scale.

Personally I like to own and use a PC (as above, its in 'my space'), bigger screen laptop and/or a good Windows 8 based tablet like the Pro.

Agree with most of what you write, and while a tablet can, theoretically, do most of what a PC / laptop can, I actually prefer the little Nexus 7 over the Xperia Z2... it's not better hardware, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, however, given tablets are a compromise generally, the Nexus 7 is much cheaper, much more portable, and the screen, although smaller, is probably almost as good (and is certainly sharper at 330 ppi), and although not as fast, fast enough.

Windows machines aren't perfect by any stretch, certain things about them frustrate me, but they are the best compromise I've found.

Between my Nexus 5, Nexus 7 and Samsung 9 Ultrabook, I've got pretty much everything I need My girlfriend however loves the iPad Air!

The iPad is perfect for the majority of my everyday needs. Surfing the web is way better on a tablet. Still use a computer for other stuff - typing on a touch screen can be a little painful.

For most people computing power isn't needed. The number of people new to tech through a tablet can only be a good thing. I know lots of people who found computers intimidating but love their tablet.

Tablets are more of a middle-ground between smartphones and a PC, rather than a replacement for the latter.

I don't have a laptop any more but I still have access to a desktop for more serious computing needs. The iPad serves me quite well otherwise.

I suppose a surface pro is a laptop without the keyboard and the i5 Ivy Bridge was a pretty decent CPU, but sometimes the Ivy Bridge had problems with rendering in that when rendered the video did not seem to be the quality it should be.

That video you picked he one little clip on just one track, how would it cope on something a bit more complex? My quad core is fine for about 5 HD tracks and then it starts to struggle, but I expect it too, which is why I updated the video card last year, extra CPU power.
My old laptop can cope with one HD track, not that it would be displayed in HD.

The problem with something like the surface pro is expandability or the lack of it, No way to add more ram and video editing needs ram.

My computer is 3 years old, so is getting on now and while I stayed loyal to AMD, I do know that at that time they was not at their best. i am looking at updating maybe in the middle of the year, only the CPU and a bit more memory, the prices have come down a fair bit. but i am in now rush, just stuck a 2TB hard drive in it.

I do know the limitations of my desktop, but to be honest, even with my old Nvidia video card in, it coped with editing video a lot better than my mates I7. and so called high end video card at the time.

Windows frustrates me a lot lately for some reason. you are doing something and all of a sudden it wants to do something itself and then the hard drive light goes nuts. i thought with 8Gb of ram that would have been cut down, but nope.
Other times it will work as sweet as sweet and then for some reason it decides that the application you was using yesterday don't want to work today.
Granted it have got better with the release of 7 and 8, but even now my hard drive is going mad and all I doing is typing on here.

It is a new install of windows. i don't even have a third party AV on here yet.

Some of the frustrations of Windows were what prompted me to see if I could live with an Android tablet as my main device. However as I came to discover, that had its own set of frustrations, which for me were worse.

Yours is probably doing updates in the background, problem is it doesn't really communicate what it's doing so it does leave you wondering at times.

Bottom line for me, nothing is perfect but the compromises of Windows are less serious to me.

To be honest if I could have afforded it iI may have been tempted to try a mac book with retina display, as you can run Windows on it as well but far too expensive for me.

Of course tablets won't do these things very well if at all. People buy and use them for convenience, portability and their multifunctional ability. If you don't want this functionality then you wouldn't buy one but people who don't want to be tied to a desktop or even lug a laptop around for everyday use whilst on the go will and do find them invaluable.

This is now a technologically advanced society we live in and the use of mobile devices is still in its infancy. The future is going to be portable, smaller and lighter and modern people will always want a new gadget to use.

Got keyboard(s) for mine. My Sony Vaio would handle video editing better then its a lot lot bigger/heavier and this is where the Pro wins when travelling.

If your PC is out performing your mates I7/good graphics card his machine has problems. I had an email off Novatech or Aria this week and one of them had a nice i7 system with 16Gb ram and 2TB hard drive for about £500 which would be a good upgrade for you.

There is a place for both, I have a desktop and a tablet (actually lots of tablets as I assess device for my work). I always come back to my Surface RT that pretty much lets me do everything I would want from a tablet, renders webpages pages properly and plays all video. It sure could do with a lot more apps though.

My PC is still used for doing my downloading, media server capabilities, long surfing session and when I work form home (having said that the RT with a keyboard allows me to pretty much log in from anywhere and do anything I need via Citrix having used a ipad once to do this was a horrible experience).

Tablets are not toys they just have a different use case then a laptop/desktop. It is still early on in the tablet wars remember when laptops first came on the scene, bulky and heavy, not well specced compared to a desktop and you could fry an egg on the back of some of them as they got so hot.

I am more partial to windows tablets, would love something like a Surface with i processor, with a digitiser and as light and slim as a iPad Air and battery life of about 10 hours. Would be great to be able to doc it to a monitor and do all the heavy work with a keyboard and mouse and then undock to use as a tablet.

I ditched the laptop & went back to a PC!

You mean a desktop. Both desktops and laptops are PC's.

My video card is better than his now and was half the price and use less energy, but that is what happens over a couple of years with computers, certainly with graphic cards.
He is going to update the card and get some better memory in the next couple of months so he told me today.

I don't want a new machine and it certainly would not be a intel anyway, only ever paid for one Intel machine and that is my laptop. i also would not buy a pre-built desktop, I don't need to, i got a decent case and, new hard drive, ssd drive and power supply, so if I needed to update it would just be CPU, and mainboard.

It does make you think mind you that 3 years ago i paid around £700 for the parts for my computer and yet now i could get something better for less.

My mate was saying today that if he decided to renew CPU and motherboard on his computer, he would go for AMD as a mate of his got one a couple of months ago, a piledriver and a Asus Sabertooth. Now my mate have always been a Intel person since he is a avid games player, but he reckons this motherboard and chip, which is a 8 core is the really good, as good as the Intel equivalent and cheaper.
Considering that my mate have never really been one for processors over quad cores as he says that a lot of games don't even use quad core, i take it he was impressed.
I have no idea what graphics card is in the machine, I know it is AMD and was not that expensive.

so next time, my mate does a major update I can see it being a AMD.

Myself, my computer does what I want, sure it may not be super fast for rendering, but I can wait a bit longer, it is not that bad to be honest and as for doing multi track in Hd, I can use proxy files, easy and quick enough to use. I prefer using proxy files anyway, makes the machine more responsive. Another mate of mine who does video editing and video work for a living always use proxy files and his compute have a lot more power than mine. As he said, editing with AVCHD files is not the best idea anyway.

i am not a fan of laptops either to be honest, i got one a few years back thinking I would find it useful and hardly used it. I prefer a desktop and i doubt i will ever get another laptop to be honest. i know for certain that the Nexus 7 is the first tablet I own and will be the last.

AMD are great value for money processors but...if you really want performance then more often than not Intel will beat them. You have your own rationale for hating Intel but I'm driven more by performance. I've two AMD quad core base units running as media centres in bedrooms, do a great job too.

Sell you tablet if your not using it, sell your laptop (you'll get £100 or more for the laptop alone), add a few quid to the stew and get a barebones system from the likes of Novatech. Its only case, MB, and ram and you pop in the rest; you could have a real performer of a PC in a couple of weeks, massive upgrade over what your running now.

According to my mate AMD seems to have up the it's game and is now up with Intel and at a lower price. I not sure because i have not really kept up with what is what for a while.

He done benchmarks on his mates AMD machine and it was pretty impressive. I know benchmarks are not the be all and end all, but it does give some idea.

My old dual core AMD would work a s a media centre, it is not really taxing.

My problem with Intel is that they are a company that will do anything to get their sales and have done dirty tricks to get out there. Thankfully it did nto work other wise we would have even less competition.

The other thing is that apart from my first PC which had a Cyrix chip in, I have always had AMD




I would get about £20 for the laptop if that, it is not worth selling, and I doubt I would get a lot for the tablet.
As i said I am happy with what I have got, it does what I want. I certainly do't need a new case since I have a Coolermaster Haf, which no doubt would be better than what comes with any barebone system.

i just had a look at Novatech barebone systems and yes i am right, my case is better than what they supply. Maybe their motherboard bundles would be better if I was looking at updating, but they seems to use gigabyte boards in their bundles and i have not had much luck with gigabyte over the years.

i prefer to source my own parts anyway, the only time i ever got a bundle was a friends sister and I got a bundle from overclock, not overclockers, CPU, motherboard and memory to replace a old p4 board. done the trick at a good price, but i would not do that for me.

My main board is a Asrock 970 Extreame 3 and is a good board, I like Asrocks and Asus boards, they seems to be reliable. yes I know Asus makes asrock.

Computers i have put asrock boards in are still going after 5 years or more.

CPU is a phenom II quad 3.5, over clocked to 3.8, so it is not really slow, GPU is radion 6570, which while not top of the range is still pretty good, got 2GB of ram as well on that, plus what is on my main board.

Maybe at some point i will update, but while the machine is working I will keep it as it is, what I want mainly is a larger monitor, somethign in the 247 inch range and with IPS

I have a laptop, an e-reader and an iPod Touch, and I'd probably feel I was being greedy if I bought a tablet while my laptop and iPod are still quite new! Do tablets have enough advantages over these 3 devices to make it worth getting one in maybe a year's time?

Surely this has been covered so many times.... did a few tweaks to my website this morning - it's hosted on a Windows Server running MS SQL, so I fired up the Windows PC to modify the source and alter a couple of stored procs. As we speak elder boy has a few of his mates round and has commandeered the living room so I'm faffing around up here on the iPad, watching the Derby match and opting out occasionally for a change of scenery. The tablet is briliant for consuming the internet and adding a few words to it. The Kindle is head & shoulders better than the tablet for reading on, esp outdoors.

I have a decent carbon bike with electric gears that's absolutlely top notch at doing what it does, but I don't take us all shopping on it as we have something better for that sort of workload. Would I sell any of these toys? Not a chance. Different needs, different tools.

Since I've had a 13 inch retina macbook pro, which is much thinner and lighter than a standard laptop and will run for hours on battery, I've found no real use for a tablet.

Being the pro model it does a reasonable job of processor intensive stuff like video editing and excellent trackpad means there isn't really any need for me for it to be touch screen ( pain to keep touch screens clean )

If i'm out or about I'll use my Nexus 5 for a bit of on the go browsing.

If you're a lover of music, the iPod touch is your ideal device. It's much more portable, weighs a hell of a lot less and has a better camera (I think ?) Some describe it as an iPhone without the phone, but you would know more about that than I do, never having owned one.
The iPad mini obviously has much bigger screen, you can actually watch tv and movies on a tablet instead of squinting at a little screen. It could replace your e-reader as well, it won't be quite as good as a dedicated reader, but it's certainly not bad. There are more apps written for a tablet, you probably have to make do with iPhone apps ?
I haven't mentioned the iPad itself, it's a bit large to be called a truly portable device, well not for your pocket or handbag anyway.

Pretty much same for me, Samsung 13" Ultrabook, Nexus 7 and 5. For me the 7 helps save the battery at times on the 5, plus much more portable than a full sized tablet and does most things just as well, whilst the compromises aren't as obvious or as bad as on the full size tablet (mainly due to the crappy apps esp. on Android). Feel like I've got it pretty much covered now.

im also ditching my iPad Air and saving for a new laptop.. my iPad Air just terribly slow at times / some of the apps crash and other websites are unable to open on it...and ive just had enough of it..i only bought it in november and its been 6 months of slow annoying internet...my old computer is as fast...

I have both, they each have their uses. Idly browsing the internet, dabbling with a bit of drawing, playing candycrush, watching iplayer in the bath - tablet wins. Anything involving serious internet use, typing more than a paragraph, downloading or multitasking, laptop every time.

Right now, I'm idly browsing the internet on my laptop because the tablet is upstairs and I'm far too lazy to get it.

Wouldn't say that, tablets have lots of uses outside games, certainly can be more than just toys. Besides, didn't you ever watch TNG? They got plenty uses out of them

As has been explained on the other thread a dozen times over, it's not the Air that's slow "at times", it's the internet that is busy.

You're going to get exactly the same problem on the laptop, unless you change your internet connection at the same time!