I am not sure where I land on this issue, I am not entirely sold that it should have been filled to the brim and packed tightly but it does seem like they could have done better either for repairability or at least having things like a headphone jack and maybe better speakers (I have read that speakers can do better with more hollow space without adding much weight but I’m not knowledgeable enough)
The comments have a lot of good viewpoints
No memory expansion = no sale. Clearly they had room for a MicroSD slot.
Haha they definitely can’t claim there was no space for a headphone jack indeed.
But I mean, electronics is tiny, it can go with the same motherboard as a phone. The only thing it needs to be larger is a battery, and that’s a capacity/weight balance.
Speakers maybe, but that’s also a function of thinness so I don’t know how much of a difference size makes. Thin laptops sound just as crappy as anything else thin unless the vendor shells out for some expensive units.
Kind of annoying, they could have used that space for a bigger battery, bigger heatsink, memory card reader, more ports, etc.
That would of course raise the cost though
Yes, but at $500 the profit margins are still huge. This is like a $200 tablet being sold for $500. It probably costs $50 to manufacture.
how did you reach those numbers?
It would, and would also only apply to a very small minority of people that are stuck in the past. But the increased price would effect everybody.
You and me both pixel tablet…
A tablet is basically a smartphone with a bigger screen. Maybe a slightly bigger SSD and battery but that’s about it.
Imo the battery should take up nearly all the free slace inside the device. Especially in a tablet considering the proportionally bigger screen.
Well, that would explain why my device feels so cool to the touch all the time (aside from the corner where the SoC is
Have you seen the surface book? It could have twice the battery capacity if they just put more batteries into all the empty space.
I have never seen a mobile device with this much free space inside.
Inspired by the AlphaSmart.
For what it did, the AS3000 was absolutely OK. I’ve seen people looking perplexed when I used this thing for note-taking. Switch on, type, switch off. And absolutely lightweight.
I don’t really see this as a bad thing, sooner or later someone’s going to come up with a battery mod for these that doubles or triples run time and I’m here for it.
Edit: Re: tablet design- your can’t really make the device super skinny or they get hard to hold so the extra space in the housing might just be designed in so the tablet is easier to handle. My eink tablet is super thin and pretty easy to drop, I don’t have that issue with my larger/thicker Samsung tablet.
