How Often Should You Upgrade Your Tablet?

Apple upgrades its tablet line but once a year. Android tablet makers upgrade and update much more frequently, although we don’t always see new tablets here in Australia as quickly as we’d like. We’re still waiting on the first batch of ARM Windows 8 tablets. No matter which platform you’re a fan of, the question remains: How often should you upgrade your tablet?

It’s a stick used to beat the particularly fervent Apple faithful — that they line up year after year to get their new iPad model — and there’s certainly plenty of proof that in fact this is exactly what they do. At the same time, the rate of development and change in the Android tablet space is so rapid that models are often virtually obsolete the moment they hit more than six months old.

In the laptop space, there’s an expectation that a laptop should last three years, which also generally ties into how often the ATO’s likely to be happy for you to write off such a machine. But a three year old tablet is largely a relic, especially in the Android space; the original Galaxy Tab is a severely compromised machine in the current tablet context.

I’ve got my own thoughts on this, but I figured I’d throw it open to the community. If you’re a tablet owner, how often do you upgrade, or do you figure on upgrading? What’s reasonable given the march of technology and the cost of a tablet?

Note: I’m not so much interested in the arguments over whether you should buy a tablet in the first place; if that’s your view that’s fine, but I’m more keen to see what the readership that already owns some kind of tablet thinks.


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