My wife has had a HP Stream tablet since we bought it at a discount in the San Francisco Microsoft Store back in 2015. I also had one. The bargain was that it came with an Office license and some credit for apps and music. it made the tablet effectively free. It ran Windows 8.1 and had live tiles.
Almost immediately it became out of date. It didn’t matter because we just used the tablets as browsers and a bit of Netflix. it wasn’t serious computing. My thought was that it worked like a big WindowsPhone. Once it had an SD card in it the 32gb storage became usable.
Things have changed. My wife now has an iphone SE 2020. Cortana is long gone from her WindowsPhone and Windows PC. When she picks up her 8 inch Windows tablet it is no longer a smooth ride to websites and news. She can’t look at Twitter easily and even looking at photos is getting laboured as Onedrive keeps asking for credentials to “fix” her Microsoft id.
Time to let the old tablet go into recycling. The Intel Atom processor was never great and Microsoft never made an ARM tablet after Windows RT crashed and burned. I am of the opinion that for some years the only real tablet people should buy is an ipad. An ipad has been ordered from Ebay. The Surface Go would suffer the same underpowered mess that the HP Stream had. A Surface Pro is a productivity device and not really a tablet. It’s a 2 in 1 with a tablet mode add on.
I now have this feeling I am gradually being sucked into the Apple ecosystem. As a professional Windows user I can see how that Microsoft’s retirement from the consumer space moves “normal users” to other ecosystems. Apple’s new found love for consumer services is providing the quality experience for personal computer users that Microsoft used to provide at the beginning of this decade.