Is anyone else amazed by this? Imagine you told yourself you could buy a fully functional portable computer with a easy to use capacitive touch screen for ~$100 just five years ago? Amazing.
Absolutely, I recently looked at Ali Express and nowadays you can even get tablets for < $50. So something like a factor of 10 in 3 years. If this continuous, then tablets will probably become simple impulse buys in another five years. Just as magazines are today. ( I have no idea what that means...)
I do. My wife got two tablets yesterday: an iPad rMini (upgrade from iPad 1, thanks Target for the $200 trade-in), and a Kindle (thanks Amazon for the limited-release offer) for $29. Purpose? about the same as a magazine: light reading, news, advertising. Considering that magazines today run a newsstand price of about $5, yeah we're on a trajectory for selling tablets dirt-cheap as dedicated disposable pre-packaged content viewers.
Amazed? vs. 5 years ago? Dang! 30+ years ago I got a computer for $100: a ZX80 kit (you solder it), with 1KB total RAM and no display or storage. Now, for an inflation-adjusted cost of just 38% that price, you get a tablet capable of wirelessly taking & editing & publishing video to the world. OK, these cheap tablets suck compared to good modern hardware, but they're still a million times the computer I started on.
Comparing the ZX-80 kit to the most popular product (a toy) at the thread's source, the latter has: 170x clock speed, 4000x memory, and 13x resolution (170x pixels), plus sound, screen, camera (video!), networking (wireless!). If we consider those three dimensions, that comes out to some 487x more computer for a third the cost.
Amazing times indeed.