Cruising X yesterday, I hit a thread touting Dell’s Pro Rugged 10″ and 12″ tablets. Out of curiosity, I started digging. Want a 12″ Copilot+ Rugged tablet? Think hard, and dig deep! Expect to spend between $4-5K for the privilege of owning one. I costed one out and it came to $3,745, not including the detachable keyboard. So I looked for other makers including  MobileDemand, Getac, and Panasonic/Toughbook. Pricing rugged Copilot+ tablets tells me they’re painfully expensive. That means other makers are charging about the same for comparable offerings as Dell. Ouch!

For the record, spending that kind of money gets you a Copilot+ system with at least 40 TOPS of NPU, bright graphics (has to be visible in sunlight), 32 GB RAM, and at least 1 TB of storage. It also typically includes at least one form of long-haul wireless capability (e.g. 5G). If you’re going this route, you’ll want to spring for a second, hot-swappable battery as well. Don’t want to run out of juice in the middle of nowhere!

Pricing Rugged Copilot+ Tablets Means $$$$

I’ve long been fascinated with powerful tablet PCs that come with detachable keyboards. They make great readers, untethered, and they work reasonably well as laptops with keyboards plugged in. But gosh, this latest generation costs up to 4X as much as any model I’ve ever purchased. I’ve owned or reviewed other Toughbooks, Dell, Fujitsu, and Microsoft Surface models configured to work this way. Of those the Fujitsu Stylistic Q704 was the most costly at just under $3K; the Dell Latitude 5285 was my definite favorite. Neither was ruggedized, though…

The markets for rugged tablets and PCs are usually the military, first responders, field crews for utilities, field scientists and data collectors, FEMA and disaster relief teams of all kinds, and other folks who must work outdoors or in hostile environments (sometimes, literally). Adding expense to achieve reliability and dependability is something that comes with such roles– and related uses, for PCs or tablets.

There are lots of specialized niches in Windows-World. This is one I’m happy to visit when companies like Panasonic want to send me review units. But at those prices, I’m unlikely to buy one myself, unless I get a job that requires me to compute in the field where I might have to work in rainy, dusty, or otherwise hard-to-handle environments. At this stage of my career, that seems kinda unlikely — but you never know.