Just to get this discussion going, before the product actually launches and we have to make hasty decisions. As a reference, here's the previous discussion: Should Tablet Computer questions be allowed on Super User?
Coming next fall, Windows 8 will launch and it will also be available on ARM. So I think it's time we revise our current non-tablet policy to start allowing these, effectively from the moment we make this decision.
The main argument for allowing them is the big difference between iOS and Windows. As the top voted answer previously said:
It all depends on what operating system it runs in my opinion. Most tablet operating systems are just glorified, "user-friendly" cellphone-based systems (Android, iOS, WP7), and should not be on Super User in my opinion. If the tablet runs Linux/OS X/Windows 7 or 8/Unix, then it's fair game.
Windows 8 should be mostly the same as regular Windows on a desktop computer, sure it'll have a touch screen and run on locked down hardware, but it's still Windows. So unless your app isn't available for Windows on ARM, your question will probably be the same as those of others.
So if we start allowing Windows 8 tablets, are we going to keep banning iPads? This policy would be needlessly complicating and luckily we have our sister sites Apple.SE and Android.SE to carry the burden. I would propose to either migrate these questions to their respective sites, given they (hopefully) have more domain knowledge and already have a sizable corpus of questions about these products. Or we make it fair game and start allowing any tablet questions and 'compete' with our sister sites for these questions, which I hope for their sake we'll lose except for the occasional hiccup.
That leaves problematic examples like the BlackBerry PlayBook or other types of tablets that aren't as mainstream as the iPad. I'd say that if we allow these other tablets, we should allow these as well, if only to have a clear policy. The worst thing that can happen to a question is that it'll go unanswered and we already have a fair deal of those, so I don't see tablets being special in that regard. Furthermore, we still uphold certain standards of quality, so if the question is poorly written or lacks sufficient information, we deal with it just like with any other poor question and close it. The same goes for questions that are basically feature requests, unless something has already been done before, we're not a forum to try and discuss possible ways to hack on some feature. Just close them.
As a final point:
We nowadays get twice as many visits/day than when we made the original decision. So in contrast to Gadgets, which lacked sufficient users who could answer questions about a large plethora of gadgets, I think we have sufficient critical mass that as long as it isn't some obscure device, we should be able to answer it.
So I propose we start allowing tablet questions and see how this plays out. I also don't expect a massive influx of tablet-related questions, just because we would start allowing them, so it's just so we can deal with them when they do start coming.
Go forth and discuss!
