This gets decided badly more often than it gets decided well. Usually because it's decided once, for the whole team, based on what the office staff use, rather than per role, based on what each role actually does all day.
Start with the actual question
Does this person create documents, or mostly review and respond to them? A finance manager building spreadsheets and reports needs a full keyboard, real multitasking, and a laptop's processing headroom. A field rep pulling up a quote, signing a delivery note, or showing a client a catalogue on-site needs something light, fast to wake, and comfortable to hold one-handed while standing. Handing the rep a laptop for that job is giving them the wrong tool because it was the tool everyone already knew how to buy.
Battery life matters more than it gets credit for
This matters more for field roles than office ones, obviously, but it's underweighted anyway. A laptop that needs charging by 2pm is a real problem for someone who's in a different location every few hours and doesn't control when they're next near a plug. A tablet with a smaller battery but genuinely all-day standby often outlasts a more powerful laptop in actual field conditions, because it's not running the same background load.
Storage is where people overspend out of habit
Most field and client-facing roles live almost entirely in cloud-synced apps. They don't need 512GB sitting on the device itself. That budget is usually better spent on the connectivity plan than the storage tier.
The durability angle nobody plans for
There's a durability question worth adding too, since it rarely comes up until something breaks. A tablet dropped on a site visit is usually a cracked screen and an insurance claim. A laptop dropped the same way is often a cracked screen, a bent hinge, and a hard drive that doesn't survive the fall. Neither is ideal, but the failure mode on a tablet tends to be cheaper and faster to fix, which matters more for a role that can't afford to be without a working device for a week.
The businesses that get this right
They aren't the ones with the biggest device budget. They're the ones who bothered to ask each role what it actually does on a Tuesday, rather than ordering the same laptop for everyone because that's what the last order looked like.
If you had to reassign devices by role tomorrow, not by who currently has what, how many people on your team are carrying the wrong one?
