Maybe one year ago isn't such a good benchmark. Less than one year ago prices here were 5x EUR for 2TB (that is between 50 and 60 eur). I'm talking good retailers, both online and brick mortar stores.
Even after the flood (but not until the retailers got wind of the shortage) USB 2TB drives were going for 59EUR.
Now the cheapest bare 2 TB drive I can find is 110 EUR. Something from a reputable retailer like amazon is 120-150.
WD20EARS (entry-level WD 2TB) is on amazon marketplace (not amazon directly) between 350 and 9999 (!!!) eur.

Bottom line:
- prices are still more than double
- supply is still in shambles

Yea, that's true. Funny thing I've got a 24 inch to replace my aging 19 inch and guess what, it's less taller than the 19 inch!!! WTF. Visibly and in some rather important respect: the 19 inch is larger than A4 length, whilst the 24 inch is smaller. WTF?!
I was saying for a long time that we'll end up with displays that are XXX inches long but have only one line, it seems that we're getting close to this!

To add insult to injury, there are still movies that are "too wide" for my 24 inch!

Tablet: read ebooks comfortably.

The guy has a kindle as well, apart from laptop and tablet.

Huh, have you ever installed Ubuntu during the last years? It asks you if you want to encrypt (encfs) your home (and of course you can change the password later on, although it won't help you if an attacker had access to the machine in the meantime).
"Whole-disk" encryption is also available in the alternate installer (and it looks and probably is identical with the one that exists by default in the debian installer). However for some reason the recent versions of the "alternate" are a mess, at least in my experience.
Upgrades/reinstalls are also no problem (if all goes well) although I hope it's obvious that backups are a must.

Kudos to Apple for creating a need that doesn't exist really but what are people doing nowadays carrying both a tablet and laptop?!
Now I somehow understand the "couch surfing" use for a tablet but really carrying a laptop and a tablet seems to be overkill (and still done by many people).
You can check something quickly on your phone (which is easier to access than the tablet and most likely it runs precisely the same OS) and for anything serious you still need the laptop. So, why the tablet?
And it's not some case of "why not if I can afford it". There's a big price to be paid in having an extra device apart from original cost and the extra weight: you need to take care of it, not to lose it, to recharge it, to install stuff on it, debug it if it doesn't work (even sending it back to manufacturer if it fails), etc.
If you are very young (or very poor) and a little bit geeky you probably welcome anything that works on electricity, from a 1GB USB stick to a nice used laptop. But there is a point where it's just too much and even if it's free it's just not worth it for the extra complexity.

Even if the pretended documentary would be close to the truth for the sake of whatever technique this still wouldn't say anything about Romania; you can gather as much if you knew at least the full title of the movie, which is "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan".

"Borat" wasn't a documentary, if you can't make the difference please don't watch "Zombie Apocalypse" or anything similar. For your own good.

This is in fact a very thorny issue to tackle. What if you have a teleportation device that makes a perfect copy of you while instantly destroying the original? We say now that the original is the original because we aren't very good at copying more than pieces of paper (and now 3D print a very few things). But what if the technology would be so good that nobody, not even you would be able to tell that you've been copied and the original destroyed? How could you tell you're still "the original"? You could go from couch to fridge and somebody could just play a trick and do the copy/destroy-original on you!