What is the usage of "need to want"?

Question

"Indeed, whoever buys this needs to want a tablet and laptop in more or less equal measure."

"Needs to want"? Isn't it a kind of unnecessary way around saying:

"I think that people buy this if they want a tablet and laptop in more or less equal measure."?

Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

It's a way of expressing a very conditional usefulness of the product. Without context, the sentence is slightly ambiguous, but I take it from the sentence that the buyer must desire both qualities in order for the product to be useful, otherwise it may not be what they were looking for.

So your sentence "I think that ..." is not exactly the same as the first.

To better clarify the distinction, I'll use @FumbleFingers's example of replacing it with must. Using must actually exposes the ambiguity avoided with using needs to.

As a verb, there are two common usages of the word must: the first is an induction of sorts. For example, if your friend is angry and he often gets angry when he's hungry, you might say to another person "Oh, he must be hungry." This implies that you don't actually know, but it's most likely true.

The second indicates that what follows is necessary for some arbitrary reason. An example of this is almost a command, "You must go to the Dagobah system." Another example is a conditional statement, "If you want this job, you must be able to sit in front of a computer for 20 hours straight."

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So with must we can mean two things (although the first is more likely than the second due to its usage/context):

"Whoever buys this must want a tablet and laptop in more or less equal measure."

This could mean "We can assume that anyone who buys this product wants a tablet and a laptop."

It could also mean "This product is most suitable for people who want both a tablet and a laptop."

Using needs to want instead of must (or wants, which implies the former interpretation of must as mentioned earlier) removes the ambiguity and clearly indicates the latter interpretation of the example used for must.

As @StoneyB eloquently explained in his/her answer, the sentence indicates that it's actually implied that what should be true isn't. That is, it seems that the speaker has noticed that one or more people have bought the product, been unsatisfied with it, and noticed the correlation between satisfaction and the desire for a tablet and laptop in one product.

If you remove the Indeed this implication disappears, so I believe my former points still stand when disregarding the usage of Indeed.

Answer 2

It's not a particularly graceful sentence; but it is not a superfluously verbose paraphrase of your rewrite.

Your version, with wants to instead of needs to want to, is a description of people who do buy the product.

But the author is not a market analyst; he is a product reviewer. He suspects that the statement in your version is not true: that many people who have bought and will buy the product may not want both a table and a laptop. He incorporates the deontic need to in order to warn people who are considering buying the product that they should not do so unless they want both a tablet and laptop.

Answer 3

Needs to want does indeed sound awkward.

For maximal succinctness, consider:

"(Its) purchasers will want something that's roughly 50% tablet, 50% laptop".