Is the Laptop Dead?
What kind of technology will grace your home office desk five years from now? According to Kit Eaton over at Fast Company it wont be a laptop. While Intel is hard at work pushing the Ultrabook, Eaton argues that – the sleek MacBook Air is the peak of design in the laptop field. Intel are simply chasing the tail of John Ive’s Air. According to Eaton “the Utrabook isn’t the silver bullet to securing their future–they’re instead almost like a well-polished, perfectly refined full stop at the end of the design description of the device.”
It’s interesting to think of this technology at the end of its natural life. We are on the brink of the next wave and in my mind it has to be some kind of tablet type device. Although having spent the weekend without my laptop trying to work from our iPad I am much relieved to get back to this MacBook Pro. The tablets need to resolve their cumbersome typing problems. If they could fix that I’d blog from the iPad in a heartbeat!
Well I think that something like a middle format will be needed. For me – as a developer I can’t possibly imagine to be programming on an iPad or on a tablet without a keyboard and I can’t imagine doing some other productive work like graphics or design.
Apple / MacOS slowly merges the usability concepts of the iPad into their ‘big’ MacOS X. Doing this is easier than going the other way round – adding all the noise from the ‘big’ MacOS X to the iOS.
A middle format is needed – enabling a mobile UI used in the iPad to be used when you travel with the possibility to switch to a Desktop/touch like system when you are at home. But you also can’t have two completely separate systems on one device – their UI/UX needs to overlap, or else it’ll be a mess.
It’s the work of us platform and UX developers to find the right mix I guess.
From the HW point of view – I believe – I really do, that the presentational / LCD & keyboard part of computers, be it mobile or desktop should be handled as separate things. You could for example have a small box (size of a business-card) that you put into a tablet or you put it into your home computer. This should be more than a disk and less than the complete computer. The tablet and the home desktop will only provide the LCD, keyboard and mouse.
At the end of the day you should be able to use the best peripherals with the best software & HW platform and you need to have a possibility to combine them.
Milan Kazarka
http://www.simplestrawberry.com