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Comment by bengoodger | Hacker News Reader

IMO it's foolish to think the laptop form factor is going anywhere, barring a fundamental shift in UX. Anything that requires productivity, e.g. content creation, is better done with a keyboard and some kind of instrument more precise than a finger. Any work involving accumulation of material from multiple sources (e.g. research) i.e. multitasking, is going to benefit from a larger screen form factor.

It's no surprise that mobile is eating consumption use cases as it means people can consume wherever they find themselves. But for the most part tablet UIs are just scaled up versions of phone UIs, even though individual apps may show more content laid out better with the additional real estate, multitasking and input don't work quite as well as laptops.

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VR will almost certainly precipitate a fundamental shift in UI. I don't see how it could not.

Whether the result will usurp mouse+keyboard remains to be seen, but I suspect it will. Body tracking just has more bandwidth.

How do you get to "almost certainly"? What makes you think people want to wear a VR headset to get real work done? It's not even established what the effects of long-term VR usage are.

> IMO it's foolish to think the laptop form factor is going anywhere, barring a fundamental shift in UX

Hindsight is 20/20: I remember a time (2012-ish) when a lot of people were banging on the "post-PC world" drum and anointed the iPad as the harbinger.

They said laptops wouldn't be as necessary. They were right. Lots of people who needed a laptop now only need a tablet or a phone. The laptop and the desktop were never in danger of going away, though, even in 2012.

> Anything that requires productivity, e.g. content creation, is better done with a keyboard and some kind of instrument more precise than a finger.

That demands a clarification because I write computer programs, which I consider to be 'productive', and I hardly need a pointing device. I wonder if people were equally sceptical of mice catching on.

> Any work involving accumulation of material from multiple sources (e.g. research) i.e. multitasking, is going to benefit from a larger screen form factor.

Give me multitasking, sure, but I very, very rarely have multiple windows of separate applications showing; I might just have a weird workflow, but it just doesn't demand it, and I like having individual windows maximised. Maybe I (think I) find it less distracting.

Yes you are an outlier. If I'm working on a web app, I will probably have Visual Studio running, the browser, the browser debugger window, maybe Fiddler and Slack. I work okay with two monitors but when space allows I've worked with three and even four.

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