Why the laptop will become endangered tomorrow

I don't buy it. Many people do real work with a laptop as their only computer. They code, they word process, they process obscene amount of email, whatever. No one used point-and-shoots for real work. No reporters, professional photographers, etc. used point-and-shoots, save maybe in very weird circumstances.

The laptop isn't really a lesser desktop. It can do anything a desktop can do, but with slightly worse performance.

It won't be until the iPad's input device is just about as good as a physical keyboard and you can code and word process effectively that it will be viable, and I think that's a long, long way off.

Laptops fit much better into many people's lives than desktops as a primary computer, including power users. And a power user's primary computer can't just be good enough in most situations.

Most importantly, there's a lot more power users of computers than there are of cameras, and that number is growing quickly. It won't just be a tiny niche of hackers that aren't ok with being physical-keyboardless whenever they're on the go.

I love point-and-shoot cameras. When my cameraphone can give me an 8 megapixel shot that is actually clear enough to print, let me know. A point-and-shoot camera lets me turn everyday events into something beautiful. A cameraphone only lets me snap a picture of a misspelled ad for my Twitter followers.

Similarly, my netbook runs Emacs. An ipad doesn't. Anything that can't run Emacs isn't usable.

I disagree.

Camera phones are replacing point-and-shoot cameras because they're starting to catch up to point-and-shoot cameras in terms of quality. Moreover, your regular consumer can do just fine with a slightly blurry 5 megapixel image because all he wants to do is upload his Saturday-night-party pictures on Facebook. (Offtopic: most non-techie people I know prefer to use goodish-quality POS cameras for their vacation/wedding/$IMPORTANT_OCCASION pics because they know cameraphones suck.)

Now the iPad is a completely different beast. It has been designed from the ground up as a media consumption device. Sooner or later, people will realize that the iPad is a kickass entertainment device, but it's useless when you need to work. Just imagine how painful it would be to type up a 200 page report on that thing, even with an external keyboard.

There are a bunch of people who use their computers for actual work, and this bunch is not limited to hackers. Architects, designers, musicians, filmmakers, doctors, researchers, teachers, retail store owners -- all these people need tools - both software and hardware - that the iPad simply doesn't support. Okay, let's assume Apple makes the device more open, or a better device like the Notion Ink Adam takes off. Even then, tablet computers (that's what they're called, right?) will never be powerful enough for most people because of hardware limitations. Media producers, at least, need powerful CPUs and/or GPUs. And tons of storage. There's no way a tablet computer can compare to a full-blown laptop or desktop in terms of raw performance.

Now, I understand the argument in this article is that people will prefer using desktops as work computers and tablet computers as portable computers. The OP is arguing that laptops are a poor compromise between power and portability. Sure, you get more performance-per-dollar with a desktop than a laptop, but laptops are useful not because they're portable computers but because they can double up as desktops. Plug in an external display and keyboard, and you're good to go. And, of course, they can do everything desktops can do.

I, for one, wouldn't want to go to college with only an iPad in hand. I do a lot of reading/programming in the library between (and sometimes during :p) lectures.

PS: I really don't want to sound like a fanboy, but if you want a laptop that is comfortable and has about 8 hours of battery life (10 if you dim the display and turn off WiFi/Bluetooth when you're not using them), get a Mac :)

I'm typing this on a $200 netbook that meets my needs far better than an iPad could.

With apt and linux I have an awesome free app "store" with thousands of apps that have been vetted by the community, a task that Apple's app store is far from accomplishing.

I can connect to the internet via bluetooth through my phone's connection.

I use this laptop to write lots of code on, and rarely mind the slightly slower processor, slightly smaller keyboard and slightly smaller screen.

All I'd ask for is a bit more battery life, but surely UNR will compile in top end kernel optimizations for battery life, and maybe my next $200 netbook will be a bit faster and get 10 hours per charge.

Somebody should be recording all these predictions so that in a year we can come back and laugh at the hype.

Missing perspectives:

1) The laptop still has several advantages over an iPad or similar device. The full keyboard, for example. And in the specific case of the iPad, open apps.

2) Many of the supposed weaknesses of laptops in his diagram -- expense, low battery life, etc. -- are not necessary conditions of laptops, but incidental. Cheap, high-battery-life laptops (like netbooks) do exist.

3) One of the main reasons camera-phones replaced point-and-shoot cameras is that people already carried phones and the things came embedded. I'd never have bought a camera of that low quality if it didn't come attached to something I already carry.

If I could make a point on the subject of cameras, the market definitely isn't polarising into cameraphones and big SLRs. The most important thing that's happening in digital photography at the moment is the blurring of the line between SLR and compact camera and between stills and video.

Samsung, Panasonic and Olympus are attacking the incumbent duopoly of Canon and Nikon by building cameras that have interchangeable lenses like an SLR, but use an LCD viewfinder instead of a bulky and complex mirror and prism. By substituting complex mechanical and optical parts for electronics, the smaller players rob Canon and Nikon of much of their competitive advantage.

Further up the food chain, Canon and Nikon are making great efforts to take on Panasonic, Sony and JVC (and even Panavision and Arai) by leveraging their optical expertise to offer a lower-cost alternative to professional camcorders and even 35mm movie cameras.

I find it very interesting that in the compact digital camera market, the megapixel war is almost entirely finished - almost all marketing is now done on the basis of ease of use, low-light performance or novel features like face recognition or panorama modes. The cameraphone is certainly supplanting the digital camera at the low end, but the digital camera is also supplanting the camcorder.

In spite of what many might regard as a fatal blow from phone cameras that effectively cost nothing, the market for digital cameras is thriving because people are taking and sharing more and more photographs. I think we have a great deal to learn from what is going on in the digital photography market.

The laptop is not the tool of choice for the consumer seeking entertainment. The laptop is the tool of choice for the professional: the doctor (me) or scientist (my dad) doing research after hours, the home-health therapist writing notes (my wife), the math teacher (my mom) putting in grades, the sysadmin (my brother), the grad student writing papers (my other brother), the author, etc. Turns out most of the target audience of consumers seeking entertainment can only afford them because they are also people are employed in the knowledge economy.

I suspect a slightly different scenario will play out, at least at first. Instead of folks cutting back on laptops outside of their homes--afterall, they left home to work--we will see iPads in more places than anything before.

Laptops will continue to be used for the intended purpose, that is, mobile computing. And suddenly we will see iPads where we didn't even see laptops before. A laptop is 5 pounds. An iPad is 1.5 pounds. One you consciously think about bringing, the other just comes with you anytime you have a bag.

I see this as different from the point-and-shoot to cameraphone scenario. A cameraphone replaces every feature of a P&S, whereas an iPad does not replace 99% of the use-case for having and using a laptop. Not yet, anyway. Wait until the apps catch up. Major apps like Photoshop, Skype, TextMate, Lightroom, Visual Studio, anything corporate.

Right analogy; wrong conclusion.

I still use my digital camera when I want to do "serious" photography, whether it's for taking family photos or any other event that I want to perserve a memory. When it doesn't matter or when my digital camera isn't available, I fallback to my iphone.

The same will be true with a tablet. It won't replace my laptop for work, serious web surfing, research, etc, but it might be there for me when I'm bored and just want to consume content. It will never replace my laptop, but may be light enough and convenient enough to be replacement for for some of today's laptop tasks.

For some people, a camera phone is a enough of a camera. For some people, a tablet may be enough of a computer. For most people, they'll probably want both.

The computer industry is gigantic. It's nearly impossible to talk about its entirety in broad strokes. Even if you don't work in the technology industry lots of people carry laptops around for various reasons. It's a little presumptuous to think their needs are always so easy to meet. So right off the bat we need to exclude most computers used for business or most professional users in general. We also need to exclude hardcore geeks and power users. My guess is that leaves you with about half the market for laptop computers. Basically the people who are buying net books today. That's the market where the iPad is going to have the most impact. I think Apple hasn't been oblivious to the rise of net books in the computer market. They see the potential market for something less than a full blown computer, smaller and lighter, better battery life, more fun to use and most importantly more task oriented instead of a general purpose device. For those people the iPad is going to be fantastic. For the first 50%, the geeks/professionals, the iPad might have some appeal as an accessory but it's not going to change much. So going back to the original premise that the world wide computer industry is gigantic the iPad, and other tablets modeled closely after it, are a fragmentation of this massive industry into more logical segments. We're long overdue to recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all. The needs of the geeky power user are massively different than the needs of a person who wants to read an e-book or webpage on their couch. They'll happily co-exist together.

I think he undersells the iPad by comparing it to a cameraphone.

Due to the fact that good lenses and flash require a certain amount of space, and no amount of technology is going to change that any time soon, cameraphones will NEVER be as good at ANY kind of pictures as even the cheapest point-and-shoots. These are phones FIRST. The camera is just another bullet point in the feature list.

A multi-touch tablet with an OS and a bunch of applications designed from the ground up exclusively for a touch-based interface isn't a second class citizen here. The primary purpose of the iPad is for using applications. It is, in some ways, better than a laptop for certain tasks. It comes back from sleep quicker, is more portable, sips the battery slower, and touch interfaces work better for many applications.

In fact, when I think all of this is over, it might be a boon for desktops. While it's cute to hack code in the kitchen or at Starbucks, let's face it, you aren't getting as much work done when you're stuck on that tiny screen, using that cramped keyboard, fiddling around with that touchpad. Laptops will continue to be very important, but it might end up being cheaper and work out better for many people just to buy something like a mac mini and a tablet device.

In the end, can't we all just agree that we have different needs and that each of us is entitled to have the devices that we choose and afford?

I don't see much overlap between laptop and iPad.

A laptop is a desktop substitute; it's keyboard+screen in a much more convenient package with a bearable decrease in performance.

An iPad is a paper substitute. It fits this niche precisely because it does not have a keyboard. It's a miserable failure as a laptop substitute because it isn't one.

Comparing it to a laptop is like comparing a motorcycle to a bus. Once you've said not to get one if you want the other there's not much else interesting to say.

I disagree. I have Four Computers, Three Iphones, Two Kindles, and, in 12-14 more hours, an iPad.

Two of the computers are desktops - one of them with a 30" monitor and 8 Gigabytes of memory (That was a big deal three years ago. :-), One of the Laptops is a four year old MBP, one of the laptops is a two-year old MBP.

I'm not including the Half-dozen Latitude D600s I use for consoling and labwork.

I am enthusiastically looking forward to my iPad acquisition tomorrow, but I expect it will be replacing my iPhone/Kindle application interaction. For serious work, I _already_ use my Laptop, not my desktop. There really is very little I need the Desktop for, with the possible exception of my always-on VMware cluster of about 15 Unix Systems (8 OpenBSD, and about 5-7 Ubuntu) that I use for OS and Network Simulations.

Everything else I already do on my Laptop. I can only imagine how much more powerful a current MBP Unibody laptop would be.

There really is very little that a desktop offers _me_, except the always on and somewhat higher/cheaper memory parameters. Oh, and the Big Disk. (Though, at home, my TerraNAP NAS is the substitute for that on my Laptop)

So, nice idea, but, ultimately will be wrong. Laptops are not going anywhere, though we may use them a _little_ less in the office. Probably a lot less at home, though.

I fully agree with the author. However, the day he talks about isn't most likely going to be tomorrow. It will either be this summer (when OS 4.0 with multitasking comes out) or this fall (when the iPad will get a camera + multitasking).

Before any of this happens, the iPad is sadly any thing but an iPod Touch (albeit bigger and badder of course).

I've been trying to understand how the iPad will be disruptive to any market, but I can't. The iPad misses the mark in so many ways. What does it do that my netbook doesn't? Nothing. Is it more comfortable to use? That's really debatable. Better input mechanisms? Certainly doesn't look that way.

I've seen tech folks point out that the iPad must be great because it's something that their mothers want to use. But is that a good thing? Are the same qualities that are attracting your mother to the device the same qualities that would inspire strong adoption? Make the device popular among teenagers? The business community? Artists? The tech crowd?

I can't wait for the iPad to come out because I'm hoping I'll finally have an epiphany about exactly what makes this device worth purchasing.

Eh, only partially. The point&shoot -> camera phone transition does indeed work, but there's still the entire medium-amateur market which is still buying a fairly large amount of them. DSLRs are expensive, and camera phones suck. Sure, the market's shrunk rather dramatically, but that's because there was no convenient option before.

Will laptops diminish similarly? Probably a bit. But the same was claimed about netbooks, though Apple wasn't making them, and there's still the large amount of people who do work on laptops who will guarantee a market. Besides, there's too much crap out there, some tighter competition would probably be good.

And, good riddance, I say. I now own an iPad and I see how the laptop is now in the same class as a desktop. It's now a work machine. I can watch TV, check email, surf the web, look up information, chat, listen to music, play games, etc. on a comfortable screen, without a keyboard, and using a form factor that is like a magazine. In fact, I neither need nor want a laptop anymore since I prefer using my iMac and PC for development.

Most people use a laptop not as a computer but as an information access device. The iPad bests the laptop for this.

Can we just forget about this iPad stuff and return to our everyday hacking?

There is a difference, though: cameras were added to phones which everybody needed anyway. The iPad is an extra 500$ investment.

Also, I have been waiting for years for phone cameras to become good enough, but last month finally gave up and bought a real digicam again.

Still hope that eventually phone cams could become good enough, but not holding my breath atm.

Whether this is true (I'm suspecting not), it would make for an interesting world—the laptop would be a niche product, made for those who do a lot of typing, even on the go: programmers and writers/bloggers. I'm imagining the term for them would gradually revert to "electronic typewriter" :)

Who ever said that there's going to, in the long run, be a difference between the iPad and laptops? A laptop is just an iPad with a keyboard.

That wasn't so hard now, was it?

An extreme but his perspective highlights how the iPad could effect the entire consumer electronics industry.

Ehh, someone had to make the claim, why not Amit?

And come to think I'm the weird one.

I've got a blackberry, an eee, an ibm laptop, multiple desktops, and a good server. I carry my phone everywhere, so I get email/sms/gvoice/facebook/msn/yahoo messages there. If I need a computer, I can use my eee, which is almost always in my van, for windows and linux apps. And to top it off, if I need raw cpu power, I can log in at my apartment to my server and 'crappycluster' of ubuntu eualyptus testing.

As per the iPad, are there any "real apps" that offer printing via cups, ssh, vnc/rdesktop or the multitudes that give access to a real machine? Probably not. I'm sure there are on the 3rd party ipod app servers.... But not on the main Apple controlled one