AnswersThatWork Blog

The AnswersThatWork Blog

Sunday, 24th April 2011

The iPad effect and the future of the laptop

There is something very strange happening to the laptop market at the moment : you can't buy 12.1" laptops.

Yeah, there is still eBay, but that's not what I'm interested in. What I want is a brand new 12.1" laptop like some of the brilliant Ideapad 12.1" that Lenovo used to sell only....... 3 months ago !

Can't get them anywhere at the moment. Lenovo used to make them, HP used to make them, Acer used to make them, Toshiba used to make them, ASUS used to make them. Now — Zilch ! Nada, Nothing !

Those 12.1" laptops were fantastic, they were little big boys. We sold loads to our clients. With their high screen resolution you could connect remotely to your corporate HQ and work efficiently for long hours without straining your eyesight and with very little scrolling. Those extra 2 inches made a massive difference compared to the current crop of 10.1" laptops, as they transformed a laptop/netbook that you could only reasonably work on for a maximum of 2 straight hours before getting a headache, to a laptop you could work on all day and sporting a full-size keyboard for fast touch-typists like myself.

At the same time Acer and one or so other manufacturers sell 11.6" laptops. Those 11.6" laptops are beautiful cuties, but they're effecively useless. Their low screen resolution of 1024x600 is only good for Internet browsing and email for home users. They are utterly useless for the business user who is connecting remotely to his/her corporate HQ as the low screen resolution results in endless scrolling up and down, left and right, just to read documents; dialog boxes are too large for the screen so you have to spend time scrolling them right up to the top of the screen so you can press the OK or CANCEL buttons ! Some palava ! They really are terrible for remote connectivity.

Which leaves ?

10.1" laptops that you can barely spend 2 hours on before needing to rest your eyes for 10 hours, or an immense pool of 15.6" wide-screen laptops which are the new "portable home desktop computers" — you can use them in the kitchen, in the lounge, in the bedroom, in the garden, on the rooftop, etc..., anywhere but on the move.

Yes, there are the odd 13" and 14" laptops, but would you want to pay $1,000 or $2,000 for one of them ?

So what is causing this problem ? Easy : the iPad !

Manufacturers simply don't know where to position themselves at the moment because of the iPad and iPad alternatives craze : iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Viewsonic Viewpad, Blackberry Playbook, Motorola Xoom, HTC Flyer, LG Optimus Pad, HP TouchPad, Asus Eee Pad MeMo, Acer Iconia Tab, the list goes on.

iPads, and their alternatives, are great, don't get me wrong. But they have a place : for us Techs, for example, we can have an iPad while on holiday on a beach in Hawaii and quickly connect to a client's network to solve a minor problem before going back to drinking cocktails, sun-tanning and surfing. Hey Ho. For millions of business users, they are fantastic for checking emails on the move and quick replies. For the TV broadcasting industry they are literally indispensable, providing up-to-the-second latest news alerts. And, last but not least, they are fantastic Internet-connected entertainment on the move gizmos.

But iPads and their alternatives are anything but efficient computers.

When you are at a client and need an efficient and fast way of accessing your office HQ all day long, an iPad is not efficient. When you are on the move for days or weeks and spend 3 to 4 hours every evening and weekend in a hotel room furiously catching up with business at HQ, iPads are useless. The on-screen keyboard is, at best, as good as 40% of the speed of a laptop keyboard, and no human finger will ever be as fast as a mouse.

So, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Samsung, please please please, bring back efficient mobile computing, bring back the 12.1" laptop !

Now !

—— (TUT) SpaceMan