Laptops of the Future

Computerworld has a feature story on the kind of laptops we'll see in 2015. The pictures they present in the gallery are concept designs, but my own personal viewpoint on the future of laptop designs is that we won't see anything so radically different from the design we have today.

I bought my first laptop in 1993. It weighed close to 10 lbs, had an Monochrome Passive Matrix LCD screen, a 20 MB hard drive and a floppy disk drive, it had the standard laptop keyboard, along with a trackball. Honestly, the laptop of 15 years ago did not look drastically different from the modern incarnation. With the laptop closed and in it's clamshell configuration, it might be mistaken for any standard PC laptop you'd be able to pick up at a big box electronics retailer.

While the MacBook Air is certainly an innovative product, not only in the size and thinness, but in its design, it is not the overall trend for laptops in the future. There are only a limited number of companies who would be so daring and bold to release such a radical design, and even fewer who would follow in Apple's footsteps.

I believe that realistically we shouldn't expect laptops to get much bigger than they currently are; nor should we expect them to get much smaller than the MacBook Air. While the iPhone is a wonderfully networked pocket device, the experience of major applications such as word processing or playing World of Warcraft still leaves much to be desired.

I'm skeptical of the touch-screen slate designs, simply because touch-typing would be difficult, if not impossible, and somewhat dubious of any change of that magnitude taking place within the next seven years. As soon as the touchpad on laptop keyboards was introduced as an alternative to a mouse, we saw a dramatic shift away from the trackballs to the touchpad; while there's definitely a lot of enthusiasm with touch computing with the iPhone, but I don't see a whole movement away from traditional keyboards to touch keyboards happening anytime soon.

One of the improvements I do see happening is a movement away from traditional fluorescent backlights to LED and OLED lighting for the screens; brighter and more efficient. I don't think we're going to see substantial improvements in screen resolution; LCD resolution averages have increased about 25% in the last 8 years, the average laptop in 2000 had a 1024x768 screen, the average laptop in 2008 has a 1280x1024 screen. In 2015, I predict we'll be running a 1600x1200 display.