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posted by on Wednesday April 05 2017, @09:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the vive-le-roi dept.

You may never buy another laptop.

Ten years ago, laptop sales overtook desktop PC sales to become the dominant hardware platform for computing. Now smartphones are about to do to laptops what laptops did to desktops.

[...] The first fatal trend is that young people are already choosing smartphones over laptops, even without docking and clamshell smartphones. ComScore reports that the use of laptops and desktops among younger people is on the decline. Some 20 percent of millennials use their smartphone as their only computing device, according to a recent report, and this percentage grows each year. Raw demographics alone favor the end of laptops.

The second fatal trend is that the industry is champing at the bit to move everything off Intel and onto ARM. (Intel and Intel-compatible chips have powered desktop and laptop platforms for decades; the smartphones and smartphone apps run on ARM chips.) Once laptops, especially laptops from Apple, run ARM chips, they'll run iOS and Android instead of OS X and Windows. And at that point, they'll essentially be identical to docking solutions, but more expensive.

The third and final fatal trend can be found in your wallet. Smartphones are becoming amazing. The Galaxy S8 is amazing. And this year's iPhone is expected to be mind-blowing as well. The new phones have cameras that rival DSLRs. They have performance that rivals desktop PCs. They run increasingly amazing apps, including professional-quality apps. Unlike laptops, smartphones are exciting.

And they're expensive.

Consumers are now ready to pay $700, $800 — even $1,000 and upwards for a phone. (Already a top-of-the-line iPhone 7 with AppleCare costs $1,100. The iPhone 8 is expected to be more expensive.)

Consumers will pay this amount because smartphones are worth it. This is especially true if they don't have to shell out $1,500 or more for a laptop as well.

Laptops are too boring and expensive. The industry is churning out new designs that enable smartphones as laptop replacements. Young people are favoring smartphones. The industry wants to use smartphone OSes. And consumers are spending more on smartphones, which will make us spend less on laptops.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:19AM (#489564)

    In my experience, the problem is less the 'only one window in the foreground thing' but more the 'context switching is too hard' thing. I usually tend to maximize my browser window for web surfing and video watching and that works fine only because I have a directly accessible task bar and a tab bar containing a lot of browser tabs allowing easy context switching from one application or page to another. Both of which are also accessible by quick shortcuts.

    Tiling windows is much better in theory but has its own issues. Occasionally I try to put a web browser and a terminal window or text editor side by side for learning and coding which sorta works, but I frequently run into stupid stuff where the website page gets squished too much and starts to require horizontal scrollbars, which are a pain.

    Mobile makes task switching hard because it involves dragging from the top of the screen (but not too high, because then you get the the android stuff instead of the chrome browser stuff) and then scrolling through a carousel list of page thumbnails (instead of a simple list of page titles that would actually all fit on the screen at once) before you find the page you need. And app switching requires another button which is awkwardly placed on the bottom right of the screen far away from my fingers usual resting place. This is my experience with Android and makes every context switch are chore. The situation may be more userfriendly on iOS, but I highly doubt it. The lack of a large array of physical buttons just makes for a large limitation.

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