5 Things All New Laptops Will Have In 2010
maksim | 4:16 am | February 29, 2008 | Laptop Mods
How slow and old can a laptop be to still be usable today? Well, an ancient Pentium II laptop running Windows 98 will be enough for internet browsing, Word and Excel, music and movies – and that is pretty much all that most of us ever need.
Yet, we don’t see Pentium II laptops anymore, even though they are cheaper than a lightbulb. People prefer new, expensive laptops with built in things like fingerprint security or webcams, even though they keep the laptop at home and still work with the same old Excel sheets, and never turn the webcam on.
And this is the only way it can be in our consumerism-obsessed society, and cheap laptops that we use today will similarly look old and cost nothing in two years from now. What, then, will new laptops of 2010 be like? We came up with a list of 5 new features that we think will become standard in each laptop very soon.
- Solid state harddrive, or SSD
It is already happening now, with new Apple Macbook Air laptop being sold with a choice of traditional HDD or new SSD harddrive. It is smaller, harder to damage, it takes less energy as there are no movable parts and it should also be cheaper to produce, once the market is saturated..
.
. - Wireless USB
Also already a reality, with Dell already selling its new XPS M1330 laptop with an option of wireless USB being built in. This means fewer cables, and fewer cables can only be a good thing..
.
.
.
. - 3G/HSDPA wireless broadband card
Internet anywhere, anytime? Oh yes, please. Understandably, it becomes more and more popular as the prices of mobile broadband fall each month. Most major laptop manufacturers are including them with new laptops already..
.
. - External CD/DVD drive
This one is not as straightforward as the previous three, since people still use CDs and watch DVD movies. Yet, CDs are big, subject to scratches and they need to be spinned, which needs energy and produces heat. There are two things that can kill a CD- the continuing rise of online downloads and the price of flash memory falling below the price of a blank CD. If this happens, nothing will save a CD from a place on a museum shelf, right next to the tape cassette..
.
. - New body shape
With solid state harddrive and no CD drive, new laptops can afford to become much thinner. There will be no movable parts, and together with new low energy processors this will help consume less energy and produce less heat, reducing the need and size of cooling pipes and fans. Laptop shape will change forever to a slimmer, lighter one, and old laptops will suddenly become as elegant as 19th century typewriters..
.
.
This is of course just a wild prediction and, like all predictions, will most likely differ from the real thing. You are welcome to disagree, any feedback on the list will be greatly appreciated.
4 Comments »
Comment by sdnjal | February 29, 2008 | 5:46 pm
2015, more like
Comment by jfohl3r | February 29, 2008 | 6:29 pm
You don’t really announce what kind of laptops [high end, budget, etc] will have these features.
However, I must disagree with most of your predictions for ‘mainstream’ laptops in 2010 (which is only a mere two years away).
By 2010, solid state hard drives will be more readily available, but come on. You really think people are going to be happy with a 30-100gb hard drive and still have to pay a premium? People will easily choose a much larger normal hard drive, especially considering how large media files / applications are.
The optical drive isn’t going anywhere any time soon either. You have 20+ years of media behind it [software, music, movies, backup, etc]. Besides, a slot load optical drive sits perfectly in a laptop supporting the above keyboard area. No chance they will be gone within two years.
The shape of the laptop isn’t going to change in the next two years either. It will get thinner, but laptops will always need to be thick enough to support various items such as card readers, ports, etc, as well as have the ability to withstand everyday abuse. The Mac Air is a novelty item; it’s a neat concept but its too thin, and not a great model for other laptop manufacturers to emulate.
What are my ideas that laptops will have in two years?
More energy efficient processors, LED back lighting, and longer [6+ hour] battery life.
Your SSD and optical drive ideas are a lot further away than 2010. An equally ridiculous prediction for 2010 would be that “Instead of Microsoft Windows, 90% of home computers will ship with OS X”.
Comment by maksim | February 29, 2008 | 8:47 pm
SSD costs more than a standard HDD only because it is a new item and there is not enough competition among manufacturers. Component-wise it is cheap to produce, and the prices will fall with the same speed that regular flash prices did. Equally, capacity will inevitably rise, and this should be enough to switch preference to SSD.
I probably agree with optical drive sticking around for a bit more than two years, but the trend to produce laptops without CD drive will continue, at least for ultraportable laptop series.
New generation batteries are coming, but as far as I know there are more than two years ahead of that.
I do agree with LED back keyboard lighting, that is something a lot of people would happily pay extra money for.
Comment by Nicky | March 4, 2008 | 3:27 am
1) In two years will every user need a 3G card in their laptop? No. I think we’ll see a lot more laptops shipping with 3G capabilities, but I really doubt it will become a standardized component. Look at Bluetooth. It’s a fairly established technology, but it still doesn’t come included on all consumer-grade laptops. Also, 3G wireless still does require a data plan from a cell provider. While these plans are dropping considerably in price, there will still be a large consumer population that will have no need for mobile internet. (Or, what about WiMax?)
2) Solid State Drives are definately growing in popularity and will continue to do so. However, I don’t think that two years is enough time for SSDs to overtake HDDs in terms of cost per gigabyte. Most users wouldn’t notice any appreciable speed difference between a SSD and a HDD (except for perhaps in boot time), and the battery savings may as well be negligible too. Therefore, many users simply won’t justify the added cost.
3) The idea of decreasing size isn’t a direct result of the larger-scale technological developments you mention in this post. For example, I have a fairly hefty 17in laptop, which is about a year old. If I were to purchase a new laptop today, with the same form factor, I would inevitably find that most of the 17in laptops available today are slimmer, lighter, cooler, and more energy efficient than my laptop – even if the components rely on the same type of technology. Certainly the popularization of technology like SSDs will help manufacturers create smaller, more efficient laptops, but that development in-and-of itself is not the crux of such development.
Overall very informative post though. We’ll just have to wait and find out what the next two years have in store for the laptop industry.
Comments RSS.
Leave a comment