Edit: I still use my beefy laptop most of the time.
Originally posted March 3, 2015 on AIXchange
A reader had an interesting response to my recent post about the end(?) of desktop and laptop computers. With his permission, I’ll share some of our email exchange:
Hi Rob — Greetings from another dinosaur. For some reasons the comments in your article do not work for me. I think you’ve exposed just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few more reasons why it is too early to declare Desktops/Laptops dead:
1. Battery, battery and battery again.
Smartphones still demand to be charged every day. Watching movies is fine but using the radio for voice drains the battery in just few hours. Streamed data transfers make things worse. Using the phone for an hour here and an hour there is fine but using it eight hours a day ultimately ties one to the power cord.
One could also add that removing the DVD allows you to slam a second battery in, and to replace the main battery with a spare. Using two 9-cells and an UltraBay battery, my TP was able to survive a transatlantic and a couple of connection flights.
2. Long running jobs
Phones/tablets are good for those on the move, but running a long job ties one to a DB server. Yes, the report can run in a VM on a “remote desktop” server, and the tablet can be used as a RDP client. Virtual or not, the desktop is still needed. The phone in such cases is nothing more than a “thin client”; i.e. a dumb keyboard-and-screen device. And a rather cumbersome one, to be honest.
3. Security
Irritated by the size of a laptop an employee puts some confidential data on his/her phone. The data is not encrypted… to save energy. Every security conscious person knows the rest.
Here’s my reply:
I guess a phone guy could argue that he can plug into an external battery to recharge his phone as well, or, with the right model, just swap the phone battery out. However, I still don’t think I’m getting more with a phone compared to what I already have with a laptop. Just comparing the memory, disk space, screen size and processor, I don’t understand why I’d want to go backwards.
I’ve always assumed that I’ll be able to buy a laptop for years to come, but I guess there are those who believe they’re no longer needed. Maybe for a less-demanding user, a phone is perfectly fine. I still want to know where all these displays are that are just waiting for us to hook our phones up to them, especially out on raised floors, etc. I haven’t tried to connect to a serial port on a machine using my phone, but I know it works great on my laptop.
Later in our discussion, the reader adds:
A phone user can have a folding stand for his phone, a folding keyboard, an extra battery, a micro-USB to USB cable, a USB card reader, etc. Have I heard anyone mentioning a folding display? The light-as-a-feather turns out to be cable spaghetti. The “phone and phone only” approach works for those who seldom need anything else. Yeah, one can use any display available. Will he present to the whole crowd around the report for the next shareholders meeting he is currently working on?
The TrackPoint was invented to save the split-second movements between the keyboard and the mouse. Why not replace that with zoom out/scroll/zoom in? I doubt it would be faster.
What about multitasking? Throughout the course of the last 20 years I was always faster than the computer. On my desktop I often open tens of tabs, reading one while the others are loading. Closing the just read one, and instantly reading the next. On my laptop I am limited by the screen size. That is just not possible on a phone, or it is painfully slow. So I am much more productive.
There are many applications the phones and the tablets are well suited for. There are quite a few they are not. The “one size fits all” dream is as elusive as ever.
Incidentally, eWeek and Business2Community both have recent articles opining that laptops and desktops will remain with us for the foreseeable future. So I guess not wanting to run everything from my phone doesn’t, at this point, make me a dinosaur.