I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen.
theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.
Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.
I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)
> Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.
IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.
We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
> I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.
I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet.
The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with.
(Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)
> The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else.
Having used the same device as my tablet/laptop/desktop for a few years (previously a couple of generations of Surface Book, now the Envy, in both cases with a dock set up on my desk), I never want to go back. It just makes using it so much smoother, even compared to having tab sync and what have you between multiple devices. It's not a money thing, it's a convenience thing, which is why I think it'll win out in the end.
I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices. I definitely still want an easy way to take a keyboard with my device on the train/plane, and I don't know what exact hardware arrangement will win out for that, but I'm confident that the convergence will happen. I think phone convergence will also happen eventually, for the same reason, but how that will actually work in terms of the physical form factor is anyone's guess.
Yes, that's useful. But eg ChromeOS already gives you most of that, and a bit of software could get you all the way there.
> I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices.
I agree with the latter, but not the former. There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.
(And once you have the extra space from a keyboard, you might as well fill it up with more battery. But I'm not so sure about that compared to the argument about physical lower bounds on keyboard size.)
I don't understand what you mean here. If you're talking about some kind of easy sync between devices software, people have been trying to make that work for decades, but they not haven't succeeded but haven't even really made any progress.
> There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.
Maybe, but those limits are plenty big enough for a tablet - particularly with the size of phones these days, a tablet smaller than say 10" is pointless, and the keyboards on 11" laptops are fine. Now making a device that can work as both a phone and a laptop-with-keyboard will probably require some mechanical innovation, yes, but that's the sort of thing that I suspect will be figured out sooner or later, e.g. we're already seeing various types of folding phones going through the development process.
Sure it's fine to get by for an hour or two but spending 8 hours 5 days a week on one is a really bad idea and will provide a great path to crippling RSI. In fact using any laptop that much is a bad idea, due to the bad posture it provides (with the screen attached to the keyboard). This is why docking stations are still so important.