But I digress. A lot of my writings back then were relics of their time, reflecting the trends that were occurring then, and in retrospect bringing to mind the trends that I never saw coming. One particularly good example of this was my Laptops vs Netbooks rambling, which I've taken care to upload here. If ever there was a quaint snapshot of the computing world before tablets, that would be it.
At that time we were struggling with this idea of having ultra portable internet browsing. If your phone wasn't an iPhone, it probably sucked in that regard. So we had all sorts of form-factors from different companies trying to approach the same concept from different directions, and it was a headache just trying to juggle all the various nicknames and initialisms they were tossing around for them. Generally the most widely-used method was to take a full Windows-compatible computer and shrink it down as much as possible, while trying to figure out a way to also have some battery life in there. An elegant solution was on the tips of tongues everywhere, but no one knew quite how to spit it out.
The netbook seemed like the closest thing to ideal at the time, and I lauded them for how slickly they fit into the internet-on-a-beanbag-chair niche. Compared to other Windows-based computers, the battery life was the best in the industry, and the size they had settled on by then was just enough for comfortable typing and fitting most websites on the screen. In fact I took the praise a step further: I claimed they rendered full-sized laptops completely cumbersome and useless.
Like I said, I had balls then.
I don't necessarily think my reasoning wasn't sound though. Laptops kind of sucked in those days. They had come amazingly far compared to laptops in the mid-to-late 90s, but they were still largely desktop PCs crowbarred into a two-inch sandwich with a shitty screen. As a result battery life was atrocious, and compromises in performance meant you weren't doing desktop-level heavy lifting with much gusto. It's amazing in hindsight though, because it seems every one of those points are now completely obsolete.
AnandTech recently published an extensive look at the upcoming Haswell CPUs from Intel. As time's gone by, Intel has continued to refine the Core architecture in the direction of squeezing increased performance into less and less power. Thanks to 22nm 3D transistors, they could make great strides in idle power consumption, and with Haswell they're taking it dramatically further by putting the power regulator on-die. With this, finer-grained powergating, the usual improvements to architecture and a tighter regulation on platform components, Intel hopes to max out at 20x less power over the previous generation. We've gone from making desktop processors and figuring out how to cram them into laptops, to making laptop processors that can scale upward.
The result of this design philosophy is already in effect with Ivy Bridge-based laptops, and with it Intel's ultrabook initiative. Ultrabooks have pretty much hit their goal in most ways except for price, but that's an eventuality. In general, laptops don't suck anymore. It took me reading an old rambling from 2007 to add up how far we've come.
For starters, battery life no longer makes you want to beat a puppy. It's actually easy now to find laptops with five to six hours of internet browsing time. That's as much as my old Asus netbook can manage, but obviously a real laptop won't struggle with flash video. A 13 inch ultrabook will probably get you seven to eight hours (if it doesn't suck).
This also means they can be used for media. Obviously laptops have been capable of this for a long time, but usually their battery life meant that you'd only be able to squeeze in a single movie, or four episodes of a sitcom before pooping out. In practical terms, you can actually use them for media, because you don't have to worry about not having the energy to browse the web after Fist of Legend. Hell you can have a three-movie marathon if you want to.
Of course, laptops were unideal media centers for other reasons as well. Again, the screens sucked. They were almost always washed out, bleeding light all over the place, changing their tint if you ever thought about slouching in your chair. They were also equipped with speakers that would maybe give your 3DS a run for its money. Oddly I didn't acknowledge the possibility of owning some high-quality headphones in 2007, but there wasn't anything you could do about the cut-rate LCD. Nowadays, however, you can actually get laptops (more than one!) with an IPS screen. That was something we barely dared to fantasize five years ago.
I complained about storage too. 320GB wasn't enough for a media library, I said. Of course now 1TB isn't too hard to pull off, but it's almost a moot point. I did not take into account, or perhaps didn't anticipate the rise of media streaming from the likes of Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, and while that's not an advancement you can associate with laptops, the net effect (lawls) is that local storage space is less of a concern. It would be a much better idea to go with a SSD, which was again completely unfeasible for pretty much everybody five years ago.
Last we get to performance. In 2007, discreet GPUs were rare in laptops. If you had a discreet GPU, it meant you had a bulky laptop firmly anchored to the wall. It was basically a desktop that you could lug around without much physical distress. Nowadays, discreet GPUs are commonplace. Games are seldom super demanding anymore, so they pack a lot of punch for very little power. What's more, they turn off completely when not in use. You can actually buy a midrange gaming laptop and leave the AC adapter in the bag once in a while.
Memory is just stupid right now. You almost can't buy a laptop with less than 4GB, and for web browsing and light gaming, you won't even use that up completely, but of course lots (most?) of laptops have a whole bunch more. And mobile processors admittedly haven't made great strides in performance since 2007, but they've more than made up for it in power consumption. Back then I might have predicted most laptops would have quad-core standard by now, and while that's almost the case, it can be just as common to get a dual core processor with some hyper threading to more or less split the difference.
So what's the overall point of all this? The point is that laptops are no longer cumbersome and useless. Netbooks, rather, are what's irrelevant. They exist in far fewer numbers now, and despite some added enhancements, they will leave their owners starving for more processing power. They're nothing but cheap, poor-man laptops with only slightly better battery life, and a lot of shortcomings. They're basically dead now -- a vaguely remembered relic that fit in a very specific time in history.
The ideal in portable internet browsing was finally discovered in 2010, when the guts of a smartphone were blown up onto a 10" screen. Since Android, iPhone is no longer the only game in town, and smartphones with quad-core processors and multiple gigs of RAM are not only adequate for web browsing anywhere, they're actually pleasant to use. Around the house, at a business, or on a campus, netbooks have been completely replaced, price and elsewise, by tablets. It's a remarkable contrast between this era and the one in which I wrote that rambling because of the fact that we're not struggling with form-factors, multitudinous categories, "subnotebooks" vs "smartbooks" and everything else contributing to the clusterfuck of devices and approaches to on-the-go computing. Whatever destination we were grappling towards, we have arrived. We are at a place where we're comfortable, and the market is now a calm, self-assured place.
I feel like I'm writing this article prematurely. I look at the direction Haswell is taking, and I see a shift in computing. The funny thing is, Haswell is only a reaction to it, not the cause. It's a symptom, like how one would see a fever when it's really a sign of the flu. The transition to smaller computers has been ongoing for decades, and laptops are picking up where desktops are dropping off. Intel isn't brilliant to see that, they're just smart to adjust to it. If I were to write about this a year from now, I might be talking about more dramatic strides in laptop technology. I act surprised because your average laptop lasts several hours, but that's nothing compared to what's around the corner. If I only waited til then, I might have a better perspective.
It's amazing to think that not only are laptops more than comparable to desktops, but that they're actually portable now. To me, they always felt like clumsy, cobbled-together attempts at shrinking down hot, power-hungry parts into unmanageable heavy slabs humorously equipped with a battery. All of a sudden, there's some elegance to them. They're slim, cool, long-lasting portable devices. And refining that further isn't a secondary consideration anymore by the big players. It's become the focal point of their future business. How long is it before laptops are the norm, and desktops are the joke?
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