Nov
No-one who works in an office, or who runs a business of their own, will agree with the above statement at all. I certainly don’t. I just put it there to attract the attention of people like me, sorry about that!
Laptops and tablets are excellent. Tablets for media, laptops for traditional computing – i.e. anything where you need to use a keyboard and have a screen that can be set at eye level. Though even here of course the laptop requires such an amount of extraneous hardware, to get it up to your eye level and let you use a keyboard to type on, that space wise you might as well have a desktop.
The advantages to a laptop begin and end with its size. It can be carried around, it can be stored easily and it does everything a desktop does. Up to a point. At some stage, the simple mathematics of spatial awareness make it obvious that the place where a desktop scores over a laptop is also to do with size.
Basically put: a desktop is big, therefore it has more space to fit technology in, therefore it is ultimately capable of running faster and better than a laptop. In actual terms, it’s rare to see a desktop that does that because the cost of all that technology makes the big guns exceedingly expensive and only really useful for people who make movies and music – or who develop websites.
For all other purposes, the laptop is just as good as a desktop – though of course a desktop is much easier to fix in terms of hardware diagnosis and replacement. Anyone with a degree of computer knowledge can fix a desktop with a faulty component, while a laptop requires a long and annoying wait in someone else’s tech department.
The versatility of laptops and tablets is undeniable. Free laptop with mobile broadband contract deals have made the ubiquity of portable computing complete. Rather than tie your office to one internet connection and one desk, as you used to with a desktop, you can take your connectivity and all your work with you in a bag that fits neatly on your shoulder.
The lightness and small size of laptops is increasing annually – though there is definitely a limit, as some manufacturers proved with overheating laptops, whose operation was significantly hampered by the fact that you couldn’t put it on your knees without giving yourself painful burns. That aside, though, we’re reaching a point where you can get a free laptop with mobile broadband contract deal and have something that works equally well as a business tool, an entertainment device and a simple base station for connecting to the internet.
The real mover behind all this, though, is the net itself. If you’ve read many of my blogs you’ll know that I’m a little obsessed with this change. Basically: the web used to be a tying that we used. Now it’s a place that we live. The real reason why most people would prefer a free laptop with mobile broadband to a free desktop with a static broadband connection is that they want to be in the net wherever they go, whenever they want.
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