Who's Lap is It For?

I got my first computer in the mid-80s. There weren't many portable computers around at the time. In my mind I created what I considered to be an ideal portable... it was quite similar to a tablet form factor. When laptops hit the market and flourished, I was surprised with their clumsy design... they are an open-and-shut book which you hold sideways! It never has been a good design, not from day one, and still isn't.

The design of a typical laptop is a compromise design. It's not all that great on your lap, on a table, held in bed, opened on an airplane, sitting in class, or any other place it might go. It is somewhat portable, but not ideally portable. A tablet is much more similar to carrying around a pad of paper, which can go anywhere with ease. That is the reason why warehouses and medical centers have been using tablet format devices for 20 years, as opposed to impractical laptop designs.

My biggest surprise is that it's taken this many years for tablets to finally find their place. But actually, it makes sense, since the input of text has always been important and an onscreen keyboard has never compared to a physical keyboard. Technology advances will keep giving us better and better alternatives to the laptop keyboard, and with each improvement, the laptop will get more and more impractical to carry around.

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