Laptops … a personal reflection and perspective

One of the first laptops that I ever used was small, blocky in design, had a rubber pointer, had small TFT screen and would get hot enough to quite literally warm up my room in winter.
We have come far in mobile computing.

I have noticed a trend over the past 2-3 years. Many of our customer and some of my friends who ask for a new personal computer, they all enquire about laptops exclusively.
Me being around PC components all the time, I always lean towards the custom built mid tower PC.
So I ask many of them why the choose the laptop over a PC and most of them answer;
“Because it’s mobile”. Or something to that effect.
People seem to enjoy the freedom to be able to take their virtual world with them, not just in their hand as a smartphone or tablet, but also as a powerful computer.

Just yesterday we purchased a laptop for a customer who wanted a laptop for watching movies.
So knowing this I tried to find something cheap, powerful enough to run movies smoothly but also cheap.
They were not entirely sure of the first few I showed them so I asked them why?
“The specs aren’t good enough”, upon hearing this I had dreadful flashbacks of my first hand me down laptop from my uncle who probably paid $2000 for an Intel Pentium 2 powered laptop.
Upon checking the specs of laptops, I eventually found what the customer was looking for.
It was an ultrabook.

Even though I work with computers every day and try to keep up to date with all things related to PC’s, I must admit I haven’t looked at the strides that laptops have made in the past few years.
This thin, sculpted aluminium device was a sight to behold and at first glance the specs were hard to believe… I kept wondering how hot and loud it would actually get.
That was ofcourse until I dug more deeply into what all the little “m” insignias mean behind the clever marketing terms on the specs of the hardware components.
Turns out it won’t get very hot or very hot at all.

Sure it was sleek, sure it looked nice and the technology packed into the butcher knife thin aluminium shell was noteworthy, I still wondered why someone would need such a device if they are not working on it? So my real question is this, with PC’s, consoles, smartphones, tablets and media centres, where does the laptop fit in nowadays?

Having said all that, I understand the mobility factor and I am astonished how far laptops have come since my uncles IBM laptop (which had such a cool looking CD-ROM drive in 1997).
I am also really interested what AMD’s new Kavari APU will also do to shake up the mobile computing market.

We at A&STech can research, find, fix and restore all your mobile computing needs.