According to a piece by Cerentha Harris on the Herman Miller site, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, declares that within five years the laptop will be dead. God, rock, now laptops? We are quick to declare the death of things which we feel have been super-ceded or rendered obsolete by socio-cultural developments, but ...Things seldom die as quickly as we might hope they would. Now it could be argued that there is a good case for this particular prognosis. After all, it wasn't that long ago that we were all running home to our desktops, and who can forget the toilet-lid shaped Apple portable laptop that was cutting-edge cool not so long ago? Eaton's point is that we are coming to the natural end to the life of a particular form of technology.
Things in the digital world are changing rapidly and we seem to be moving towards the table era in many regards, but I wonder. The obstacle for me with complete dependence upon the iPad is the typing issue. I do quite a lot of written stuff still and while I do occasionally use an external keyboard, I find it quite hard to type on the iPad.
For a while it was the desktop/laptop permutation which shifted to the laptop/tablet form many now operate with. The desktop seems to have morphed into an interactive entertainment access point rather than being a static computer, so who knows where we go from here with regard to laptops. I can foresee their end, and if nothing else, the hand-writing seems to be on the wall, but as with most declarations of death--you need to ascertain that breathing has stopped first before it is called, and while it may be gasping, it seems their might be a little life left in it yet.
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