In the past couple of weeks, both Intel and HP announced not bigger and better but smaller and less powerful laptops that they are going to be producing soon with release dates set as early as the end of the month.
The idea is to produce machines that are reasonably affordable for more people and to get them put to use by more and more schools. Apparently reasoning that most people don’t use the full power of a laptop computer anyway, these two companies are building what appear to be stripped down machines with slower processors, smaller hard drives, and smaller screens for less money.
After all, if all you’re doing with your laptop is word processing, watching YouTube, and sending e-mail, why pay for enough processing power to be able to do fancy graphic editing and powerful video and audio mixing?
I like the approach. I’ve noticed in the past couple of years that my old 3 megapixel camera is out of date, while my newer 6 megapixel SLR is also out of date. Neither has nearly the megapixels that most cameras that are currently available have. Yet, unless you’re blowing up your pictures to poster size, a 3 megapixel camera will do nicely, and a 6 is a luxury. Why pay for something you’ll fully never use like an 8 or 10 megapixel camera?
Making computers accessible to more people by offering them less makes sense. Most of us don’t need all the bells and whistles, and not having to pay for them should be great.
2 Comments to 'When less is more: Smaller laptops'
April 14, 2008
I know what you’re saying, but what often happens is that there are new features that are worthwhile. For example, the new 10 MP DSLRs often come with image stabilization. I agree that for most people 10 MP is overkill, but image stabilization is useful. Laptops, too: I just got a new one — it’s a lot faster than my old one with way more hard drive space, but it also has an LED monitor, which is brighter and extends battery life. The other thing with computers is that the operating systems require more and mroe computing overhead to work. Vista is a hug resource hog that requires a lot of RAM just to run. I know there’s Linux, but outside of the Geekworld, hardly anyone uses it.
April 16, 2008
I’ve got to agree with you on this. I’ve been looking hard to find uses for Linux, but, realistically, it’s a Windows world. It’s hard to buck the system. It can be hard to use a small computer when all they’ll sell you is the resource hogging Windows Vista.
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