Does the Cloud Mark the Death Knell for Laptops?

By Alok Jain

A few years back if someone would have told me that we will see the end of laptop soon, I would have laughed at the suggestion. Laptops can be considered a natural descendant of desktops in terms of innovation as they started providing more storage and RAM, and that too by occupying less space. Soon desktop computer became thing of past.

From big desktop machines to heavy laptops to light weight machines – computers just kept on getting lighter and better.

Laptop designers kept on doing away with what were once considered necessities: stuff such as CD Drives, huge storage space etc – all results of technical innovations such as pen drives and portable hard disks.

Continuous innovation did managed to impress old timers like me who has grown up booting desktop through 4″ floppy drives. However Gen ‘Y’ who is growing up on smartphones is giving it a miss. They are so used to working with smartphones that I doubt they will ever need laptops for their work.

I have always felt that this generational shift and preference for tablets and phablets will break the WINTEL ‘cartel’ (if i may say so). Little did I realize that this will happen at the pace it has played out at.

A number of new technological breakthroughs are contributing big time to this change. Key among them is the evolution of the Cloud. Everyone keeps on talking about it, but once its full potential is realized, I would not hesitate in getting rid of my laptop.

The biggest challenge for any cloud computing solution is reliability, security and speed. Even though I am a fan of dropbox, google drive etc but that is only to ensure availability of documents anytime, anywhere. I still have a thick client installed and keep a local copy. The simple reason is ease of use and of updating documents.

If one goes by the pace of past technological breakthroughs, these challenges with Cloud computing will disappear very soon.

Private clouds are the solution to security and cloud providers are investing heavily to pacify nerves here.

Fibre optics have led to speeds unimaginable only couple of years back. A normal retail customer can get speed in excess of 15 MBps (in India) and in excess of 100MBps in matured markets which makes the place you store data immaterial  – you can access it in real time.

Network connections are getting more and more reliable with 24*7 access QoS. Telcos are investing heavily to augment cloud computing and are coming up with special offerings for this solution which will make the market more mature. Cloud access through Internet does away with need of VPN (Virtual Private Network) too.

In the excitement to make laptops lighter, companies removed excess storage and decided to provide it over the Cloud. That innovation actually sounded the death knell for laptops in my opinion. If I can get a smartphone which has a port to connect to a screen and a keyboard, I would not require a laptop. And I don’t think that day is quite far.

If we take away the storage feature, there is very little ground left for smartphones to cover. Available RAM has already crossed 2GB and storage has already reached 64GB.

Of course, we are talking of high-end smartphones, but then laptop do not come cheap either.

In the excitement to make laptops lighter, companies removed excess storage and decided to provide it over the Cloud. That innovation actually sounded the death knell for laptops in my opinion. If I can get a smartphone which has a port to connect to a screen and a keyboard, I would not require a laptop. And I don’t think that day is quite far. 

So what does all this mean?

In simple terms, a laptop could soon be thing of past. Users are comfortable with one device rather than carrying multiple devices performing similar functions. With a dwindling user base, there would not be enough money to invest in innovation in laptops and the product will stagnate soon.

It seems laptop manufacturers such as Dell and Lenovo have seen the writing on the wall and are trying their hand at making smartphones.

It will be sad to see a marvelous product dying but that’s the crux of innovation and it will not be wrong to say that the laptop has scored a self-goal by pushing cloud computing forward!