Notebook Computers Being Marginalized By Tablet/Desktop Tandem Trend? – The ‘Book Mystique

There’s an evidently growing school of thought that the laptop computer is going to be gradually squeezed out as users gravitate toward a tablet/desktop tandem. Interestingly that would be a throwback to the original concept of notebooks serving mainly as portable auxiliary devices for when you were away from your desktop, before a lot of us decided that a desktop machine was superfluous to our needs and standardized on a notebook for everything. I essentially kissed desktop computers goodbye back in the late nineties — somewhat ahead of the curve.

I think it was around 2002 that Apple notebooks became the best selling Mac hardware form factor, a lead that has continued to widen. In Apple’s fiscal second quarter 2012, 70 percent of Macs sold were notebook models.

Which is one reason why I harbor considerable skepticism that a tablet/desktop squeeze play will threaten the traditional laptop’s form factor dominance in PC space anytime soon. Another is Intel’s Ultrabook push on the Windows side.

Of course, it can’t be gainsaid that the iPad is doing extremely well, and that tablets are projected to do even better going forward. According to the latest NPD DisplaySearch Tablet Quarterly report, shipments of tablet PCs are expected to grow from 81.6 million units in 2011 to 424.9 million units by 2017, and in the nearer term, the forecast for 2013 shipments has increased from 168.9 million to 184.2 million. NPD DisplaySearch forecasts that more tablet PCs will be shipped than notebook PCs by 2016.

While Mac sales were up what would traditionally have been a very respectable seven percent year-over-year in Apple’s Q2, iPad sales increased by a breathtaking 151 percent. It’s also fair to note that the seven percent Mac sales increase derives from a lopsided general uptick of 19 percent for desktops and just two percent for Mac portables, which lends some credence to the tablet/desktop tag team future concept.

Still and all, one quarter’s performance does not a trend constitute. There are several factors exerting downward pressure on MacBook sales right now, most notably that both the Air and especially the Pro designs are both getting a bit long in the tooth, and also that Mac notebook fans are holding off system upgrade plans until widely-anticipated new models arrive with Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs. We’ll have a better idea of how things are going to shake out in the near-term after Apple unveils the next-gen MacBooks. I’m anticipating a substantial upswing in Mac notebook sales.

It is being suggested that a tablet computer is really all the computer many users need, which is no doubt true, and will be even more true with the Windows 8 tablets coming later this year, able to run both traditional desktop productivity applications and touchscreen apps on a single machine and OS. NPD DisplaySearch notes that while Apple’s iOS operating system has thus far been dominant in tablet PCs, it is expected to lose share, from 72.1% in 2012 to 50.9% by 2017, while Android is projected to increases from 22.5% in 2012 to 40.5% over the same period and share for Windows RT is also expected to grow from its current very small base of 1.5% in 2012 to 7.5% in 2017. I think that latter metric is pessimistic given the manifold advantages Windows 8 tablets promise to offer over the competition.

On the Apple side — specifically the iPad, there are a number of shortcomings that need to be addressed before the tablet can be seriously considered as a laptop substitute for mobile content creators and power users.

Multitasking is essentially mythological in the iOS. It doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense. Application switching was improved with iOS 5, but real multitasking would entail enabling processes to run in the background, and support for some sort of windowing to display more than one application or document window simultaneously. The potential for this has been recently demonstrated in hacker space, and it will be supported by Windows 8 tablets, but so far Apple has doggedly clung to the fullscreen, single app paradigm.

Text editing, selection, cutting, pasting, etc. are also woefully lame in the iOS, but again they don’t have to be, with hackers once again showing the way. http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/05/04/swipeselection/ For iOS tablets to be an adequate laptop substitute for content creators, text handling must be improved — another area where Windows 8 tablets are expected to have a leg up.

There needs to be a user-accessible file system, and transferring data from the iPad to your laptop or desktop has much room for improvement.

Facility for non-Cloud storage expansion is needed. Removable memory cards have gotten so small that there is really no legitimate excuse for the iPad to not have a card slot of some sort. Another context in which Windows 8 tablets are expected to have the advantage. Tablets tend to be very stingy with internal storage memory at the price points most users opt for, and still only modestly capacious even if you pay the hefty premium charged for maxing them out. The countering argument is that the Cloud can take up the slack these days.

Maybe people will go for that. I use the Cloud — specifically DropBox and Box.net services — routinely these days, but only for document synching across machines and for redundant backups respectively. I’ve given iCloud a pass so far because it demands that one be running a minimum of OS X 10.7 Lion on the Mac, and I’m still using Snow Leopard and Tiger. However, for a variety of reasons, I can’t imagine ever being comfortable consigning all of my digital archives to the Cloud, and I continue to keep multiple local backups on external hard drives as well. Of course, that requires a Mac or PC as an intermediary for backing up work created on my iPad — a dependency that won’t apply with Windows 8 tablets. However, I’m most comfortable carrying a complete archive of my files with me on my laptop’s hard drive.

Moving along, and picking up from where I left off in last week’s ‘Book Mystique column, a new rumor has been making the rounds suggesting that the new Mac Pros may not turn out to be simply the somewhat feature-enhanced MacBook Air clones that have been widely projected. There’s a fairly strong consensus that internal optical drives are on the bubble, also to be replaced by the Cloud, but this latest scuttlebutt suggests that Apple will fill the space vacated by the optical drive with more battery capacity and a Flash memory boot drive for the OS only, while continuing to offer a choice of either SSD or HDD for the main storage drive. That sounds intriguing, and the solid state boot drive/HDD tandem would appeal to me, combining the advantages of both modalities.

I’ve long been an advocate and practitioner of using my laptops as all-purpose computers – a “digital hub” as it were. My number-one laptop indeed spends most of its life parked on a stand in my office connected to an external keyboard and mouse and a tangle of USB hubs and peripherals cables, and I’ve mused about adding an external monitor as many laptop users do. But I can also pull a few connectors and walk away with the core of my computing world in one hand and use it anywhere in mobile mode.

The reasons I ditched desktop computers for laptops exclusively about 15 years ago still obtain. I don’t dispute that you can get greater bang for your buck power and features-wise with a desktop. I do find the Mac mini and iMac especially, somewhat enticing. However, it’s still really boils down to how much you cherish portability and the self-containedness of battery power. For me, those qualities are huge. For others, perhaps not so much. There is no “wrong” answer here. Whatever suits your needs, tastes, and budget best. For me though, living in a rural area where power outages are banefully frequent, having battery power can amount to the difference between computing and not computing.

Also, living in a neck of the woods where power and/or broadband Internet outages are banefully frequent, the laptop’s ability to run on battery power and support a dialup modem can be priceless, and reliance on the Cloud for data storage is a dubious proposition. For those reasons and more I anticipate using laptop computers for a long time to come.

But looking further into the future, we can only assume that tablet computers are going to get better and better. After all, it’s only a smidge more than two years ago that Apple ushered-in the purported post-PC era of popular tablet computing. I’m hoping that intensified competition from Windows 8 and Android will persuade Apple, perhaps dragging its heels, kicking, and screaming, to address the iPad’s manifold shortcomings for content creation, which is not an exclusive concern of professional and power users. I’ve got nothing against tablets per se. I like my iPad and use it a lot. I’m using it right now to dictate this column with Dragon Dictation. However, it still has a very long way to go before being even marginally satisfactory for me as my sole portable computing platform, even if I had a desktop machine backing it up