On the future of computing
Ok, probably nothing profound or new will be covered here. Just that I've been thinking about where computers will be in the next few years and what I'd like to see happen.

Seeing the new tiny laptops (Acer Aspire One, Asus Eee PC, HP Mini-note, Sylvania Meso) on the market has been encouraging to me. While it is fun to have a laptop with the power of a desktop and a 19" widescreen high res monitor for playing games and watching movies on it just isn't the best deal in the world.

To get the computing power of a desktop system in a laptop you sacrifice portability and battery life, two of the key ingredients to making a laptop worth having, and often to keep it running cool enough you sacrifice performance on the top end.

These small laptops, most with a 9" widescreen display and weighing just over 2lb are truly portable. With my laptop and it's 15.4" widescreen display, weighing in at over 6lb I really have to want to have it with me to pack it up and lug it around. More often than not I'll leave it at home because I don't want to carry it around all day and I can't leave it in the car where the sun will possibly destroy the fragile hard drive.

These tiny machines have battery life claims of from 3 to 8 hours, versus the 2.5 hours claimed by my Aspire. (Of course battery life claims never match up with real-world usage. I get about an hour and half out of mine when running in reduced power mode.)

One of the things that makes these extended battery life claims possible is the fact that so many of these small machines are using solid state drives rather than magnetic hard drives. This is a great advancement for a few reasons: weight, battery life, heat reduction, noise reduction, and durability.

Magnetic drives are heavy, loud, power hogs that generate a considerable amount of noise and heat. Solid state drives cut down on all of these areas since they have no moving parts to draw power or generate heat and noise. Also, since they don't generate the heat of a conventional drive the system requires less cooling power. Since there are no moving parts there is much less potential for a jolt to cause a hard drive failure. Of course the drawback is that they don't come near the 1 terabyte capacity of today's magnetic drives.

This brings me to one of the failings of the systems I see on the market now. Of the systems I mentioned earlier none of them have ESATA. Sure, you can use USB to connect an external drive but it is limited to 480Mbit/s to SATA's 3Gbit/s speed. Yes, USB 3 will be 4.8Gbit/s but it isn't out yet, and SATA 3 with 6Gbit/s is supposed to be out soon. So for speed, ESATA is the ideal method of connecting an external drive.

If these small systems would rely on a small SSD (solid state drive) and include an ESATA connection you would be able to have your cake and eat it too: The benefits of solid state on the system and the ability to connect your gargantuan multi-terabyte drives full of video and music externally while still getting internal speeds.

Now, running a Windows system on something with 20 gigs of space might be hard to do (and some of the SSDs on these small systems are even smaller, 4 or 5 gigs) which is why many of them are turning to Linux. With Ubuntu the world of Linux has become much easier for the novice to navigate and these operating systems tend to be a lot leaner than Windows.

So, to me, the perfect laptop would look something like this:

7-9" display, low-power processor to cut down on battery usage and heat, a good-sized SSD, USB, ESATA, a multicard flash reader (always a handy thing to have for digital photography and you can stick a flash card in for more storage if you need it), wifi, lan, VGA (or DVI and possibly s-vid), power, a touchpad, keyboard, 1-2GB ram. Minimal graphics, again cutting in heat generation and power usage. Optical drive? Nope. If you need that you can connect it via the ESATA or USB ports. With a Linux operating system all the software you could ever need on a system like this is downloadable anyway.

This machine would be used for internet, word processing, and simple things like that. It would have enough memory to view videos if you really wanted to, but not enough power to run high-end video games. If you need a bigger screen you have the VGA or DVI outputs.

I'd love to see this get under 2lb, into the 1lb range, but even 2 is great. With the durability of SSD and the extended life of the battery this would be ideal for taking on the road or to class. A student could bring just the laptop and no power adapter with them in the same bag as all their books and a business traveler could fit this into their brief case as well.

The systems that are on the market with similar capabilities to these are currently in the $350-$550 range (HPs machine is over $700 but they are clinging to the magnetic drive and Windows OS) and I can imagine something like this reaching the $200 mark. This would allow users to buy a portable computer for portability and durability and leave them enough budget to spend on a higher-end PC with all the top of the line components for gaming and video. And of course, I am of the opinion that you should build that yourself, ensuring upgradability in the future.

That is, assuming you still need a "desktop" system. The casual user probably doesn't use a desktop rig as gaming or for media and as such they would be perfectly happy with the low-power laptop. But for those of us who still like their high powered media systems we can afford one after buying the $200 portable system.

I also long for the day when the home theater PC is fully in the mainstream. If I could have a small, ultra portable laptop and a high-powered multimedia pc I would be happy. (and a 19" monitor for the laptop and a huge flatscreen for the HTPC!)

I hope this is where we are going. I don't think the Iphone is the answer. They are nice, but I don't think they are the ideal interface for the things we use computers for. They are just too small. They have a use but I don't see it replacing laptops. Maybe I'm too short-sited in that, I don't know.

Addendum:
Oh, and I fail to see why you wouldn't be able to achieve passive cooling in a system like this. With the SSD storage and reduced processing and graphics capabilities and the advances in passive cooling lately thanks to the advent of HTPCs and the desire to keep them quite, it should be possible to at least have a fan that only comes on some of time if not to be able to eliminate the need for a fan at all.

Addendum 2.0:
I forgot to mention the possibility in the future of using OLED technology to prolong battery life and further decrease thickness by eliminating the need for a backlight in the display.
- posted by Nick @ 9/24/2008 11:10:00 PM | 0 comments