My dream laptop
I use an Apple 2001 vintage G4 Powerbook about 15 hours a day. It’s great, but looking forward, here’s my realisable dream machine:
Dual processor 2GHz G5s.
4Gb flash memory for the operating system.
802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi with wide spread coverage.
No hard disk! Uses a distributed secure file sharing protocol, perhaps the Andrew File System, perhaps even WebDAV.
OLED (Organic LED) display, no backlight required.
I use an Apple 2001 vintage G4 Powerbook about 15 hours a day. It’s great, but looking forward, here’s my realisable dream machine:
Dual processor 2GHz G5s.
4Gb flash memory for the operating system.
802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi with wide spread coverage.
No hard disk! Uses a distributed secure file sharing protocol, perhaps the Andrew File System, perhaps even WebDAV.
OLED (Organic LED) display, no backlight required.
Result: much lighter machine, much longer battery life, smaller enclosure or alternatively more room to cram in those G5s in 8^). Laptops need to be much lighter and longer running to see further adoption in business, relegating desktop machines to specialised markets requiring very large displays (i.e graphic design, large scale visualisation etc). I see laptops surviving for mobile workers with medium screen resolution requirements, despite an expected demand increase in PDA/Smartphones once these improve in connectivity and screen resolution. Watch out for the OQO machines also.
So, how far away are we? Well, our operating systems need to evolve to deal with the virtual memory swapping issue when working with flash memory. Perhaps RAM capacities will improve to where we can reduce swapping to a minimum, or (eeek) swap over the ‘net. OLEDs are not yet a commercialised technology, but may hit the market by the end of the year in low resolutions. WiFi is here, it just needs coverage, probably driven by a VoIP demand from PDA/Smartphone systems. G5s are way too hot and power hungry now, but 65nm fabrication of IBM may see them become feasible. Flash capacities are doubling roughly every 6 months, and are currently around 512Mb. Finally, I need to dig into what exists for usable internet file systems. Certainly NFS isn’t up to scratch.
I’d say we’re about 2 years away. There, I’m on record. My blog will probably be a hilariously bad prediction.