In the near future, how do you see laptops evolving?

This is a follow up to my thread about laptops in the past. Seeing how far we've come in just around 15 years, how do you think laptops will change in the next 15. Do you think they'll be replaced entirely by mobile device? Will we be getting improved keyboards? Will touchpads be replaced by something better?

 

In the olden days, there was only the laptop. But in the last decade, we have seen the notebooks which is a smaller version of laptops. And then there are the tablets which is trying to mimic the laptop although not really. I predict that the laptop will remain in its present size of 11 inches to 15 inches of the monitor to provide convenience to the user especially for the older generation. Pretenders will come and go but the laptop will remain an exact alternative of the desktop.

 

I believe laptops will become the lead devices as techonology will become more and more necessary to be with at all times. As such, manufacturers wil l find it necessary to make laptops as portable as possible. In fact, I even imagine that laptops and mobiles might somehow be integrated together to provide both functions in some way or another.

 

It seems to be that they're gutting the ability to upgrade, repair, and manage things yourself while boosting only the functions, features, and aspects of the hardware that the consumers demand.

You're going to see the screen resolutions and extended features of audio and video increase, the ram and subcomponents of the computer become hotter while becoming faster and requiring significant cooling due to the fact that eventually, even a secondary bus for processing some things and interacting with the primary system bus may be its own SBC (single board computer) equivalent requiring cooling to keep up with multiplexing data and push past Moore's Law a little while longer by running data differently on the board. Of course, storage sizes will increase, but so will the demand for faster access (you would think that SSD speeds today are enough, but if left to itself, software developers are going to eventually find a way to even bloat and bottleneck that too, so the demand for increased speed on things that are already fast will find their way to the market).

Right now, what we're witnessing on a massive scale is often times de-evolution. Cheaper made, lesser powered, less serviceable, less durable, more hackable, but less expensive tech is being sold to the masses to pander to the economy and the prices people are willing to pay for things. It's like taking a perfectly good shirt, tearing it in half, and then selling people only the top of it. If it were an Apple device, some women may like that since they often run around in short shirts and clothing anyway and call it a fad, but most men will not, and will pay twice as much to get the other half of the shirt which they should have had to begin with, and then pay someone else even more to sew it back together again.

That's the current state of what is going on with the mobile devices trying to dethrone laptops, and what they are doing with knock-off android devices they try to get the public to believe are "laptops" simply because they look like them cosmetically and on the surface of a GUI.

 

I think that laptops, and portable computing devices of any kind, will probably become more and more unbreakable, waterproof, higher in memory capacity, stuff like that. The keyboard might give way to an entirely voice-activated system that automatically types out the spoken word... which means that the microphones on these devices will have to be improved so that typos and comprehension errors are a thing of the past. Heat reduction is a necessity because the smaller and more compact your device is, the hotter it will get when in use as the components are closer together. Computer monitors might also become a thing of the past, evolving into glasses that can be worn by the user, like virtual reality units. I have no doubt however, that any and all improvements will have a period of years of testing and evaluation... just like today.

 

Well this is certainly an interesting question, but it is rather tough to answer. I am sure that nobody really saw some of the things that we have today coming when it was a couple years back, but that is just how these things go. If I had to guess I would say that they will continue to get both smaller and larger, meaning that the middle sized laptops will slowly fade away. Outside of that and faster speed, I cannot really think of anything too exciting.

 

I never thought for a second that laptop will be replaced by tablets or mobile devices, there's just no comparison between these devices. Laptop i believe is more powerful and can be used in heavier and more serious tasks than what mobile devices can do and i don't see that changing anytime soon.

 

Yeah

Yeah I agree. When people were suggesting and when they still do suggest that laptops will be replaced by mobile devices, I'm usually pretty skeptical. Trying to type an essay on an ipad is just not the same as doing it on a laptop. A physical keyboard feels so much better than a touchscreen one.

 

Yeah I think what you're saying is pretty realistic. The large laptops cater to people who need a good laptop for gaming or for using certain software. The small ones cater to people who just needed for Microsoft Office basically and emailing and things, which is a lot of people.

 

A great improvement in laptops would be laptops that have more than one screen. The other screen could fold out, or something like that. I know that a few companies have tried something like this, but they haven't found a way to do it in a way that appeals to the majority of consumers.

 

I see a lot of changes in laptop's future (no pun intended.) I think the screen will probably keep getting bigger; everyone likes a bigger screen unless their reason for choosing laptops is only mobility. I also think the companies will find a way to include scrolling wheels in the trackpad, it's so crappy to zoom in/zoom out in a laptop. I don't think the keyboard will change at all since we've already manage to create a flawless combination of keys.

 

I don't see how laptops can be further improved.
It's very limited due to its purpose of being able to be mobile and to be brought with you everywhere you go.

 

They're obviously going to be more powerful and ergonomic but I think that technology favors them. The current weight and battery life for a laptop is pretty decent as of now, a lot of parts such as SSDs, RAM, GPU, CPU etc. are becoming smaller and smaller so I think in a few years laptops are going to pack a lot more power, though they won't be comparable with desktops anytime soon.

 

Well I'm sure there have been many times in the past when people couldn't imagine how their technology could be more advanced. It may be difficult to imagine laptops getting much better but there's a strong chance that they do.

 

Laptops, and any other tech devices out there for that matter, seem to follow the same evolution curve. Each year and half or so we see a new generation of hardware takes the crown for the enthusiast grade laptops out there (this time, Intel's Broadwell, Nvidia's 1000 series and AMD's 400), the products from the years before move down a tier: the enthusiast grade becomes high end, the high end becomes mainstream, the mainstream becomes low end and so on. High end laptops seem to go on a rout of style rather than performance (with a few gaming oriented options, of course) and the mainstream and low end seem to become more and more focused on the bang/buck ratio. However, I don't think that will be of relevance in 15 years, becuase of the way the smartphone industry is moving: much faster. Phones have become the all-in-one solution for the average user, who doesn't need anything a modern day smartphone can't offer. And I'm not talking about the flagships of giant companies, but the options offered in the mid-range category. I don't think we'll be seeing half as many laptop users in the next 15 years as we see now, unless more education systems approach a different style to learning, which would involve such devices (I went throught that as an experimental stage in high scool and it seemed like a valid strategy).. that might be an area where laptops would beat all other products on the market, in my opinion.

 

I can see a possible reduction in the usage of laptops but I don't think it would be too significant. Of course you can do a lot of stuff on your phone and you probably will be able to do more in the future but using a laptop to do work is something almost everyone I know seems to prefer. I can't imagine a time when doing college or office work on a phone rather than a laptop is the norm, touchscreen keyboards just aren't as good to use as physical ones. There's also a lot of profession that need modelling or rendering software that would be more or less impossible to use on a phone unless they phones are drastically improved. So yeah I don't think the phone can replace a laptop anytime in the near future.

 

I believe that in the future, laptops will come with mini projectors and cameras on the back lf the laptop. They may start coming with additional features like cell phones have over the last two decades. This would be really nice to see.

I watch a lot of movies, and play games in it, it's be super nice to project that onto a wall.