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Insights Into the Future of the Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "ThinkPad founder Arimasa Naitoh sat down for a chat with CNET.com.au about the future of the laptop. The article includes a few concept design images, as well as details on why Lenovo believes that fuel-cell technology is poor and that Origami will never succeed as a primary device." From the article: "Although Lenovo has traditionally targeted the business crowd, it recently released the consumer-targeted Lenovo 3000 series, as 'many people want to have a ThinkPad that is not black'. Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties. Naitoh also showed off a number of ThinkPad concept designs with innovations such as raising displays and removable keyboards. He didn't give any word on whether these would be incorporated into official ThinkPad models, but we've snagged some pictures for you anyway."
If somebody made an ARM powered laptop with solid state storage then I'd be very happy. No moving parts, silent, incredible battery life.
As long as they run for a whole day (16 hours plus) when running Ubuntu or FreeBSD they will be fine.
As long as they run for a whole day (16 hours plus) when running Ubuntu or FreeBSD they will be fine.
16 hours isn't quite there yet, but I do get 6-8 hours with my current laptop, a 1-year old battery and Ubuntu (the higher number when I'm offline (no wifi) and basically just read text). Add another hour with a brand-new battery. If I put it to sleep whenever I don't use it, it easily stretches to a 10-hour workday. And with a spare battery (which itself is a small unit for this laptop) I can go a whole waking day - or the Osaka-Frankfurt-Stockholm route, which amounts to the same thing.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
What I want is something small that I can plug a keyboard and monitor into for desktop use but also use on the move. Not a laptop - much smaller.
The closest I've seen is this thing:
http://www.dualcor.com/
But it looks like it's not aimed at the general market, and has a corresponding "business class" price tag.
"...praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties..."
So what did Apple get wrong then? My TiBook was looking pretty ragged after two years of use. By contrast, my 15" Aluminum G4 PowerBook doesn't have a scratch on it....
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Lenovo just brands them. http://tuxmobil.org/laptop_oem.html
What, weaker than the plastic the black ThinkPads are made of?
Lenovo appears to be playing a smart game, looking to expand from the business market to the professional consumer. With companies like Acer and HP looking more a the entertainment machine concept Lenovo is looking to a higher value market. The Origami stuff is interesting too. The whole idea is a loser (sub laptop capability for more money) and he's wise to stay out of it. All this stress on using titanium could also be a nod towards industry fears that Lenovo might compromise quality for price. Maybe they've decided to rely on low manufacturing costs to keep prices at reasonable levels.
I have to say, I'm completly on the side of "PCs are powerful enough already" - especially where Laptops are concerned. If I really wanted something that powerful, I'd just use my desktop - nothing is so important that it has to be processed on the spot, on a laptop instead of just waiting till I get home. I'm very happy that there is hope for a laptop running a full day on a single battery, in the next 1-2 years, I've been waiting for this news for a long time.
I guess it's just a waiting game now, until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life and a wide screen into something the size of my old Compaq Armada M300. That laptop is the perfect size/weight, it just sucks for battery life, and could use a lot more RAM.
Ohh well, fingers crossed.
Will program for karma.
In terms of shape and size, I'm a bit surprised that peope are willing to lug around laptops with 17" displays while portrait-oriented displays are not widely available. Instead of having the whole LCD panel being the "lid" on the laptop, a smaller panel would do that and then hold the pivot to allow switching between landscape and portrait orientation.
these days I tend to keep the dock on OSX taking up the right hand side of my 16:9 screen and the only reason I don't do the same with the Windows taskbar is that some apps act funny when their menus are not where they're expected. Anyway, it makes much more sense to have the taskbars and menus taking up space on the corner of the eye than to have one web browser displaying empty space on both sides of whatever I'm reading, and then to have to scroll up and down all the time.
... I am having a Seinfeld moment.
Why is it that, in nearly every printed interview, people "sit down for a chat?" Does this actually happen? Does sitting down precede chats that will be put to the printed word? What happens if the interview is almost over and the two realize they were actually standing through it? Does that mean they can't use the material committed in the upright position? Should they sit down and perform the entire interview again?
One day, I am going to conduct an entire interview leaning against a well.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
These people are on the active promoters list on the official website of the trusted computing initiative.
I can tell you one thing about their future, it won't involve my dollars.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It would be nice if laptops used displays that could be read in sunlight. I'm working at home at the moment, it's a beautiful day outside, I have a laptop and a wireless network... the only reason I'm not working outside is because I wouldn't be able to see the screen.
My ideal notebook:
- 8"x5" screen area (1024x800)
- high-contrast b/w indoor/outdoor screen
- 30 hour battery life
- runs on 4 AA hot swappable batteries plus internal battery
- removable solid state storage
- an open OS made for mobile work, or Linux
- full size keyboard, or BlueTooth foldable keyboard
- USB, WiFi, bluetooth, and SIM
- weight under 1lb
- thickness under 0.5"
- price around $250
My blog
With a christmas bonus in my pocket, I walked into Sefridges jewellery department, tried on the watch I wanted (still wearing it) as the salesmans pitch started;
Salesman: Now this watch is made from titanium, are you aware of the properties of titanium
Me: Yes, very light and very strong, this its why its used in the aerospace industries
Salesman: Thats correct, and its also a self healing metal
Me: Excuse me?
Salesman: thats correct, if you scratch titanium, it will heal the scratch like your body will with a scar
Me:
Salesman: I know, amazing stuff
Me: sooooo, you wouldnt mind if I took a serrated knife to this breitling then
Salesman:
Me: I think someones been telling lies to you, but I am going to buy this watch anyway.
Not a great story, but some people areally are gullable.
I had one of those. It was pretty cool. It had a battery that lasted for 24hrs, and recharged to 80% in about 40 minutes. The only problem was that it was a pain to tranfer your work to another computer. If they remade it today, I imagine they could make it smaller, lighter, and more svelte. Data transfer would be trivial by wireless. It would be a great portable for people who write for a living, much like the Radio Shack Model 100 was for a different generation.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Don't try to understand 'em
just rope, tie and brand 'em...
So here's what I would like, although the market is probably too small to justify. Or maybe it exists and I'm not aware of it.
The smallest, lightest device possible with (1) >=128M RAM, (2) several GB disk or maybe no disk and just a USB port for a thumbdrive, (3) >=250MHz CPU, (3) long long battery life, (4) a screen sufficient to display a bash shell, (5) runs Linux, (6) a small keyboard that is just large enough for comfortable touch-typing.
It would be somewhat like a glorified PDA, but with a somewhat larger screen that's easy to read and a built-in keyboard that's large enough to touch-type on. In a nutshell, a little VT220 with a built-in computer. Hopefully cheaper than a laptop.
He sounds like a petulant child. Cnet just did this "article" gave him some free ad space. I mean, c'mon... He didn't say anything we haven't already thought or heard already many times over.
I don't know about you but after reading this, my opinion of Lenovo is worse now than it ever was. I don't think this guy has a clue.
...not that I'm a pirate.. Hell I've never even fired a cannon. - oldwolf13
Now, that's something I want!
A small, cheap, rugged, wireless, linux-enabled laptop! Something I could use for web browsing, email, IM, chat and text-editing but also capable of running a ssh shell and a freeNX session! I don't know about you, but I think that the OLPC reached a nice balance between PDA and Notebook.
Oh, and probably it's powerfull enough to run Wesnoth, NetPanzer and a SNES emulator!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
4:3 at 12.1" diagonal is 70.3 square inch of LCD,
16:9 at 12.1" diagonal is 62.6 square inch of LCD
At face value, that's 12% of saving on LCD cost, and the consumer doesn't notice.
I tried to buy z61t from Lenovo page. But I don't see 1440x900 there! Where to get z61t with this resolution?
Some years ago, when IBM was going through a management change the new technology officer at the time said that he went back into IBM's patent vault and found 72 technologies that went ignored that he brought back into the mix.
Some of these kind of flopped, like the butterfly keyboard (remember that?). But some of them went on pretty far - like the nipple (that's what I call it - I think they call it the trackpoint but whenever I help someone with a thinkpad out and say "use the trackpoint as a mouse" they can't find it - when I say "use the nipple" - whamo).
Also - IBM did have a consumer based laptop a few years back and they even offered different skins to change the color. It's interesting how they are kind of going back to that and using the same logic (not everyone wants black). Back then the consumer laptops all started with an "i" like the i1572. They sold them at best buy and they were under $1000 - great laptop.
The main thing missing from the Laptop market is Modularity. He addresses this slightly by showing a model that has a detachable keyboard. What is really needed are inter-operable components that can be mixed and matched to fit both budget and requirements. For example, allowing users to choose screen size from several different screens, and let them all attach to the same connector on the motherboard. Allow different motherboard configurations. Allow for different sized keyboards, some with or without number pads, and some with or withough touch pads.
This is clearly the next step, but Laptop creators aren't getting the hint that desktop creators learned a long time ago. Don't put it all in one machine unless that's the low end model. Let us choose which pieces we want for our laptop and have them work together seamlessly.
Personally I want:
Full sized keyboard
15 inch screen
No touchpad
No battery
Wireless mouse
2-3 GHZ processor
3 gigs RAM
Detachable 10 gig drives
What do you want in your laptop?
Never expected it to be, and I doubt MS did either. It's an expansion on the PDA device.
I'd expect this kind of 'stating the obvious' from a pundit, but from the head of Lenovo?
Even in the web-mercials we saw of the device, it was web-vertised as being used in conjuction *with* workstations, Media-PCs, etc...
"...innovations such as raising displays and removable keyboards."
My IBM PS2 P75 do also have a removable keyboard and a sort of raising display... so do my Compaq Concertol, both machines are from 1993 or something like that.
Innovation is when you make something never before seen...
--
No sig!
My last two laptops were an Apple powerPC ibook and then an IBM X-31 Thinkpad. From that prospective, here is my opinion on future laptops. From the Thinkpad: 1) make it at least as tough and durable, 2) make it at least as Linux compatible, 3) please give me a nub not a pad for mouseing (sic) (or both). From the iBook: 1) keep the bottom as smooth as possible, 2)slot loading optical disks should rule in laptops 3) not black 4) cables on back and one side, opposite of optical drive 5) style is your friend, 6)sleep with a breathing LED. In general I want 6 hour battery life, at least sub 5 pound weight, work (wireless with WPA, sound, and suspend/sleep) with Ubuntu/Debian, CentOS/RedHat and Suse Linux straight from the install DVDs, , two power supplies (home and travel), and please price it at a $1000 or less.
PS What I didn't like from the Thinkpad 1) black, 2) rough slots and crap on bottom 3) no optical drive built in, from the Apple, 1) not durable (two hard drives died in first year), 2) ONE BUTTON scroll pad 3)not much choice on Linux distros and at the time, no drivers for wireless. 3)Apple fanatics.
I'd rather Microsoft and Palm quit *expanding* on the PDA and concentrated on making a better PDA.
Higher resolution screens - great, so long as they don't shortchange battery life.
Bluetooth - great, but give me a standard USB or serial interface as well... you can't charge via BT.
Wifi - my experience with wifi on PDAs hasn't been terribly good. But that may have changed.
Faster processors, huge memory, multimedia support - include me out.
Unfortunately you can't get a better screen without getting all the rest of the junk included. In fact you can hardly get a PDA without the rest of the junk these days.
From TFA...
I'd love to own a more affordable ThinkPad that is not black. But not if it doesn't have a TrackPoint!
The Powerbook 2400c was designed for Apple by IBM Japan. Perhaps Lenovo might want to talk to Steve about a rematch?
Here's what I want from my Macbook Pro and my old Thinkpad t23:
Thinkpad: Two mouse/trackpad buttons, trackpad AND trackpoint, plenty of status indicators when open, BLACK, easy access to internals, pay attention to the feel of the keyboard... beveled keys may not be as stylin' but they're easier to type on, docking connector, built-in night light above the screen, working fans and cooling, optical drive on the side and replacable... and I do prefer the tray drive: you can't read business-card CDs in slot drives.
Macbook: OS X, Decent GPU, OS X, can tell status when closed (usually), OS X, Firewire built in, OS X... um... I think that's it.
Here's what I don't like:
Thinkpad: Windows, Intel graphics, teeny cursor keys, can't tell if it's on if it's closed.
Macbook: Keyboard aggravates my RSI, HEAT, one-button trackpad, Magsafe "unplug if you look at it wrong" power connector, HEAT, aluminum case, ports cluttering all sides (especially the USB port that puts any mouse cable right where I want to put the mouse itself, plugging 6 cables every time I set it down on my desk, HEAT, too hard to get into (adding RAM required trying three different screwdrivers until I found one that didn't threaten to strip the screw head), have to watch it to be sure it's really sleeping, HEAT HEAT HEAT.
As for the operating systems:
Windows: consistent keyboard support in the original user interface, reliable hibernation even if the hardware doesn't support it, "run explorer windows as separate processes".
OS X: Not stealing three keys for dedicated OS tasks, sleep works most of the time, transparent multi-display support, doesn't suck.
And dislikes:
Windows: It's an opaque toxic swamp full of industrial waste.
OS X: Why don't you sleep when I tell you to sleep? Why don't you hibernate (safe sleep isn't)? Why didn't Finder get an execution-style termination instead of infecting NeXT's File Manager?
(more for both, of course, see hates-software.com for details)
There's also the entirely different matter of stiffness (rigidity) and its relationship to mass. Steel, Aluminum, and Titanium are all plenty strong for building a laptop, but because their densities are dramatically different, a given mass of each translates to different thicknesses, which becomes the dominating factor in determining the plate's stiffness.
The stiffness of a plate is approximately proportional to the cube of the plate's thickness multiplied by the material-specific flexural modulus. Most steel alloys have a flexural modulus of 205GPa, while cheap construction-grade Aluminum (alloy 6063, temper grade 6) has a modulus of only 69GPa. So a given thickness of steel is stiffer than the same thickness of aluminum, but steel is three times more dense than aluminum. This means that for the same mass budget, you can get an aluminum plate three times as thick. The cube of this ratio of thickness is 27, which when multiplied by the aluminum's modulus gives you an overall stiffness nine times greater than that of steel. This higher rigidity is highly desirable in products such as laptops, which you do not want to have flexing under the user's hands, or in the owner's backpack. The casing could have plenty of strength (ie, not break), but fail to protect the internal components from damage due to insufficient rigidity.
An annealed high-strength titanium alloy (Titanium Ti-8Al-1Mo-1V) is only 55% as dense as most steels, is as strong and resilient as hardened steel (about 50% stronger than mild steels like the kind your car and laptop are made from), and has a modulus of 121GPa, betwixt that of steel and aluminum 6063-t6. So for a given mass budget, a plate of this titanium alloy would be about 1.8 times thicker, and 3.4 times more rigid, than a steel plate, but only 0.38 times as rigid as the aluminum 6063-t6 plate.
I am thinking the main draw of titanium for laptops is probably scratch resistance (some titanium alloys are much more scratch-resistant than both steel and aluminum), which I guess would be a big draw for some customers. Personally I'd rather want the tougher aluminum laptop. (Better heat dissipation too, and probably somewhat cheaper, though the material costs of a laptop are a small fraction of its actual cost.) It's not like the aluminum laptop would be that much bulkier. 1.5mm steel is more than enough strength for such a product (your car's body is probably made from 1.5mm steel), and a triple thickness of this of aluminum would be only 4.5mm -- about 1/6th of an inch. I could totally live with that.
-- TTK
Seems there was just an article a few weeks ago or so about how there was a breakthrough and now titanium is or will be much more affordable. That might have something to do with it.
0 8/223234
yes, here it is
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/
Consider that my (currently outdated) iPAQ H2210 has a 400MHz Xscale processor (PXA255) and a 240x320 transflective TFT display, CD quality audio, etc etc cost me $180 (refurb) with an extended battery (~22 hours of heavy use, like playing music and reading, or playing games) and a 128MB SD card... and it's got bluetooth. If you poke around you can find one with wifi as well for about $200, but without the added battery or memory card. They could probably make them $400 with a VGA-resolution display, and just barely big enough to have a usable keyboard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
but first, i dont think the origami is intended as a primary device.
and i liked the looks of those concepts, atleast the first one that rise up as a kind of desktop system, complete with tilted keyboard.
but what i want to comment on is that multimedia talk at the end.
what i forsee is a kind of modular system, maybe based on that rise up concept, where you have a kind of "dock" that when attached will provide the desktop with a stronger graphics card, tv tuner, and all that other stuff you need for multimedia.
maybe you can even use it for basic playback and recording even when the laptop part isnt docked via some embedded multimedia system based on wince or linux.
basicly i see the future as modular, with the laptop rather then the desktop as center.
i think one could potentialy build one right now based on amd's hypertransport buss...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Give it another 2 years.
I've been hearing people say that since I got my first PDA in 1999.
Yeah, because what we consumers really want, is something ridiculously expensive, with a perceived feeling of exclusivity. No matter that most of the parts are plastic anyway. No matter that aluminium seems to work fine for other weight/strength-sensitive tasks, such as in the aero-industry, mountain-bikes, etc... No matter that just a little bit of coffee, rain, salt-water, other liquids, sand, ants, etc..., easily gets into the electronics and short-circuits it. No matter that harddrives are fine-tuned mechanical things that are easy to destroy just by loosing your laptop onto the concrete floor.
No, what we want is to be seduced by marketers, adding ridiculously expensive substances, such as titanium, to our laptops, just so it can be perceived as more high-tech and "exclusive". This has nothing to do with aluminium being "weak", with todays designs laptops won't be any stronger using titanium, than they will be faster if you boost the (electrical) power.
Wow -1 somebody's got the Mondays.
Tuxmobil.org is incomplete. The ThinkPad T-series and R-series is still made by Lenovo (ex-IBM) manufacturing in Shenzhen, China. Compal makes some of the Lenovo 3000 product. And LG is no longer a supplier to IBM/Lenovo.
I read that as "I wish Nokia offered a SYBIAN-enabled version of the i770!"
*That* would be something to see.
What has effectively happened is that the vendors have decided that 2-3 hours is the max battery life that "Desktop replacement" laptops need. If ever battery power gets above that, they crank up CPU or GPU power, and battery life goes right down again. Its the way that all the SUV manufacturers give their SUVs fuel tanks that do 300 or so miles; that's the expected range of the truck, regardless of its fuel consumption.
Displays are a major battery hog, so is eclipse. crank back on the brightness and you will get more.
on a long flight, I have this vision of an extension airline power adapter, one that says "boeing, do not touch" that we plug in to someone in biz-class's power socket, then roll it back to economy.
Otherwise, get a battery that plugs in where the DVD drive goes, rip all your DVDs to the HDD before you travel, because they play more power efficiently that way anyway. Sleep a bit on the plane eventually.
What we really need is an ultra-power efficient text mode linux distro or just runlevel for long flights, where you get nothing but emacs and your build tools, all networking is turned off, the display backlight goes off except for 15s after you press any key or move the mouse. Yeah, that'd be cool. The first linux distro optimised for long haul flights.
I'm sorry to hear that video performance is a dog. Presumably the laptop is targeted towards power efficient 2D than decent gaming.
It's going to be an interesting problem for Vista, which uses the GPU aggressively; I dont know how many of todays laptops can handle aero, and of those that do, it's going to kill their battery life.
The irony is, Vista Aero gui is a client-side GUI; you dont want it on your servers. But desktops are going away; apart from the home gaming/media desktops, laptops are all people need. But Vista Aero is going to kill laptop battery life, probably compared to MacOS as well as XP. So its a gui which isnt the right one for the primary client computer of the future.
I've heard this feature and that feature touted and to be perfectly honest they've all got their merits but my question is when will my laptop start doing some of my work for me? I'd like to see that as a feature of the future!
What about an OQO?