An Open Letter to Laptop Manufacturers

I'm not quite sure where to start. I'm sure that for many years, you've supplied top quality laptops to the general public for years, if not for decades. Your products out-compete your competitors, becoming ever more powerful, ever faster, ever more full of features. No doubt your sales are coasting along a nice high peak at the moment.

But consider this: Is there an alternative kind of laptop you could be producing? Something there's a demand for, that perhaps there might only be a demand for if people saw it in the first place?

Like most of the people on Associated Content, I tend to write a lot.Generally speaking, I don't tend to write when I'm front of my desktop PC, but at work or on the move. I'm sure many members here would empathies. I don't tend to use a mobile device that does much else. I don't necessarily need a quad-core 100 kamehamehabyte processor with quantum tunelling and a video card capable of artificially rendering a Pink Floyd Concert. At least not yet, but given the way the likes of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice bloat in size periodically, I can only wonder. But still, what I want (and what other people may want) in a laptop differs dramatically from what you generally offer.

For instance, have you ever considered producing a laptop with a small screen? Rtf files don't particularly work any more efficiently on a 32" HD widescreen. Perhaps if we had something a little smaller, around 9"-12", the laptop would be much more portable, and therefore probably get taken a lot more places, and get used a lot more. While you're at it, have you looked at the possibilities of an ePaper screen? If we're not trying to join a forty man raid on World of Warcraft or watch the latest movies online, perhaps it'd be nice to have a screen that's energy-efficient and, well, is actually visible in sunlight? Imagine that, being able to use a laptop outside? Last time I looked, the vast majority of the world was outside. That's a lot of places we're currently woefully underequipped to deal with. I'm not asking for an underwater laptop here, you understand, just one that's usable in daylight.

Likewise, have you ever considered making them a little lighter? As well as losing the fans and cooling systems for the highend processors, if you dispense with the 800 Terabyte hard drive capable of storing a human soul, and replace it perhaps with a few gigs of flash memory, we'd shed at least 20 lbs. Your portable computers would suddenly be portable, rather than a piece of furniture you have to carefully plan a trip with, lest you find a door it won't fit through or give yourself lower back problems.

Finally, how about that battery life? We have cellphones that can run for days. Admittedly, a laptop has rather a lot more going on than a cellphone, but I suspect if you did all of the above, and dispensed with every comes-as-standard energy guzzling feature we apparently demand in a laptop, battery life would be a lot longer than the average 90 minutes. I'm not asking for you to crack the secrets of cold fusion, just to provide us with something that could run, for example, for a full business day. Take it off charge when you leave home, put it on charge when you get in, and not worry about it in between.

A final point. No doubt you're going to tell us such a machine is unfeasible, or would cost a fortune. I really want to head this one off at the pass before you start, because it is possible. I know this, because I'm pretty much using one right now. Psion Teknologix Netbook Pro, 400Mhz Processor,all flash memory. No ePaper, admittedly, but a smallish LCD screen. It folds to something about the size and weight of a hardback book, and runs for eight hours without charging. Cost on eBay right now? Eighty bucks plus shipping. And this is a device made in 2004. The one before it was just as powerful, and made in 1999. Did we lose the arcane knowledge of how to make a cheap, lightweight, low-end notebook in the last ten years? Is this knowledge only the ancients possessed?

I'm not suggesting you change your whole product line overnight, just to recognise there is a gap in the market here. People do want a cheap, carryable word cruncher. Something they can read eBooks on, and type up the odd document in pleasant surroundings. They don't want to pay an appreciable percentage of the GDP to buy one. They particularly neither want nor need something capable of launching the space shuttle to do this on.

How about it?