New notebooks lack little

Notebook PCs are on a roll. While desktop PC sales have been in a state of decline for the past two years, notebook sales are actually increasing. In fact, in the consumer space, notebook sales this year are up nearly 30 percent, as opposed to desktop sales that have declined more than 10 percent, according to IDC. A similar trend is at work in the enterprise, though precise numbers are hard to come by.

It's easy to understand why notebook sales are on the rise. The vast majority of users use their computers for e-mail, accessing the Internet, word processing, and spreadsheets. Even the slowest, notebook on the market today--say a 700MHz model, although a 1GHz processor is more typical at the low end--has plenty of oomph for most business productivity apps. There used to be a time when desktop PCs were required if you wanted the performance necessary. Today, there are few applications, other than perhaps computer rendering and animation and other extremely demanding specialized applications, that require more than 700MHz of processing power to run at an acceptably speedy clip. And since today's Pentium 4-powered notebooks top out at 1.8MHz (Winbook actually offers a 2.2GHz model, using a desktop chip), there's enough power at the high end even to accommodate the most demanding uses.

Moreover, there used to be a time when desktops were the only way to go because of the flexibility their expansion buses afforded. First ISA, then Microchannel and EISA (remember those?), then PCI and AGP found their way into desktop boxes, resulting in literally thousands of available expansion cards for almost any purpose. These buses were also used in notebooks, of course, but not in such a way that end users could actually expand their notebooks' functionality in the early days. Expandability was addressed first by PC Card (originally called PCMCIA) slots and infrared wireless connections, but with the advent of USB, a significant beachhead was achieved. Now notebooks can use exactly the same peripherals, across a wide range of functions, that are used by their desktop counterparts. (Some may say that SCSI PC Card adapters offered similar capability first, but because SCSI peripherals are much more difficult to configure than USB, SCSI never gained significant popularity.)

And the newer buses, such as FireWire and USB 2.0, effectively turn the PC box inside out, because these new buses allow data to move across external buses faster than PCs could move them internally only a very few years ago. Add to the mix wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth connections, and enterprise users no longer need to be tethered to their desktops to be productive--either in their place of work, where they can be connected during meetings in conference rooms, or when they take their notebooks home for some after-hours work.

There are those who say that this preeminence of notebook PCs will be short-lived, that they will be displaced by a new generation of PDAs and smartphones. While this may come to pass once these PDAs and smartphones have achieved a natural language interface (meaning you speak to the device in English, or Finnish, or Mandarin, and the machine understands what you say and responds in kind), the limitations of their form factors mean that ergonomics alone will keep them from supplanting notebook PCs. The mechanics of entering data, not to mention viewing Web pages or video playback, will keep notebook PCs front and center for many years to come.

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