Notebook roadmap: what's ahead for portable PCs

There's a notebook PC in your future. But what will it be like?

Talks with major notebook vendors revealed several trends. First, there's a strong belief that one of the things currently driving notebook sales is the fact that the "delta"--the difference in price between a desktop PC and a decent notebook--has narrowed to the point that many people are glad to pay a bit more for the added convenience of portability. Where one or two years ago, buyers were paying $1,000 for a desktop with an acceptable level of performance, now they can get a notebook with acceptable performance for about the same price.

"We're seeing a large number of desktop customers moving to notebooks, who view mobility as just another feature, albeit an important one," said Mike Stinson, Vice President of Mobile Products for Gateway. With gigahertz-plus performance and large displays, "these customers don't care that much about battery life, because they'll spend most of the time plugged into an outlet. But they like the convenience of being able to move their PC from room to room, or to take it home or on a trip," he continued.

Jonathan Kaye, Manager, Product Marketing, Personal Systems Group for Hewlett-Packard, agrees. "We think there may be a new segment emerging, of big notebooks, larger than the current crop of 'desktop replacements,' with larger displays and using desktop processors. Two hours of battery life is plenty for this new group of users."

Ed Lukens, Marketing Manager at WinBook, notes that though component prices are rising, customers still expect low prices, with the result that "it will be fairly difficult to pass along price increases." He notes that as a result of pricing pressures, many Taiwanese OEMs--which supply product to most of the major American manufacturers--have moved production from Taiwan to mainland China to reduce labor costs. WinBook is one of the manufacturers that is already using desktop chips to achieve higher levels of performance, such as its WinBook J4 model, which can be ordered today with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor.

All of the vendors we spoke to expect 802.11b wireless networking to become a standard equipment item for most notebooks, along with FireWire ports and Bluetooth. Jonathan Kaye expects Bluetooth actually to catch on at some point. "Look how long it took USB to become useful, and now it's necessary," he noted. "The killer app for Bluetooth is using it in conjunction with a Web-enabled mobile phone to give always-on Web access wherever you are, and that's available right now."

As for hardware, all the manufacturers we spoke with expect 3GHz or faster processors well within a two-year time frame, along with new generations of mobile processors from both Intel and AMD. Intel's new processor, expected sometime in the mid-2003, will use a totally new architecture that will make more efficient use of clock cycles. As a result, the clock speeds of desktops and notebooks will tend to diverge, though that won't necessarily be indicative of the difference in performance between the two platforms. The new mobile processor is code-named Banias, and will be manufactured using a .09-micron process. AMD expects to introduce its 64-bit Mobile Hammer processor, also manufactured using a .09-micron process, at about the same time.

Although mobility will remain important for true road warriors, more and more users are expected to move to notebooks as their main or only PCs for the added convenience they afford. In a gigaherz-plus world, mobile PCs make more and more sense.

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