Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 24/04/2002

To One Aldwych, where Intel is hosting one of its regular Views at Ten breakfast briefings. This one was trailed as being all about the Pentium 4M -- the mobile version, all low power and cute packaging -- but rather disappointingly turned into an hour and a half's panel discussion about how laptops were a good thing. People like laptops, a survey showed, and Intel approves. And that, rather sadly, was that.

Oh, I exaggerate. There was a lot of stuff about how people use laptops at home and at work, and sometimes they do work stuff at home, and sometimes home stuff at work. And laptops are becoming status symbols, taking the place of the company car as a sign of how important you are. Well, gee. And, Intel says, how people want a laptop and a desktop -- but I reckon that's just Intel trying to sell laptops and desktops.

I haven't turned my desktop at home on for weeks. First, it was my only machine and never got turned off. Then I got a clunky laptop that I never used at home; then a better laptop which started to see some sofa action while the desktop sat sulking in the corner. Then the desktop turned into a file server, music machine and Net gateway, and the laptop did everything else: now I've got a gateway in a tiny box and the laptop has a huge hard disk... the desktop is history, man.