Over the past several weeks I’ve been keeping an eye open for a laptop to replace a customer’s broken Mac. In my travels I came across the perfect little laptop and sold it to her at a great price. During my follow up call earlier this week she told me it didn’t have a DVD drive and asked why.
She didn’t stump me, but rather made me think of trends in new technology. At the shop we’ve moved away from DVDs and CDs and have replaced them with USB drives. At home I’ve moved to hard drive storage. Oddly, the trend has been moving towards a less is more approach as the industry makes smaller equipment.
Years ago laptops had an optical drive, large hard drive, and huge screen. Laptops were considered a portable desktop replacement and were designed for students and professionals. As they gained popularity, laptops increased functionality and size overtaking desktop sales until a few years ago.
A couple years ago laptops started to become much smaller and lighter, reversing the big trend. Unfortunately, by making them smaller manufacturers had to cut corners and limited options. So even though laptops are smaller than ever, features have been trimmed which are making them somewhat pointless.
The new MacBook, for example, is smaller and lighter than its predecessors. For $1299.00 the new MacBook includes two plugs. One is the headphone jack and the other is a multifunction charger/USB port. To increase battery life, Apple went with a low end processor.
Apple basically cut corners on the new MacBook to make it smaller and lighter. Eliminating a separate charger port has limited the consumer base that might purchase their laptop. Apple has limited the functionality of their $1300.00 starter laptop to a really nice web surfing appliance.
Google went in an opposite direction as I would have expected; making the new Chromebook overkill for even the most intense online applications. For just under $1000.00 Google is introducing their Pixel which seems to be a direct competitor to the new MacBook. A grand buys an i5 processor and the same limited plug-ins as the MacBook.
Reading the specs of the new Chromebook makes it sound like a phenomenal deal until the word “Chrome.” Google introduced Chromebooks as an online surfing appliance. Because of Google’s focus, very few third party software packages have been developed making the beefy i5 processor and lack of DVD drive and storage an odd combination.
I’m throwing out two examples of laptops that have been over-engineered for a specific purpose but haven’t seemed to hit their mark. In order to achieve their target both companies had to strip functionality making surfing the web expensive. I’m picking on Apple and Google, but other companies are starting to follow suit.
As consumers we spend our money on technology that serves a specific function and allows us to be productive. Some of us own businesses and need accounting software while others might need to create documents or edit pictures. Certainly neither of the laptops mentioned here will be a complete solution. I’m not sure what manufacturers think when they strip features.
While I’m writing this I’m thinking back a few years ago to netbooks and the chaos they created. People used to ask me if they were toys and I used to shrug my shoulders and tell them, “you get what you pay for.” This doesn’t seem to be the case today.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)