The Incredible Shrinking Laptop

As technology advances and people’s demands for ever-thinner, ever-lighter laptops increase, more and more the thickness of a laptop is beginning to be determined by what ports it has. What are manufacturer’s to do?

Well, the first thing they did was to introduce docking stations and mini-docking stations. Not a very elegant solution for mobile uses. What we need now are new standards for the biggest offenders – the biggest ports (Ethernet, VGA, and Phone). We need the industry titans to come together and give us new standards. Apple created a smaller Firewire connection and a smaller video connector, but given that all projectors out their use a VGA connection, they are not as handy as having a standard VGA port built-in. Without the commitment of all the players involved in connecting devices, these ports will hang around another twenty years.

Apple is apparently looking at an interesting interim step – collapsible ports, but what we really need are smaller, more useful connection points. Even better would be magnetic connections like Apple’s laptop power connections.

With the delivery of cooler processors, a laptop of fewer chips, better batteries, flash memory instead of hard drives, and smaller connections, the industry would reach the next level of portable value. Chiropractors better step up their marketing, the laptop shoulder may soon be a thing of the past. 🙂

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Braden Kelley is a Social Business Architect and the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. Braden is also a popular innovation speaker and trainer, and advises companies on embedding innovation across the organization and how to attract and engage customers, partners, and employees.