Many of you out there don’t need me to remind you that IT is a fast moving industry, one where the pace of change appears to be accelerating all the time. Of course, as with all industries, once the IT world settles on a particular form factor for something, it tends to stick to it for a while (although not as long as the others).
So, for instance, what makes up a car hasn’t really changed all that much in 80 years in terms of having four wheels, an engine and a steering wheel. The same can be said for a PC: motherboard, hard drive, monitor, keyboard and mouse have pretty much been constants since day one although, as with cars, there have been improvements, enhancements and innovations in the innards and the appearance of the PC over the years.
The same has been true for laptops and notebooks. Latterly, we’ve had the advent (and relatively rapid decline) of netbooks. Now, we’re on to smartphones and tablets. For the moment, they look like form factors that will persevere for a while, even if there might be changes to their size. The clamour around the release of the latest version of the iPad today amply demonstrates just what a big deal tablets are becoming.
Anyway, the reason why I bring all this up is because only last week I came upon a very interesting example of how quickly technology changes. Walking into the kitchen of my brother-in-law’s house the other evening, I noticed that in addition to the family iMac, there were three Windows-based notebooks in the room. One of them belonged to his eldest son, who is at college, while the other two were birthday presents this year for the second son who is doing his leaving cert and for Dad himself.
Later, I gave the eldest boy a lift in the car. We were talking about the notebooks and he said to me that they were pretty much standard in college. "You’ll be getting them for your girls when they go," he added. But here’s the strange thing, although I was listening to a young man who had just turned 20 talking to me about technology, my first thought was: "No, that won’t happen".
Why was I thinking that? Because the eldest of my girls won’t be going to college for another six years or so and already I can see that the notebook/laptop won’t be the most popular form factor when that happens. We don’t have any notebooks or laptops in our house – well, I have an old laptop but it doesn’t really work as a laptop because it has to be plugged into the mains all the time, so I never use it, but we have an iMac and an iPad.
Last year, when I went out of country to a couple of conferences, I packed the iPad and I typed all my notes for interviews and briefings on it, wrote up all my stories and articles and emailed them to the people I was working for-all with minimal fuss or difficulty. I doubt I’ll ever buy a laptop again.
I think it will be the same for my children. By the time they go to college, iPads and tablets will be the most popular devices for students. In fact, I doubt we’ll even have to wait that long for it to happen. The girls are already using the iPad at home for all types of things, some of them unique to the iPad and some that they used the iMac for in the past. Progressively, I think, they will use the tablet more and more. Besides, if their dad can use it for his work, I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to use it for college work when they go.
The challenge will be getting them to use tablets for college work when they can use them for so many other things. You could same the same thing about laptops and notebooks today which just goes to show, I suppose, that whatever changes occur to the technology, people stay pretty much the same.
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