Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with my Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and I did an
Speaker 1: episode about the early history of laptops, and I talked
Speaker 1: about the emergence of portable computers in general. It took
Speaker 1: a surprisingly long time to get to the clamshell form
Speaker 1: factor that we tend to associate with the word laptop. Okay,
Speaker 1: it really actually wasn't that surprising, because when you're displayed
Speaker 1: technology of the time relies heavily on cathode ray tube
Speaker 1: or CRT monitors, you can't exactly slim that down. Now,
Speaker 1: these are the old style monitors. They're also old style
Speaker 1: CRT televisions, which are those big boxy things, the really heavy,
Speaker 1: boxy monitors. And in fact, I'm gonna start this episode
Speaker 1: by explaining what's going on inside those old sets so
Speaker 1: that we can understand why they're so big in the
Speaker 1: first place, and why that meant that the early boordable
Speaker 1: computers were pretty hefty things. So if you listen to
Speaker 1: that last episode, you heard me talk about how computers
Speaker 1: used to take up entire rooms or sometimes entire floors
Speaker 1: of a building. These machines were massive, largely because the
Speaker 1: components that designers used were themselves big. The parts that
Speaker 1: the computer were made of were large. There were no transistors,
Speaker 1: especially no transistors that are down to the nano scale.
Speaker 1: Back in those days. Circuits were actually made up of
Speaker 1: big wires and stuff like vacuum tubes, and those took
Speaker 1: up a lot of space. A CRT display or CRT
Speaker 1: television has something similar inside of it. The screen you
Speaker 1: look at is actually the end of that vacuum tube
Speaker 1: like structure. In fact, I would argue that the cathode,
Speaker 1: ray tube, the vacuum tube, and even the lightbulb are
Speaker 1: all closely related. They are all components that have a
Speaker 1: filament inside them. The filament heats up when you pass
Speaker 1: electricity through it. They all have glass that surround the filament,
Speaker 1: And what we're really interested in is the energy that
Speaker 1: that filament gives off as a result of being heated. Now,
Speaker 1: with lightbulbs, which are not a vacuum, that is one
Speaker 1: major difference between them and vacuum tubes and c RT s.
Speaker 1: But with light bulbs, the energy it gives off is
Speaker 1: drum roll, please light. The filament heats up due to
Speaker 1: that electrical resistance until it's hot enough to glow. And
Speaker 1: with cathode ray tubes, it's not light, it's electrons, so
Speaker 1: we'll start super basic. Electrons are, of course, those negatively
Speaker 1: charged sub atomic particles, and typically we find them in
Speaker 1: an orbit around an atomic nucleus. The atomic nucleus has
Speaker 1: positively charged protons, and those attract electrons because opposite charges
Speaker 1: attract one another and like charges repel one another. Well,
Speaker 1: if you start to pour energy into an atom, then
Speaker 1: you're going to start pushing electrons further out from that nucleus.
Speaker 1: The electrons furthest out would be the ones that would
Speaker 1: be affected. They would move into energy levels energy shells
Speaker 1: further out from the nucleus. So if you pour enough
Speaker 1: energy and you can actually pop that electron right off
Speaker 1: and you ionize the atom. In fact, that's kind of
Speaker 1: why we worry about ionizing radiation. It has this sort
Speaker 1: of energy that can do this. It can turn atoms
Speaker 1: into ions. Those would be atoms that have a net charge,
Speaker 1: whether positive or negative, due to either losing or gaining
Speaker 1: electrons compared to the number of protons. So electric current
Speaker 1: is the flow of electrons. Well, you know, actually that's
Speaker 1: that's only partly correct, as you could have a flow
Speaker 1: of protons in something like a plasma and that would
Speaker 1: technically be an electric current too, because electric current is
Speaker 1: really concerned with the movement of electric charge, not whether
Speaker 1: or not the charge is positive or negative. But we
Speaker 1: can leave that behind because times out of a hundred
Speaker 1: when we talk about electric current, we're talking about electrons. Now,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier, the screen on a television is
Speaker 1: the end of the cathode ray tube. So a television
Speaker 1: screen is just a very very wide tube ending the
Speaker 1: other end is very narrow. Indeed, so at that opposite end,
Speaker 1: the opposite side from the screen, way back inside the
Speaker 1: television or the computer monitor is the cathode and the
Speaker 1: electron gun. So the cathode is the negative terminal. It's
Speaker 1: the thing that emits electrons when you turn on the power.
Speaker 1: So the inside of the the CRT, the actual tube,
Speaker 1: is a vacuum. That means that the electrons that are
Speaker 1: emitted can move freely through that space. There's no air
Speaker 1: molecules that the electrons could potentially interact with. That's why
Speaker 1: you have to have a vacuum inside of a vacuum
Speaker 1: tube or a CRT is to let these electrons flow
Speaker 1: freely and not have to worry about them interacting with
Speaker 1: something else. You have the anode or the positively charged
Speaker 1: terminal of the CRT towards the screen side, so that's
Speaker 1: what's attracting the electrons towards the screen. As the beam
Speaker 1: of electrons hit the backside of the screen, it impacts phosphor.
Speaker 1: Uh So, the inside of the screen has a phosphor
Speaker 1: coating on it. So when an electron hits phosphor, the
Speaker 1: phosphor ends up being quote unquote excited. And it's not
Speaker 1: because you're settling down to watch Tiger King or whatever. No,
Speaker 1: the electron imparts energy to the phosphor, and the phosphor
Speaker 1: luminesses as a result, So that means it gives off light.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot more to it than what I
Speaker 1: just described, but I've done full episodes on it, and
Speaker 1: it would take a long time to go into all
Speaker 1: the details, but here the big takeaways. Before companies had
Speaker 1: found ways to bring the manufacturing costs down for stuff
Speaker 1: like l c D displays and to get it at
Speaker 1: a level of resolution that would be suitable for a
Speaker 1: computer screen. The CRT was the go to, otherwise you
Speaker 1: would just have a prohibitively expensive computer because the l
Speaker 1: c D manufacturing process was still relatively new. So having
Speaker 1: a giant vacuum tube also meant it was really hard
Speaker 1: to make a device that incorporated a screen and have
Speaker 1: it be portable because just the nature of the tube
Speaker 1: meant the screen had to be a pretty decent size.
Speaker 1: And what's more, because the CRT requires a vacuum, the
Speaker 1: monitors or television sets had to be extra dirty to
Speaker 1: withstand the tremendous difference in atmospheric pressure between the inside
Speaker 1: of the CRT and the outside world. So old televisions
Speaker 1: and old computer monitors are super heavy because they had
Speaker 1: to be. Engineers had to make them out of sturdy stuff,
Speaker 1: including thick glass for those screens, and the bigger the display,
Speaker 1: the thicker the glass had to be, and glass will
Speaker 1: add a lot of weight to a device in a hurry.
Speaker 1: So while I did express some surprise that took so
Speaker 1: long for someone to come up with the clamshell design
Speaker 1: for portable computers, in reality, it's not that big of
Speaker 1: a surprise at all. Because l C d screens. Screens
Speaker 1: that didn't require this cathode ray tube technology had not
Speaker 1: really been a viable option for very long. Now, in
Speaker 1: the last episode, I left off with the Macintosh Portable,
Speaker 1: Apple's first attempt at making a laptop, and ultimately that
Speaker 1: machine did not sell very well. It was heavy, it
Speaker 1: was bulky, it was extremely expensive. But this was also
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, a time when it was still more
Speaker 1: common for the average household to not have a computer
Speaker 1: at all. In fact, in nineteen nine, only fifteen percent
Speaker 1: of households in America owned a computer, according to Statista
Speaker 1: dot com. The vast majority of that fifteen percent likely
Speaker 1: owned a desktop, so portable computers were, in general a
Speaker 1: very tiny slice of a still relatively tiny market. The
Speaker 1: same year that Apple launched their failed first laptop, another
Speaker 1: company called n e C began a new chapter in
Speaker 1: the laptop saga. And I'll call this chapter the notebook. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not the two thousand four drama starring Rachel
Speaker 1: McAdams and Ryan Gosling. Instead, notebook is a subcategory of
Speaker 1: laptop computers. And we're kind of back to that same
Speaker 1: problem I mentioned in the last episode, you know, the
Speaker 1: one where how do we distinguish between something like the
Speaker 1: difference between a hill and a mountain. You know, you
Speaker 1: normally would say a mountain is taller and steeper than
Speaker 1: a hill, but it really can't just be elevation. There's
Speaker 1: some things that we call hills that are taller than
Speaker 1: some other things that we call mountains, So it gets
Speaker 1: really subjective. Well, the same can be true in notebook
Speaker 1: and laptop anyway. Generally speaking, notebooks are supposed to be smaller,
Speaker 1: more portable versions of laptops, which are already supposed to
Speaker 1: be portable. They're also supposed to be less powerful, or
Speaker 1: they tend to be less powerful. That's usually a trade
Speaker 1: off in order to lighten the load and slim down
Speaker 1: the form factor. You do that partly by not including
Speaker 1: so many features, and that in turn brings down the
Speaker 1: weight of the device. The size limit of the device
Speaker 1: gets reduced, and you also can charge less for it.
Speaker 1: It costs less to make and you can charge less
Speaker 1: when you're selling them. They tend to be positioned in
Speaker 1: the market as more of a personal computer. The full
Speaker 1: lap top would be geared more toward business times. Now,
Speaker 1: I would argue that these distinctions are so subjective as
Speaker 1: to be almost meaningless, like one person's laptop could be
Speaker 1: another person's notebook, and vice versa, and form does not
Speaker 1: always dictate function. There are people who will use a
Speaker 1: hefty portable computer that you would never call a notebook,
Speaker 1: kind of like the one I'm on right now. This
Speaker 1: one is a beefy alien ware gaming laptop that I've
Speaker 1: got all my notes on. It's quite heavy, and they'll
Speaker 1: use it to do light work like word processing, which
Speaker 1: I could do on any computer, especially since I'm using
Speaker 1: a web based UH service for all of my word processing.
Speaker 1: It's not even a program that's running natively on my computer.
Speaker 1: I could use anything, but I'm using this big, old
Speaker 1: beefy monster here instead. In fact, I'm sure if my
Speaker 1: computer had a heart, that heart would be breaking right
Speaker 1: now because I'm using it to type out notes rather
Speaker 1: than blast zombies and do maternal But I digress anyway.
Speaker 1: The word book got some traction as various tech journalists
Speaker 1: started to use that term kind of in an effort
Speaker 1: to just make an easy distinction between lightweight laptops and
Speaker 1: the big ones. So notebooks are a type of laptop
Speaker 1: that tend to be lighter, thinner, smaller, and less powerful
Speaker 1: than their larger counterparts. An ec ultra Light fit into
Speaker 1: that category nicely. While other laptops like the Macintosh Portable
Speaker 1: we're tipping the scales at sixteen pounds or about seven
Speaker 1: point three kilograms, the Ultra Light was just four point
Speaker 1: four pounds or two kilograms. When closed, the ultra Light
Speaker 1: measured one point four inches thick, that's about three point
Speaker 1: six centimeters. The CPU ran at eight point one four
Speaker 1: mega hurts. It had six of RAM for system memory,
Speaker 1: and it also relied on a non volatile battery backed
Speaker 1: solid state memory for storage, which was kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean this was before really the rise of solid
Speaker 1: state drives. You wouldn't see that come around until a
Speaker 1: little later, and they were really expensive. But this was
Speaker 1: a way of having a lightweight, uh long term memory
Speaker 1: storage solution that didn't require moving parts. The standard Ultra
Speaker 1: Light could store one hole megabyte of data on the
Speaker 1: solid state memory, so it wasn't huge by any stretch
Speaker 1: of the imagination. Of course, back in the day, I
Speaker 1: remember when I thought a megabyte would be more than
Speaker 1: I would ever need. Oh I was so dumb, still am,
Speaker 1: but now I'm older. So while it supported a rechargeable battery,
Speaker 1: that being the n ec ultra Light, That charge would
Speaker 1: only last a couple of hours max. So many tech
Speaker 1: reviewers wrote that it was kind of a waste of time.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you could have this super light portable computer,
Speaker 1: you can easily carry it everywhere, but you'd still have
Speaker 1: to carry a cable and plug the darned thing into
Speaker 1: the outlet. You couldn't just use it on battery power
Speaker 1: for you know, a full day. So what's the point?
Speaker 1: I find that pretty funny today, because these days I
Speaker 1: cannot take any laptop with me anywhere without the cable
Speaker 1: and expected to last more than just a few hours.
Speaker 1: It's funny to me how the world can change. Although
Speaker 1: this is also due to the fact that, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the last episode, even as our computers get
Speaker 1: more powerful and more efficient, software gets more complicated and
Speaker 1: requires more assets and resources, so it nullifies all those
Speaker 1: advances effectively. Well, the Ultralight reviews were mixed. People thought
Speaker 1: the lightweight was impressive, but they found the lack of
Speaker 1: other features like a printer port that made it a problem.
Speaker 1: How could you use it for business If you didn't
Speaker 1: have a port for a printer, you could swap out
Speaker 1: the floppy disk external drive for a an adapter to
Speaker 1: connect the printer, but it wasn't easy and at a
Speaker 1: list price of of three thousand dollars, they might have
Speaker 1: been designed to be a personal computer for leisure, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't priced like one. While this was all going on,
Speaker 1: other manufacturers were also making lightweight computers, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them were not yet following the clamshell design. The
Speaker 1: Cambridge Z eight eight, which only weighed two pounds or
Speaker 1: point nine kilograms, was an example of this. It was
Speaker 1: not a clamshell laptop. Instead, this computer kind of looks
Speaker 1: like a calculator with delusions of grandeur. There's an LCD
Speaker 1: screen mounted above a full keyboard. The keyboard itself was
Speaker 1: a membrane keyboard, which also meant typing on a Z
Speaker 1: eighty eight was super quiet. You could turn on a
Speaker 1: little digital click noise if it was too disturbing for you.
Speaker 1: And the computer was powered by and I am not
Speaker 1: making this up four double A batteries, and those four
Speaker 1: double A batteries could provide a charge of up to
Speaker 1: twenty hours of work time, which is a phenomenal design
Speaker 1: when it comes to power efficiency. Sure this wasn't a
Speaker 1: computer you would do stuff like play modern games on
Speaker 1: or whatever, although people did create games for this machine.
Speaker 1: But it was an incredibly portable, lightweight computer, and if
Speaker 1: you needed more power, you could pop out and grab
Speaker 1: a four pack of double A batteries and you're good. Now.
Speaker 1: I never owned one of these myself, that I understand,
Speaker 1: there's a small but passionate group of enthusiasts who still
Speaker 1: tinker with them, and I think that's pretty cool. Despite
Speaker 1: computers like the Z eight eight, the general design philosophy
Speaker 1: around portable computers was starting to coalesce behind the clamshell
Speaker 1: design that the old Compass Grid eleven oh one had established.
Speaker 1: And like I said in Part one, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: go over every laptop. That would just be ridiculous, but
Speaker 1: I do want to cover a few notable early laptops
Speaker 1: that have their place in history, and one of those
Speaker 1: would be Apple's second attempt to design a marketable portable computer.
Speaker 1: The Macintosh Portables were a bust. They just didn't sell
Speaker 1: very well, so the company went back to the drawing board.
Speaker 1: In a few years before Steve Jobs would come back
Speaker 1: to the company, Apple introduced the power Book, which was
Speaker 1: a new clamshell style portable mac The company launched three models,
Speaker 1: all at the same time. You had the power Book
Speaker 1: one hundred, the power Book one forty, and then the
Speaker 1: one seventy. The one hundred was the baseline model. The
Speaker 1: other two had additional features. For example, the one seventy
Speaker 1: had a much more powerful processor. The power Book one
Speaker 1: hundred weighed ten pounds less than the portable Macintosh from
Speaker 1: a few years earlier. I remember the portable Macintosh weighed
Speaker 1: in at sixteen pounds. The power Book was actually much
Speaker 1: closer to five pounds, around two point three kilograms, and
Speaker 1: had a sixteen mega Hurts processor. It came standard with
Speaker 1: two megabytes of memory. Were actually in the megabyte era
Speaker 1: of RAM. Now we were in the kilobyte era for
Speaker 1: a very long time there, and you could supplement those
Speaker 1: two megabytes of RAM with an additional six megabytes with
Speaker 1: a special memory module. The display measured nine inches on
Speaker 1: the diagonal. That would be about twenty three centimeters, although
Speaker 1: I think pretty much everyone refers to screen size and
Speaker 1: inches these days. It was also a monochromatic screen, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't a color display yet for portable max it
Speaker 1: had an expansion slot for a modem, which is pretty
Speaker 1: impressive for a laptop from and the standard amount of
Speaker 1: storage on one of these was a twiny megabyte hard drive.
Speaker 1: It also had max Graphic User interface or gooey, So
Speaker 1: the regular mac os the one where you would have
Speaker 1: icons representing different programs, the basic type of operating system
Speaker 1: most of us are familiar with these days. But that
Speaker 1: meant you needed a way to navigate that interface. You
Speaker 1: know that was designed for a mouse and keyboard, but
Speaker 1: you're talking about a laptop, a portable machine. How do
Speaker 1: you incorporate a mouse in a portable machine. Apple's original
Speaker 1: solution was to include a track ball on the keyboard
Speaker 1: part of the laptop. So there was actually a little
Speaker 1: ball that you could use and roll around to act
Speaker 1: as your mouse, and it was positioned below the space
Speaker 1: bar on the keyboard and in between where your hands
Speaker 1: would be if you have your faces sitting on the
Speaker 1: rest keys of the keyboard. That placement would become the
Speaker 1: standard spot for stuff like touch pads in the near future.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get the touch pads in just a second.
Speaker 1: The MacBook would also set you back twenty five hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: so that's about four thousand, seven hundred fifty bucks in
Speaker 1: today's cash, so still pretty darn expensive. And this was
Speaker 1: the basic model of the MacBook. However, the smaller form
Speaker 1: factor and the advancements and processors and storage made it
Speaker 1: much more attractive than the old Macintosh portable computers, and
Speaker 1: the PowerBook line would succeed where the earlier ones failed.
Speaker 1: By the way, in case you're curious how the one
Speaker 1: compared against the other end of Apple's launch power books,
Speaker 1: you know, the one seventy being the top end, I'll
Speaker 1: give you a very quick rundown. The one seventy had
Speaker 1: a faster processor. It ran at twenty five mega hurts,
Speaker 1: not sixteen. It also had twice as much RAM and
Speaker 1: standard at four megabytes, you could max that out at
Speaker 1: eight megabytes again with a memory module. Had a larger display.
Speaker 1: It was still a monochromatic display, but it included the
Speaker 1: active matrix technology that Apple had introduced with those old
Speaker 1: portable Macintoshes, which introduced much less blur. It had a
Speaker 1: faster updating screen, and it came standard with a modem
Speaker 1: which you would hook up to a phone line. And
Speaker 1: this was a good old two hundred bawd modem. I'll
Speaker 1: have to go into modems in a future episode to
Speaker 1: talk about those days, because boy do I remember them
Speaker 1: and I don't miss them. And uh, it cost about
Speaker 1: four thousand, six hundred bucks, which would be around eight
Speaker 1: seven hundred dollars in today's cash, so yawza. And the
Speaker 1: battery life on these things was good for about three
Speaker 1: hours max. How far we've come? All right, I've got
Speaker 1: more to say about laptops and their history in just
Speaker 1: a moment, but let's take a quick break. So just
Speaker 1: before the break, I talked about how the power Book
Speaker 1: line helped get Apple into the portable computer game, but
Speaker 1: I also mentioned that there was a fairly short battery
Speaker 1: life and in general that was becoming a bottleneck for
Speaker 1: portable computers. Processor speeds were getting better, in fact, twice
Speaker 1: as better, you might say, every eighteen months or so,
Speaker 1: thank you Gordon Moore. Display technology was also improving. But
Speaker 1: all these components needed electricity, and if you're designing a
Speaker 1: desktop computer, that's not a big deal. You create a
Speaker 1: power supply unit for the PC that's good enough to
Speaker 1: support everything, and then you plug it into a wall
Speaker 1: outlet and you've got a nice, steady supply of juice,
Speaker 1: you're good to go. It doesn't really matter if the
Speaker 1: processor is requiring a lot more power, everything's fine. But
Speaker 1: with a laptop, particularly a laptop that is not plugged
Speaker 1: into a wall, that is reliant upon battery power, things
Speaker 1: are different. Batteries can only store a finite amount of
Speaker 1: electricity before they need to be recharged, and that can
Speaker 1: be really inconvenient if you're in the middle of working
Speaker 1: on an important document or presentation or video or whatever.
Speaker 1: So how do you meet the challenge of delivering upon
Speaker 1: expectations where people have a bare minimum that they expect
Speaker 1: from a computer, but you also avoid either a uselessly
Speaker 1: short battery life, meaning you're always going to be plugged in,
Speaker 1: you're never gonna worry about being unplugged because it's just not,
Speaker 1: you know, a viable option, or you go the other way.
Speaker 1: You end up having a great battery it just also
Speaker 1: weighs a ton and makes your portable computer way less portable.
Speaker 1: How do you avoid that? Well, one way is to
Speaker 1: create a more efficient means of managing power in the
Speaker 1: first place, and that's what Intel and Microsoft set out
Speaker 1: to do when the two companies partnered to create advanced
Speaker 1: power management or a p M, and a p M
Speaker 1: is an a p I, which isn't confusing at all. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So an a p I is an application programming interface,
Speaker 1: and let me explain. And application programming interface is a
Speaker 1: set processes, functions, libraries, and other assets that act as
Speaker 1: a foundation for developers who want to create programs for
Speaker 1: a specific platform, like a specific operating system. So you've
Speaker 1: got a base set of functions on a computer that
Speaker 1: operate directly on the hardware itself. These are processes that
Speaker 1: might be hard coded into the physical circuits of that machine.
Speaker 1: And in the old days, that's how all programming had
Speaker 1: to be done. You actually had to make physical changes
Speaker 1: to a machine by unplugging cables and plugging them into
Speaker 1: other sockets and things like that, in order to change
Speaker 1: the programming in order to make it do something differently,
Speaker 1: like if you wanted to add numbers and stuff subtract them.
Speaker 1: These days, we have layers of firmware and software that
Speaker 1: helped manage all these interactions between the program you're running
Speaker 1: and the underlying hardware that's supplying all the assets that
Speaker 1: make that program possible. This way, programmers don't have to
Speaker 1: have a d understanding of the underlying hardware. They don't
Speaker 1: have to change that hardware. They just need to work
Speaker 1: within the parameters of those other layers. They just need
Speaker 1: to follow the rules. In other words, So if you'd
Speaker 1: like an analogy, or even if you don't, I'll compare
Speaker 1: it to building a house. So imagine you walk up
Speaker 1: to a building site and someone's already laid a bare
Speaker 1: concrete foundation there, but there's nothing else there. That's it.
Speaker 1: You get there, there's a foundation, nothing else is at
Speaker 1: your disposal. It's up to you to figure out how
Speaker 1: to build a house. You have to get all the
Speaker 1: stuff yourself. You have to figure it all out, maybe
Speaker 1: through trial and error. There's no one there to help you.
Speaker 1: That would be very frustrating. Or imagine you walk up
Speaker 1: to a building site. There's the foundation, but there's also
Speaker 1: materials for building out a frame and tools that you're
Speaker 1: going to need to put it all together, and sets
Speaker 1: of instructions on how those tools work, and maybe even
Speaker 1: some examples of various styles of houses that you could
Speaker 1: build using those materials. The second approach is way easier,
Speaker 1: and that's generally how an API works. It gives developers
Speaker 1: the setting and tools they need in order to build
Speaker 1: the programs they want to run on any given operating system. Okay,
Speaker 1: but what is a p M in particular, then, Well,
Speaker 1: this ap I gave programmers tools that would allow them
Speaker 1: to build software that could run in a more optimized
Speaker 1: way on a battery operated computer like a laptop. The
Speaker 1: a p M gives a way for each program to
Speaker 1: communicate its individual power requirements to the main system, which
Speaker 1: can then more precisely choose which programs get the juice
Speaker 1: and which ones can kind of fade back into sleep mode.
Speaker 1: The whole purpose is to conserve that sweet, sweet battery life,
Speaker 1: extending it on a single charge as much as you
Speaker 1: possibly can. So really, it's just kind of like an
Speaker 1: administrator or a foreman who is looking at what is
Speaker 1: required at any given moment, dedicating the resources that are
Speaker 1: needed and saving everything else in the meantime. Now I
Speaker 1: should hasten to add this really only applied to Windows
Speaker 1: based PC's. Microsoft would support a p M until two
Speaker 1: thousand and six and the debut of Windows Vista, whereupon
Speaker 1: the company introduced an updated API called Advanced Configuration and
Speaker 1: Power Interface or a c p I. So really it
Speaker 1: was just the next generation of that kind of power
Speaker 1: management strategy. Around this same time is when we got
Speaker 1: an early, perhaps even the first laptop with a touchpad
Speaker 1: to act as a mouse, and this one came from
Speaker 1: an Italian company called Olivetti. There was also a similar
Speaker 1: computer from Triumph Adler, German company, but that company had
Speaker 1: already been acquired by Olivetti earlier and had previously been
Speaker 1: owned by Volkswagen. Anyway, early touchpads weren't always the capacity
Speaker 1: of ones that we tend to use today. In fact,
Speaker 1: most of the time they weren't. Instead, capacity of touch
Speaker 1: screens would come later. Capacity. By the way, those are
Speaker 1: touch screens that work by detecting touch through a change
Speaker 1: in electrical conductivity. We humans conduct electricity, so when our
Speaker 1: skin makes contact with something that has an electric field,
Speaker 1: we alter that field, and this is how smartphones and
Speaker 1: touch screens work today. They have these grids that generate
Speaker 1: an electric field, and when we touch them, then the
Speaker 1: conductivity changes, and by pinpointing where that has happened on
Speaker 1: the grid or matrix, the computer processor knows where you
Speaker 1: are touching and what you are doing. But there is
Speaker 1: another way to do this. Actually, technically, there are a
Speaker 1: few other ways to make a touch screen, but when
Speaker 1: it comes to touch pads, there's really two big ones,
Speaker 1: so there's capacity. But then there's also resistive touch pads
Speaker 1: or touch screens. These systems required the user to apply
Speaker 1: a bit more pressure in order to bring two layers
Speaker 1: of electrically resistive material into contact with one another. When
Speaker 1: they're in a rest state, the two layers would separate
Speaker 1: from each other. You'd have a top layer and a
Speaker 1: bottom layer in between, which you would have maybe an
Speaker 1: inert gas or just some air, and embedded in those
Speaker 1: layers are electrodes. So when you push down and you
Speaker 1: bring those two layers into contact with one another, the
Speaker 1: electrodes touch and you get a current passing through. It
Speaker 1: registers there as a touch. And there are pros and
Speaker 1: cons to both resistive and capacitive touch surfaces. Resistive touch
Speaker 1: surfaces don't need the activating point of contact to be conductive. So,
Speaker 1: for example, let's say you have a smartphone with a
Speaker 1: resistive touch screen. You could use a stick or a
Speaker 1: a regular pen, not a light pen or capacitive touch pen,
Speaker 1: nothing like that, just a regular pen or whatever, a nail.
Speaker 1: Not that I would recommend you do that, but you
Speaker 1: could use anything like that. In order to make contact
Speaker 1: with the screen and get stuff to happen, you just
Speaker 1: have to use enough pressure, which is why you probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to use nail because you'd scratch up your screen.
Speaker 1: But if you had, let's say a smartphone with a
Speaker 1: resistive touch screen, UH, you would have a couple of
Speaker 1: different layers between your eyes and the display that the
Speaker 1: actual images, so they tend to be darker than capacitive
Speaker 1: touch screens. They also tend to suffer more from wear
Speaker 1: and tear because you're actually having to use pressure to
Speaker 1: make contact UH and to have it registered by the device.
Speaker 1: Capacitive touch screens don't require that kind of pressure. They
Speaker 1: just require a touch. But you also have to use
Speaker 1: a conductive surface to touch the screen, So if you
Speaker 1: were wearing like regular gloves, then it wouldn't work because
Speaker 1: the gloves would insulate your fingers from the surface. Fun fact,
Speaker 1: this is why a few years ago there were stories
Speaker 1: about people in Japan using hot dogs to operate their
Speaker 1: smartphones during the winter because it was too cold to
Speaker 1: go without gloves, and hot dogs could stand in as
Speaker 1: a fingertip because they too can conduct electricity anyway, Early
Speaker 1: laptop touch pads were often resistive technologies, and you had
Speaker 1: to use a little bit of pressure in order for
Speaker 1: them to I remember having some early laptops with touch pads,
Speaker 1: and the touch pad would give up the ghosts after
Speaker 1: a few years just from heavy use. While the incorporation
Speaker 1: of touch pads first came from a relatively obscure company, Olivetty,
Speaker 1: but at least it was obscure here in the United States,
Speaker 1: touch pads would find their way into the designs of
Speaker 1: other laptop companies, including Apple, which would update its power
Speaker 1: book lines with new models that replaced the track ball
Speaker 1: with a touch pad, and it would become a fairly
Speaker 1: standard component in laptop and notebook computers. Because this was
Speaker 1: also the time we were seeing a very serious shift
Speaker 1: away from text based operating systems like DOSS and moving
Speaker 1: more to graphic user interfaces like Windows and mac os,
Speaker 1: So you had to have something now. Not all laptops
Speaker 1: around this time had disc drives, but those that did
Speaker 1: typically relied on the three and a half inch disk drive.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until when IBM, which at the time was
Speaker 1: still making consumer computer released the think Pad seven seven
Speaker 1: five C D that optical drives. In this case, a
Speaker 1: CD drive or CD ROM drive would become standard, and
Speaker 1: CD ROM disks represented a big jump in storage capability.
Speaker 1: The three and a half inch disc of could hold
Speaker 1: about twenty one megabytes of data. A refinement of a
Speaker 1: few years later would boost them up to a hundred
Speaker 1: twenty megabytes. The information was stored magnetically on the disc,
Speaker 1: which is why you were supposed to keep floppy disks
Speaker 1: away from powerful magnets, because those magnets could realign all
Speaker 1: the magnetic particles that was on the film inside the
Speaker 1: computer disc and thus corrupt all the data that was
Speaker 1: stored on that disc. A CD ROM disc could hold
Speaker 1: much more data, as much as six d forty megabytes.
Speaker 1: It also is optical storage, not magnetic. You could bring
Speaker 1: a powerful bangnet near a compact disc, it wouldn't affect anything,
Speaker 1: because that's not how they store information. However, the think
Speaker 1: Pad did not have a c deep burner, so you
Speaker 1: weren't storing information on CDs. You could only read information
Speaker 1: from CDs. That's where the ROM matters here. ROM stands
Speaker 1: for read only memory. That means you can pull data
Speaker 1: from the source as much as you like, but you
Speaker 1: cannot change the data and you can't add to it.
Speaker 1: A CD at this time was essentially an unchanging record,
Speaker 1: so software developers can make more complex programs on CDs,
Speaker 1: and that would remove the need for users to keep
Speaker 1: track of five or six discs and then swapping out
Speaker 1: the discs whenever the computers said so, which was nice.
Speaker 1: You no longer have that hassle. IBM would introduce another
Speaker 1: really interesting innovation in one that wouldn't become standard, but
Speaker 1: it was really cool. It's a great idea. So it's
Speaker 1: clear that one enormous challenge early on with portable computers
Speaker 1: was miniaturizing stuff so that could all fit into a
Speaker 1: small form factor and also so it wouldn't be too heavy.
Speaker 1: And engineers did a great job working with various components.
Speaker 1: They optimized designs that created crazy compact circuit boards that
Speaker 1: allow for a notebook style laptop. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: were to ever open up some of these laptops, you
Speaker 1: would be amazed at how tightly packed they are. In fact,
Speaker 1: remember when I said the term notebooks came out to
Speaker 1: describe slimmer, smaller laptop computers. By the mid nineties we
Speaker 1: had a new term. These were sub notebooks, so these
Speaker 1: were even smallerer and slimmerer than those But there was
Speaker 1: a trade off, and that was that the keyboards for
Speaker 1: those devices tended to be more than a little cramped.
Speaker 1: I'm sure a lot of you out there have worked
Speaker 1: with laptop computers that had small keyboards, so it worked.
Speaker 1: For example, I use a full sized USB keyboard that
Speaker 1: I plug into my laptops docking station so I can
Speaker 1: use that instead of the laptop's native keyboard because it
Speaker 1: just gets too uncomfortable after a couple of hours of typing. Well,
Speaker 1: IBM was looking at this problem and a brilliant designer
Speaker 1: named John Kuritas came up with a solution, and supposedly
Speaker 1: it occurred to him after he had been playing with
Speaker 1: building blocks with his daughter. And IBM called the solution
Speaker 1: the track right, but almost everybody else called it a
Speaker 1: butterfly keyboard. It's a little tricky to describe an audio,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna do my best. So imagine you've got
Speaker 1: a closed laptop. The screen is down and it's the
Speaker 1: size of a decent compact laptop, and then you open
Speaker 1: it up. You lift the latch and you lift the
Speaker 1: screen up and as you do, so the you see
Speaker 1: that the keyboard begins to shift into place. It's actually
Speaker 1: two half keyboards and they're mounted on a pair of
Speaker 1: sliding basses. So as the laptop opens, the keyboard separates
Speaker 1: a bit, spreads apart, and then fits back together to
Speaker 1: become a larger keyboard. It actually is large enough to
Speaker 1: overlap on either side of the base of the laptop,
Speaker 1: meaning the base is now wider than the screen is.
Speaker 1: When you close the laptop, same sequence happens, but in reverse.
Speaker 1: The keyboard platforms detach, they swivel a bit and fold
Speaker 1: in together to conserve space, making it more compact. And
Speaker 1: this is probably a little hard for you to imagine,
Speaker 1: so I recommend that you guys do a search for
Speaker 1: IBM Butterfly keyboard or the think Pad seven oh one C.
Speaker 1: There are videos on YouTube that show it in action,
Speaker 1: so you can actually see. In fact, there are some
Speaker 1: that explain the mechanism that was used to activate this.
Speaker 1: It was built into the hinge of the lid itself,
Speaker 1: the display itself. The think Pad seven oh one C
Speaker 1: would be the only laptop to feature the track right,
Speaker 1: and to purchase one back in the day would set
Speaker 1: you back a cool three thousand, seven hundred dollars back
Speaker 1: that would be about the same as spending six hundred
Speaker 1: bucks on it today. Okay, so maybe I do see
Speaker 1: why it didn't catch on, although I should add the
Speaker 1: keyboard was not the only thing contributing to that price
Speaker 1: tag on this one. The design, however, did get a
Speaker 1: lot of critical acclaim including more than twenty Design awards,
Speaker 1: even though it wouldn't find its way into future laptops,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a shame because it is really nifty,
Speaker 1: especially if you like stuff like transformers, because that's what
Speaker 1: it reminds me of. Anyway, by this time, the basic
Speaker 1: components of your standard laptop were mostly in place. Nearly
Speaker 1: all were clamshell design, nearly all had some sort of
Speaker 1: mouse replacement like a touchpad or track pad, and nearly
Speaker 1: all had some sort of additional drive, whether it was
Speaker 1: a floppy disk drive or a CD ROM drive. And
Speaker 1: when we come back, I'll talk about some other cool
Speaker 1: innovations and first in laptop history, but first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. Something that happened in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: that would go on to be a major influence in
Speaker 1: laptop design was the creation of the Universal Serial Bus
Speaker 1: or USB. Today, these ports are everywhere and they allow
Speaker 1: us to plug in all sorts of peripherroles or devices
Speaker 1: into a computer or hub. They've also advanced the standard
Speaker 1: quite a bit, so now we've got US B C
Speaker 1: and all this other stuff. But you get the point.
Speaker 1: The important point I was trying to make here is
Speaker 1: that they really eliminate the need for a lot of
Speaker 1: specialized ports that computers otherwise had to have back in
Speaker 1: the day. You know, if you bought a computer in
Speaker 1: the nineties, then you had all these different specialized ports,
Speaker 1: like you had a port just for a mouse to
Speaker 1: plug in, one for the keyboard, one for a printer.
Speaker 1: You might have one for a joystick or game pad,
Speaker 1: and these started to add up, right, You had all
Speaker 1: these different specialized ports. That meant that a computer had
Speaker 1: to have enough space for each of those. Uh, the
Speaker 1: engineers had to build in the actual circuit boards for
Speaker 1: each of those. The the the interfaces that connected the
Speaker 1: port with the computer motherboard itself. So the invention of
Speaker 1: the USB meant that you have a universal connector that
Speaker 1: would be compatible with all sorts of different devices. So
Speaker 1: manufacturers would make USB capable or USB compatible printers for example,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't need a printer cable. You just hook
Speaker 1: up a USB cable between the printer and the laptop,
Speaker 1: or you would use a USB mouse or USB keyboard,
Speaker 1: and you no longer had to worry about all these
Speaker 1: specialized connectors. And it really simplified the design of computers
Speaker 1: in general and laptops in particular. That in turn would
Speaker 1: also bring prices down. I mean, if you can streamline design,
Speaker 1: then you cut out a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: adds cost to the end product. So that was a
Speaker 1: big deal. Even though it wasn't directly connected to laptops,
Speaker 1: the development of USB would have an enormous impact on
Speaker 1: laptop development moving forward. Beginning in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: around two thousand three or so, companies began to offer
Speaker 1: laptop computers with DVD drives. Now, just as the CD
Speaker 1: ROM drive had volutionized computing about a decade earlier, so
Speaker 1: too with DVD drives, not only could you PLoP a
Speaker 1: DVD film into your laptop and watch movies on the go,
Speaker 1: which was a pretty darn novel idea back in the day,
Speaker 1: you could also have software on DVDs, software for really
Speaker 1: big programs because while a c D could hold around
Speaker 1: six d forty megabytes of data, a DVD up the
Speaker 1: anti to four point seven gigabytes of information or more.
Speaker 1: If you used multi layer encoding and used both sides
Speaker 1: of a disc, you could have up to seventeen gigabytes
Speaker 1: on a single DVD. Not that a lot of people
Speaker 1: did that, but it was a possibility. Around that same time,
Speaker 1: HP introduced the Compact TC one thousand and this one
Speaker 1: is a bit of a hybrid computer. It had a
Speaker 1: detachable keyboard, so when you had the keyboard and the
Speaker 1: display joined together, you essentially had a notebook style laptop
Speaker 1: clamshell the sign but you could also separate the display
Speaker 1: from the keyboard, which was pretty novel back in two
Speaker 1: thousand three, and then you would have a tablet PC.
Speaker 1: There was also an optional docking station you could purchase
Speaker 1: and that would essentially turn this into a desktop, though
Speaker 1: it was a desktop that was severely lacking in processing
Speaker 1: power and other capabilities compared to other desktops around that
Speaker 1: same time. However, it was a real innovation and when
Speaker 1: we would see used a few times further down the
Speaker 1: road as laptops would try to masquerade as tablets, or
Speaker 1: vice versa. So it was kind of the beginning of
Speaker 1: a trend in design, but it was a trend that
Speaker 1: was very slow to pick up because also, this is
Speaker 1: two thousand three, This is well before the iPad and
Speaker 1: well before things like tablet computers had a widespread appeal.
Speaker 1: There were very niche jobs, like especially in the medical industry,
Speaker 1: that really depended upon tablet piece seas, but you know,
Speaker 1: your average person had no use for them before the
Speaker 1: iPad came around. Still, it was pretty cool to see
Speaker 1: that as early as two thousand three there were companies
Speaker 1: that were working on that sort of design. In two
Speaker 1: thousand six, Apple made a switch from the power Book laptops,
Speaker 1: which had been using G four processors for the last
Speaker 1: several generations of the power Book, and then introduced a
Speaker 1: new line of laptops called the MacBook. Now by two
Speaker 1: thousand six, Steve Jobs have been back with the company
Speaker 1: for essentially a decade, so he was making some really
Speaker 1: big moves. Around this time, the iPod had already really
Speaker 1: established itself as a success, and the company was on
Speaker 1: the verge of releasing the iPhone the following year. So
Speaker 1: these MacBooks had Intel microprocessors in them. Not G four processors.
Speaker 1: They also featured webcams, and as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: there's some of the earliest laptop computers that actually incorporated
Speaker 1: a webcam into the design, into the bezel of the display.
Speaker 1: The company offered up a range of computers in different
Speaker 1: side and capabilities and price tags. So if you wanted
Speaker 1: a basic MacBook, the no frills, entry level MacBook that
Speaker 1: costs a thousand dollars really a thousand ninety nine dollars.
Speaker 1: But if you wanted the top of the line, the
Speaker 1: seventeen inch MacBook Pro when it first launched, that would
Speaker 1: be two thousand seven premium price tags from Apple Products. Now,
Speaker 1: over time, Apple would phase out the seventeen inch model
Speaker 1: of the MacBook, releasing the last one in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: and the company was really packing more power and smaller
Speaker 1: form factors, and the development of the retina display technology
Speaker 1: would change things up a lot too, so they ultimately
Speaker 1: abandoned that and that was when they were switching to
Speaker 1: the MacBook Air strategy. I'll talk about that more in
Speaker 1: just a second, But in two thousand seven, we would
Speaker 1: see a new type of innovation in the laptop space,
Speaker 1: and this was the same year that Apple put out
Speaker 1: the iPhone and launched a tremendous trend in consumer smartphones.
Speaker 1: Now there was another trend that was starting to take
Speaker 1: with laptop computers, but this one didn't have nearly as
Speaker 1: much success as the smartphone industry, and that would be
Speaker 1: the emergence of the netbook. So yeah, we're getting back
Speaker 1: to naming conventions. We had laptops, we had notebooks, we
Speaker 1: had sub notebooks, we had tablets, we had hybrids. Now
Speaker 1: we have netbooks. So what are those? Well, I should
Speaker 1: use the past tense for these, because no one really
Speaker 1: talks about netbooks anymore. But they're even smaller devices than
Speaker 1: sub notebooks. They're somewhere between smartphone and sub notebook. They
Speaker 1: typically lack stuff like optical drives, so you don't have
Speaker 1: like a CD driver, DV drive at all. There's in
Speaker 1: fact no drives all. This helps cut down on bulk
Speaker 1: and cost. This is not something that's unusual these days.
Speaker 1: A lot of laptops don't have any kind of optical
Speaker 1: drive in them, but they also tend to have much
Speaker 1: less powerful processors than standard laptops. They often rely on
Speaker 1: the exact same type of microprocessors that handheld devices use
Speaker 1: like smartphones, and they offload a lot of the heavy
Speaker 1: lifting to the cloud. You're meant to use these devices
Speaker 1: to access web and net based services rather than running
Speaker 1: programs natively on the machine. Thus you get netbooks in
Speaker 1: a way. This was a move back to the old
Speaker 1: days of dumb terminals and mainframes. So with that model,
Speaker 1: you had a centralized computer the main frame. Like if
Speaker 1: you might work for a big company financial company and
Speaker 1: they have a mainframe computer and you would interface with
Speaker 1: that by connecting through a dumb terminal. A dumb terminal
Speaker 1: is essentially just an input and output device. Commonly you
Speaker 1: would be using keyboards and displays, and these devices have
Speaker 1: no computing power of their own. They are not computers.
Speaker 1: It's just a way for you to access the main frame.
Speaker 1: And you can actually have a lot of different people
Speaker 1: with a lot of different dumb terminals, all accessing the
Speaker 1: main frame around the same time. Though you would often
Speaker 1: have a central computer using a system called time sharing,
Speaker 1: but that's a matter for a different episode, all right,
Speaker 1: So flash forward, we moved through an era where computing
Speaker 1: oponents get maturized, they get less expensive. This allows for
Speaker 1: the rise of the personal computer. Where people have their
Speaker 1: own computational machine at their disposal, so all the computing
Speaker 1: happens at the computer that the user is sitting at.
Speaker 1: There not at a dumb terminal anymore. They are actually
Speaker 1: at a computer. Then we get to the point where
Speaker 1: the Internet emerges from being this obscure project that only
Speaker 1: people in academia, the military, and a few research facilities
Speaker 1: are aware of, and then no one else has heard
Speaker 1: about it, and then it becomes a public utility, or
Speaker 1: at least it should be one. And now the Internet,
Speaker 1: or rather servers that are on the Internet, can fulfill
Speaker 1: a function similar to those mainframes. It's not centralized the
Speaker 1: way a mainframe is. But once again, the end user
Speaker 1: doesn't need a very powerful machine. They can access servers
Speaker 1: that's doing doing all the heavy lifting on the server end,
Speaker 1: sending the data through some web based or net based interface,
Speaker 1: and then you're getting the result on your device. It
Speaker 1: becomes kind of a conduit to these more powerful computers,
Speaker 1: so your computer doesn't have to be as strong, and
Speaker 1: that means you can enjoy really interesting content, especially as
Speaker 1: long as your your machine has the capability of doing that. Right,
Speaker 1: it still has to be able to display good graphics.
Speaker 1: It still has to be able to play good sound
Speaker 1: so that you can have those rich Internet experiences that
Speaker 1: we've all come to expect, you know, like streaming Tiger King. Now,
Speaker 1: I know that's the second time I've made a Tiger
Speaker 1: King reference, and I should also add that I haven't
Speaker 1: actually watched Tiger King. I've just absorbed all my knowledge
Speaker 1: of it from social media, because that seems to be
Speaker 1: one of two things everyone's talking about, and the other
Speaker 1: one is COVID nineteen, so I prefer referencing Tiger King
Speaker 1: at the time being. Anyway, what this would mean to
Speaker 1: the end consumers is that netbooks would be these super
Speaker 1: lightweight devices and they could be really cheap compared to
Speaker 1: other laptops. The tradeoff was they were also underpowered compared
Speaker 1: to laptops, and they could only run a subset of
Speaker 1: the types of software that other computers could run. Netbooks
Speaker 1: became a big category over the next few years, and
Speaker 1: companies rushed to build their own versions of these lightweight,
Speaker 1: lightly powered machines. The a sous e PC seven oh
Speaker 1: one E, by the way, is three es, so I
Speaker 1: guess it's really e PC one would be a really
Speaker 1: early example of this. In fact, a lot of people
Speaker 1: call the seven oh one the first netbook, but if
Speaker 1: I'm being honest with you, guys, the timelines for these
Speaker 1: things get really tough to untangle. Anyway, the seven oh
Speaker 1: one way just two pounds or point nine two ks,
Speaker 1: so it was feather light compared to some of the
Speaker 1: other laptops I've talked about, and it also cost three
Speaker 1: when it launched, landing it solidly in the budget category
Speaker 1: for portable computers. Netbooks would tend to be so small
Speaker 1: that users would run up against some pretty tough obstacles,
Speaker 1: including those keyboards. Sub notebook keyboards are hard to tie upon.
Speaker 1: Netbook keyboards are painful for me. They're even more cramped
Speaker 1: than notebook or sub notebook styles, and that is a downside,
Speaker 1: But I don't think that would ultimately be what led
Speaker 1: companies to abandon the netbook form factor. Most companies did
Speaker 1: that around the year two thousand eleven. I think the
Speaker 1: real reason most companies got all the game comes down
Speaker 1: to cash money, y'all. See budget netbooks fill a consumer need,
Speaker 1: but they're not great for profit margins. The cost of
Speaker 1: making a netbook versus the amount you get for selling
Speaker 1: the netbook is narrow enough that it was a problem
Speaker 1: for a lot of companies. I mean, if you're a company,
Speaker 1: you have a limited number of resources at your disposal,
Speaker 1: why would you dedicate manufacturing and design resources for a
Speaker 1: product that might not even make its money back. Like
Speaker 1: the amount that you're pouring in you're not getting back
Speaker 1: in your return on investment. You could use that same
Speaker 1: amount of time and effort designing other stuff that has
Speaker 1: a better return. And so, for many reasons, but mostly money,
Speaker 1: companies started to back off of making net books. Around
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, we did see slightly larger laptop computers
Speaker 1: that otherwise followed the netbook philosophy. However, they still had
Speaker 1: a focus on web and net based services, but they
Speaker 1: also would include slightly higher end features like better displays,
Speaker 1: which in turn would mean the price tags would be higher.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of where we've seen the budget market settle.
Speaker 1: They're bigger than netbooks, typically, they're not necessarily as big
Speaker 1: as full laptops. They're somewhere in that sub notebook range.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there are other examples of laptops that we could
Speaker 1: talk about, like MacBook Air Apples, extremely thin, light laptop
Speaker 1: that essentially replaced the older MacBook line. Or we can
Speaker 1: talk about the Chrome Book, which are laptops that are
Speaker 1: running Google's Chrome operating system. They rely almost exclusively on
Speaker 1: web based services. There's Lenovo's Yoga Book C nine thirty.
Speaker 1: That's a laptop that replaces the physical keyboard with a
Speaker 1: second touch screen that's powered by e Ink, So you
Speaker 1: will have an e Ink touch screen keyboard. You're typing
Speaker 1: on a screen rather than on physical keys. And I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna lie. I actually really dig the design of
Speaker 1: the Yoga Book. I don't own one, and I don't
Speaker 1: know how comfortable it would be to use, but I
Speaker 1: think it's a really nifty look looking device. Um Or
Speaker 1: we could go back to two thousand eleven, you can
Speaker 1: talk about the Razor Blade gaming laptop, which the company
Speaker 1: Razor referred to as the world's first true gaming laptop. Now,
Speaker 1: whether you agree with Razor or not, it is true
Speaker 1: that since then we've seen more companies build laptops with
Speaker 1: the intended purpose of serving as a gaming rig. And again,
Speaker 1: the computer I used to type up all my notes
Speaker 1: for this episode is one of those. Is that alien
Speaker 1: Ware seventeen are four laptop and I do love it,
Speaker 1: but I would never carry it around with me because
Speaker 1: it weighs like ten pounds and it's about the size
Speaker 1: of a coffee table. Okay, it's it's not really that big,
Speaker 1: but it is large enough that I actually don't have
Speaker 1: a computer bag big enough to fit this thing in it.
Speaker 1: But I still love this computer, don't get me wrong. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll continue to see lots of innovations in
Speaker 1: the laptop space, whether it's incorporating eye tracking technology and
Speaker 1: webcams to give you the ability to control your computer
Speaker 1: just by moving your eyes. Lots of computers have that,
Speaker 1: Mine has that, or computers that have their own voice
Speaker 1: activated assistance, two more purpose built machines that do a
Speaker 1: subset of things incredibly well. You know, we're watching as
Speaker 1: companies are working to differentiate their products from all of
Speaker 1: the competition, and as you can imagine, that gets pretty
Speaker 1: tough because you can only say, you know, this is
Speaker 1: like the old one, but faster, because people will start
Speaker 1: to lose interest. So I'm sure we're going to see
Speaker 1: more kind of innovative, funky, perhaps even outlandish design choices,
Speaker 1: some of which will succeed and some of which will
Speaker 1: never see again. My hope is that the track right
Speaker 1: will come back in some way because that was just
Speaker 1: such a cool design and it's a shame that was
Speaker 1: only ever used on one computer or But that wraps
Speaker 1: up our history of laptop computers. We will move on
Speaker 1: to a different topic for our next episode, but if
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for future tech Stuff episodes, reach
Speaker 1: out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for
Speaker 1: both is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.