Tomorrow’s laptop will work more like your phone, and you’re going to love it
Tomorrow’s laptop will work more like your phone, and you’re going to love it
Luke Larsen@lalarsen11
5.29.18
Imagine for a moment that you lived in a technological utopia. Not one with flying cars and holograms, but one that could exist using only the tech you already own right now.
Imagine if the phone you check social media on when you wake was seamlessly integrated into the laptop you use at home, as well as the desktop PC you use at the office. Imagine if they all ran the same apps, shared the same files, and held the same data. You could answer a phone call, or text, on whichever you wanted, and could control them all remotely with the press of a button. Even the voice assistant you call to while cooking dinner could be plugged into the same system.
That’s not the world we live in today, but Google, Apple, and Microsoft are doing their best to create it. The fragmented worlds of mobile and desktop operating systems must be unified, and when they are, it’ll be a watershed moment in computing. That moment’s not as distant as you may think.
A RESPONSIVE, UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM
Today, forcing your phone and your laptop to be friends is like trying to force a conversation between people who speak different languages. That became a topic of discussion when we spoke to Trond Wuellner. He’s a project manager on Google’s Pixelbook, a 2-in-1 laptop that tries to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile.
“Our relationship with computing fundamentally changed
when phones became the first go-to device.”
“In a large way, laptops and that form factor haven’t gone through a major evolution in 25 years,” said Wuellner. “They’re fundamentally the same kind of feel as they were then. The reality of how people are actually using computers is just very different today.”
Wuellner’s correct. Mobile operating systems and desktop operating systems are not cut from the same cloth. One was designed for touch, and one was designed for a mouse and keyboard.
“Our relationship with computing fundamentally changed when phones became the first go-to device everybody grabs in the morning,” says Wuellner. “As a result, what is happening is the relationship with the software and the experiences and the applications that people go to first have evolved as well. No longer is that desktop-installed application or “program” the first way you think about computers. It’s now the mobile apps.”
That may be true, but it’s not as easy as porting mobile apps to a laptop or strapping a keyboard onto a tablet. Products like the iPad Pro, Surface Pro, and Pixelbook have tried that, and none have held up as a truly unified device.
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