How to replace the laptop

Sometimes people ask me: how can we replace “the laptop” as a form factor? What’s the next big new form factor that does everything a laptop does, and more, the way smartphones replaced “dumb phones”?

As the VP of Lenovo’s Global Commercial Product Center, I see and work with a lot of laptops. Instinctively, my answer is always that we truly can’t replace it, but we can reimagine how we use it.?

As it stands, “the laptop” - the clamshell, traditional laptop - is a multifunctional mature form factor, tried and true, and well-refined. It’s hard to beat. It’s evolved so many times already since its inception, and importantly, not every laptop is the exact same product anyway. “The laptop” can be as diverse as the people who use it.

Before we can really talk about replacing a laptop, we need to start with something more essential:

What is a laptop, anyway?

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The genetic makeup of a laptop

A laptop is a small, portable computer with a screen and an alphanumeric keyboard that generally folds together. It might also be called a notebook. Portability and therefore battery power are both key.

But keyboards, these days, can be detachable.

Screen size is variable, from 10 or 11 inches diagonally up to 17 inches, and even a very few that are larger.

And thanks to the evolution of the 360 hinge as seen in the Lenovo Yoga form factor, and the foldable screen technology as seen in the X1 Fold, screen orientation is also variable. We’ve even debuted a two-screen laptop this year - the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3, which has an 8-inch screen next to your keyboard.

Some people - and I’m often one of those people - will happily split out the Yoga and the X1 Fold into their own categories. The Yoga is a 2-in-1, a tablet and a laptop, whichever you want, when you want. The X1 Fold is a brand new form factor all on its own, though still in its infancy in terms of its potential for innovation.

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“Evolution” instead of “replacement”

What we’ve found with “replacing the laptop” as a concept is that we like to think of it more as an evolution.

Take the Yoga as an example.

There are times when customers want to get rid of the keyboard, because they can consume or produce content more easily with just a screen. That means there are crevices and corners of use cases that traditional clamshell laptops don’t address.

What do we do when we learn about these use cases?

We start brainstorming. How can we make a product that has all the best parts of a laptop (like its performance, productivity and its wide range of software), but lets customers move or remove the keyboard?

Working in the product development team, I can say we always knew it would be nice to flip the keyboard backwards. But the hinge technology just wasn’t there yet, for a long time. Then one day, I was at this terrible little hotel with the consumer notebook team. We’d deliberately locked ourselves away to brainstorm and ideate. An engineer came up to me and pulled out a cardboard box and started flipping it around, showing off some ideas for 360 degree hinges the team could probably figure out how to do now.

Seeing this cardboard box prototype, I went up to the whiteboard and wrote “360 hinge” on it. And from there, it grew.

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Thinking a new way vs. Engineering a new way

The teams I’ve worked on, we’ve always challenged ourselves to do something better next time, even if we were pretty happy with what we did this time. There’s always something better to be done.

The clamshell is such a multifunctional design, it’s been very hard to try to think of a brand new way to do it better. We created the 360 hinge, we created the detachable keyboard, we created the foldable screen. These all solve unique problems.

A colleague of mine once bet me that the Yoga form factor would outsell the clamshell in a year, because it covers everything the clamshell does, and does more still, even if it is a little heavier because you need additional display protection and the special hinge. It’s been ten years, and the Yoga form factor sells around 25% of the volume of the clamshell families, so he owes me a beer!

25% isn’t nothing, though. That’s still a quarter of our customers who appreciate the use case, the evolutionary line that 2-in-1’s are advancing along. I know I enjoy having the ability to put a laptop into tent mode when I’m with a customer, or on a plane, or when I’m watching content.

But it hasn’t replaced the laptop for me, or for many other users. (Not yet?)

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“Replacing” the keyboard

Maybe that’s because at this stage, it seems like there’s no getting rid of the keyboard as we know it.

I’m talking about the mechanical, alphanumerical keyboard. It’s ingrained to our current user experience, and we miss it when it’s not there, even with all the advances that haptic keyboards have made.

For example: there’s the potential for AI software to learn how you use a haptic keyboard. If my keyboard knows I always hit the P long and just miss hitting the E by an eighth of an inch, it can adapt to where I’m striking the screen so I make fewer errors.

With continual adjustment and evolution of the software, we can even make a haptic keyboard feel much more similar to a mechanical keyboard.

But it’s still weird. Sometimes that’s the best user feedback you get when you’re trialing things like this: “it’s weird”.

So we’ll keep working at it until technology catches up, like it did with the 360 hinge and the foldable screen; like it did, years ago, with narrow bezels and embedded cameras, with cloud storage replacing CD drives, with weight reductions galore, with better and better battery chemistry and much improved performance per watt.

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What exactly is “replacing”, anyway?

The closest we’ve gotten lately to what I’d probably call “replacement” is in the Lenovo workstation family, where technology has shifted so that we can combine the best features of the P15 and the P17 into a new family member: the P16. A 16:10 display combined with new advances in cooling and processor efficiencies, the power of the P17 and the portability of the P15, made the P16 a natural “replacement” for both going forward.

When we see major shifts in the way users use technology, or major shifts in the technology itself, that’s what prompts something startlingly new enough to be called a “replacement”. That’s what happened when smartphones replaced “dumb phones” (even though there are still some people who prefer the straightforwardness of a phone that only makes phone calls).

But in the PC business, the laptop didn’t replace the desktop. The tablet didn’t replace the laptop. They’re additional tools for additional use cases.

So how do you replace “the laptop” as we know it?

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Right now, you don’t. Right now, the clamshell form-factor has proved incredibly hard to top and addresses most user needs, and when we find use cases that it doesn’t suit, we’re able to adapt the form factor to fit into those corners. We can tweak its outsides, its insides, its software, but it’s still recognizably “a laptop”, or at least a laptop’s cousin.

That being said…

Who knows what next year will bring in terms of new technology, new engineering, new thinking, and the application of all three?

Whatever it is, whenever we do “replace” the laptop, I can’t wait to see it.?