Innovation on the Laptop Market
In September ‘11 Ars wrote:
Apple has produced a monitor with a bunch of ports – USB and Firewire — that connects over Light Peak. That’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking.
Compare that with Sony, which has produced, for its Vaio Z range, an external module that contains an entire GPU, a Blu-ray optical drive, gigabit ethernet, and some USB ports, one of which is USB3. That’s exciting in ways that Apple’s monitor can’t even begin to approach…
Somehow a drive for physical media doesn’t strike me exactly as “exciting” or even “groundbreaking”. You know, I mean “physical media” as in “back in the 80s, when we needed physical media because there was no internet” or as in “back in the 90s, when the internet was too slow for large files”.
Let’s check for more awesomeness of the Sony side:
Sony slightly undermines the impressiveness of its achievement by including a 20-year-old, and desperately obsolete, VGA connector onto the machine.
So much for the the amusing search for any laptop that can compete with the MacBook Air, before Intel pushed 300 Million bucks into companies to even make them start copying the MacBook Air concept.
It wasn’t that much later, when the first “Ultrabook” arrived. It was the Asus Zenbook:
Using the Zenbook’s trackpad is like walking somewhere with a friend who keeps sticking his foot out and tripping you. After the first couple of times, hey, you got me. Good joke. Let’s walk seriously now. But that friend, who lacks the ability to tell when a joke is no longer funny, just keeps doing it. Don’t you understand, Zenbook, that it drives me insane when your trackpad makes the cursor behave like a drunken Nightcrawler?
How was this overlooked in Asus’ testing? We want to like this ultrabook, but a trackpad is so fundamental to the experience that it is unacceptable for it to not work all the time, every time.
Personally I find “fundamental to the experience” a somewhat peculiar way to put it. Would you call the steering wheel of a car ”fundamental to the experience” if the car would jump around the road at every turn?
However, remember that VGA-port from 1987 we talked about above? At the CES 2012 “Sony shows off 13-inch VAIO Ultrabook behind glass”. Wow, behind glass. Let’s see:
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Innovation is not thinking it out or making a prototype. If it was, we had a million people being innovative for “having had the idea of facebook before facebook had it”.
Innovation is when you make people use something new.
Nope, Apple did not invent the tablet computer — or did they? No, they didn’t. But they are innovative as in “making people use a tablet computer”.
Still hungry? Here’s a bonus track.