Our
notebooks and desktop PCs are all getting thinner -- thin enough that Kate Moss
in her heroin-chic heyday could have sported something like the 13-inch MacBook
Air down the runway and it wouldn't have overwhelmed her almost nonexistent
frame.
It's no
surprise. We've been seeing computers slim down ever since those giant
room-sized computers that spawned the digital age, and the introduction of the
first PCs in the decades that followed.
But for a
while, we were continually adding features such as hard drive space, optical
drives, SD card slots to our notebooks and PCs.
Now, as
storage migrates toward online servers, and media is more likely to be streamed
rather than viewed from a DVD or Blu-ray disc, many of those onboard features
are shrinking down, or getting nixed altogether.
Consumers
are favoring size and portability over a heftier 'do-it-all' type machine.
"Size will most certainly be an important driver when consumers look for
their next PC or notebook," especially with tablets at the forefront of
consumers' minds today’s, says Desiree Davis, Senior Manager with Resolve
Market Research.
We're also
seeing PCs begin to favor flash storage, typically in the form of SSDs that
incorporate NAND-based flash memory, rather than thicker, weightier HDDs.
"There
are simply fewer devices on the market that consumers want to carry that have
room for hard disk drives. Their value to the on-the-go consumer is simply
nonexistent," says Davis.
Although
SSDs are currently more expensive than comparable capacity HDDs, they offer
more benefits than just their smaller form factor: they are quieter, less
vulnerable to physical shock, have less latency, and quicker access time. We're
probably going to see them become more and more prevalent in notebooks and PCs.
The
materials used to create modern computers and laptops also lend itself towards
thinner design, especially in Apple's case.