IDG Contributor Network: HP design innovation on PCs and printers will spread to homes and offices
[Disclosure: HP is a client of the author.]
My first portable PC (you’d never call it a laptop), was made by Panasonic. It cost something like $7K in today’s dollars (allowing for inflation), weighed 35 pounds and included a thermal printer. I also work from home so unlike my office-oriented peers, part of what I think about when I equip or update my home office is the printer — even though it’s no longer integrated with my laptop (thankfully).
For much of my career, laptop design has largely been driven by one of two factors. Corporate buyers who had no taste (and resulted in a long period of time when hardware design could best be described as butt-ugly), or Apple, who tended to put form over function resulting in pretty but often unreliable or fragile products. (My first Apple laptop fell off a chair onto carpet and broke both hinges on its screen, something I’d never seen happen before or since.)