I’ve been thinking about mobile computing even more than usual lately. For the past few years, and especially the last six months, I’ve found myself using my computer and all my digital content outside of my home more than ever before. For a period of time I was working partly from coffee shops and a small office at a coworking space I rented. Then, when I had my kidney transplant, I found myself living in the hospital for around four weeks, and then staying in a nearby hotel for two weeks. Then, for about a month or so after that, I was living part-time with my parents so my semi-retired mother could be an around-the-clock caregiver while my wife worked each day. And now, twelve hours per week, I find myself confined to a dialysis chair.
All of that is to say, I spend a lot of time behind my laptop.
The biggest source of frustration is, without question, power. Under typical use of web browsing and watching videos, I can squeak out almost four hours of use before the battery drains down to zero. I am constantly fighting with power. While in the hospital, there were times when I wasn’t near an outlet, or didn’t have anyone in the room with me who could help me connect to a power source. I have a large Anker power bank, but it is heavy, and I don’t always have a way of keeping it near me.
Oh, how I yearned for one of the M-series Macs during my hospital stay, with their legendary battery life. I would have been willing to switch to one temporarily, but I’m not willing to switch to one full-time.
But now, we’re closer than ever to having all-day battery life as table stakes for laptops. Between the new ARM-based Snapdragon processors that are starting to be the default for Windows laptops, or the new extremely powerful x86 chips that Intel announced this week, it’s just a matter of time before I will be able to buy a Linux-compatible laptop that has more power than I can realistically use, that will get me through an entire day from sun-up to sun-down.
It’s not just the power use; I’m now reaching a point where everywhere I go, I can have everything I own with me. In my bag on any given day, I now carry with me every single book that I own, stored both on my laptop’s drive, as well as a Kobo ereader that provides month-long battery life and a tremendous reading experience.
Every video game I own, or have ever owned, likewise travels with me and is playable on my laptop. I keep a small 8BitDo controller (in transparent Donkey Kong 64 jungle green) that I can connect wirelessly to play everything when I don’t want to use a keyboard. Some of the larger games take more horsepower than my aging laptop with integrated graphics can handle, but the new chips I mentioned promise to be able to handle those with ease. Even if they struggle today, it’s just a short matter of time before the chips out-pace the games.
Thanks to the proliferation of large SSDs, I carry every movie and TV show from my library around with me. A tiny 4TB SSD sits in a pocket, and can be connected any time I want to watch anything. With my next laptop, I’ll just get a 4TB (or larger?) drive, and keep everything on the internal storage. And improvements in video codecs, like H.265 and AV1, mean that I can keep Blu-ray and Ultra Blu-ray quality videos with me in a much smaller space footprint than ever before.
All my music and photos also travel everywhere I go, but they have for years, so those aren’t worth writing home about as much. And of course, every document I’ve ever written, every digital project I’ve ever worked on. This might be the norm today, but it’s still worth marveling at what an achievement that is.
And as for internet? I carry around an incredibly fast wireless access point, in the form of my cell phone and its built-in hotspot, everywhere I go.
That’s not to even mention my new home internet. In my teenage years, I seriously contemplated moving to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It wasn’t because I had visited before and loved the area (I would later visit in my late 20s, and did end up really enjoying myself), but rather because they were installing gigabit fiber, and I couldn’t imagine what life would be like with an internet connection that fast.
Turns out I didn’t have to move after all; gigabit fiber now runs directly to my house, and the speeds are almost life changing.
I’m amazed by the future. I carry a messenger bag, and in it, nearly every “possession” I own or care about accompanies me. I can’t wait to update this blog post in a year or two, removing the “almost” from the title. I’ll be able to say I have all-day battery life, can play every single game I want, and keep it all on a tiny drive built-in to my computer. But even today, I really am almost there, and it will never not feel like magic to me.