Amid the new COVID-19 ‘normal,’ the laptop and smartphone need to merge
Disclosure: Most of the vendors mentioned are clients of the author.
When the laptop was conceived, the tech industry was attempting to address the needs of a mobile workforce. These workers often had to travel to remote locations and needed to use familiar hardware at job sites, in hotels, in conference rooms, and other places like coffee shops.
The new normal we now live in has people mostly working from home, travel has been massively curtailed, and interactions are virtual or communications-based. The priority now is less about mobility and more about staying connected – not only to work but to what is going on around them. Attention is often split between work and meetings and watching their kids, and unreliable networks sometimes gate interactions. Their primary communications device, the smartphone, wasn't designed for this new normal.