Let us embark upon a journey in which we will investigate the progression of computers in the next couple of decades. Some of this stuff may or may not come to pass, but at the very least, it's fun to speculate and imagine. Some of what I'll say may be obvious and on the tip of your tongue. Some of it you might have not heard about, or have forgotten about. This mainly just serves to bring together things which are totally possible and just might combine in interesting ways. This first part will focus on the changes which I'm hoping and thinking will take place in the market of portable computers, which are becoming increasingly popular (as if I needed to point this out) now that they can have high-capacity drives and fairly high-end hardware while still having several hours of battery life.

The first change will involve capacitance-based touch or multi-touch screens. These already exist in two well-known consumer electronics, the Nintendo DS and iPhone. As technologies and production quantities improve, prices will go down, and it will become feasible to make laptops with touch screens (not the same as tablet screens, which require not just a stylus, but an expensive specialized pressure-sensitive one). Now, this may not sound like a particularly useful change, given that a laptop has a touch pad and other inputs--this will change, however. Allow me to explain.

Consider what would happen if you took a laptop, severed the display from the rest of the unit, added a battery to the display, and established a wireless connection between the display and the laptop base. If you had a regular screen, you'd basically just have a motion picture frame that you could set up and watch things on--say, watching a movie in bed without the rest of the heat-producing laptop. That's interesting, but not terribly practical--in order to do something as simple as pausing a song, you'd have to either have keys around the display for it (ugly) or a wireless keyboard or remote (awkward). If your laptop has a touch screen and the possibility for a virtual keyboard and can send your input back to the laptop base, you can effectively navigate around your computer, even do some simple typing, with just this remote screen.

This brings up two important questions: How is this possible, and why is this desirable?

First, about how this could be accomplished. It's obvious that sending the input from the screen to the computer is no large feat--you can already get Bluetooth keyboards, mice and tablets which do the same thing. Sending the video output from the computer to the display is a bit more of a challenge, if only because of the sheer quantity of data: my laptop display, which isn't particularly large, is 1280 pixels wide, 800 pixels tall, and each pixel takes 3 bytes (24 bits) to determine its color--this happens 60 times per second, and if you multiply those numbers together, you get ~185 MB/sec, or in networking numbers, you need a ~1.475 Gbit connection to maintain the video signal. Looking at wireless data transfer rates, this is pretty intimidating--802.11b offered 11 Mbit/sec, 802.11g offers 54 Mbit/sec, and 802.11n, when it's finalized 10 months from now, will offer 248 Mbit/sec. That's theoretical max though, typical transfer rates are 4.3, 19, and 74 Mbit/sec from b, g and n respectively. Even if we see an idealized 5-fold increase in bandwidth every 4 years (in this case, more like a 4-fold increase every 4.5 years), we'll need another 7.6 years for the typical bandwidth to be acceptable, and I have no doubts that the resolution, refresh rate, and color accuracy of displays will only increase. Clearly, we need something different.

In steps WHDI, Wireless High-definition Interface. This new technology is intended to replace wires for sending high definition video data, and can achieve transfers of up to 3 GB/sec, which is more than 15 times more than my display would need. Let's try to be forward-looking, though (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't know what a pixel is). Let's assume that people don't want to carry around displays larger than 17 inch widescreen, for weight and size considerations. Barring the developments of wireless power and/or screen projection into 3D space, the physical dimensions of a display have a floor set by the display frame and battery, which can't be avoided. A 17-inch widescreen display has a width of 14.818 inches and a height of 8.335 inches. If we assume that people want higher quality displays, say 300 DPI (compared to a common display DPI of 80-100, so you get more than 9 individual pixels in the same area of space), this multiplies out to the impressive resolution of 4445x2500. Call me short-sighted if you will, but barring people who want to carry around TV-sized displays or have much much finer quality, this is about the maximum resolution we'll end up seeing in laptops. The human eye can't perceive much motion beyond 70-90 images per second, except in the peripheral, so let's cap our refresh rate at 100 a second. Finally we'll double color depth from 24 to 48 bits, which increases the number of displayable shades for any one color from the present 256 up to 65,536 and increases the total number of displayable colors to an astronomical 281 trillion (presently 16.7 million). All in all this increases the required display bandwidth by about 36 times, to the phenomenal 6.668 GB/sec (53.3 Gbit/sec). While this is clearly more than twice what is provided by wireless high-def, it's also taking things to such an amazing extreme--the largest display you'd like to carry around, a 9-fold increase in overall image detail on a square-inch basis, and an increase in the number of permissible colors by a factor of 16.7 million--that it's more of a "this is the highest you would want today, next year, or 15 years from now" thing. A more realistic measure would be reduced DPI of 200, refresh rate of 90 Hz and... shit, we'll keep the color depth where it is. That comes out to a transmission rate of 2.67 GB/sec (21.3 Gbit/sec) which is safely within the spec for WHDI while still offering a 50-100% improvement in color depth, pixel pitch, and refresh rate. And that 2.67 GB/sec is just the peak you need, too--if your screen is largely static, or playing a 30 fps movie, it's possible that only parts of the screen might be redrawn, or it might only have to do one out of every 2 or 3 frames.

How far along this technology is, and how well it works, I'm not entirely sure. The website for the WHDI tech does mention PCs and laptops as possible benefactors of this technology, though they discuss streaming output to your TV and not to a remote laptop screen--the potential impact probably hasn't occurred to them yet. However, let's for now assume that this technology or its successor can be employed some time in the next few years to maintain a fluid, low-latency transmission of video output from your "laptop base" to your display. Why would you want to do such a thing?

Many, many reasons. First, by removing the CPU, RAM, graphics chip, and hard drive from the battery-powered portion of the laptop, you would considerably improve battery life while decreasing size, weight, and heat output. Your laptop need not be any larger than the screen with a battery and the video receiver/input broadcasting hardware, which is certainly thinner than present laptops. Combined with the use of LED backlighting, the power draw for the mobile display would drop dramatically, improving its battery life regardless of any improvements in battery tech which we may come up with. Your laptop wouldn't be some 100-150 degree lap warmer, as the only things drawing power would be the wireless parts and the LEDs. You could take the laptop with you to places you might not've before, such as to bed to watch a movie, or working on it as you carry it from place to place. The mobile portion would also be solid-state with no moving parts, rendering it impervious to many of the damages which can affect spinning hard drive platters or fans.

Also, as long as you've got the "base" part of the laptop plugged in and physically independent from the screen, you gain some other benefits. If you just use your laptop around the home, there's no reason you can't have a standard desktop PC power the guts of your laptop. Graphics performance, processing and storage levels never before possible in a laptop due to size, weight, heat and power constraints would suddenly become entirely feasible, and cheaper too--look at how much a 250 gig drive for a laptop versus desktop costs.

Finally, consider what happens if you DO lose or break your laptop. All you have to do is get a new screen and link it to the wireless base, which is certainly cheaper than re-buying all the hardware and praying that you have a backup of your files somewhere. And if proper multi-user software is built, where one physical computer with multiple input sources and one or multiple displays can work at the same time (either on the same program, or on separate programs in virtual desktops), you could effectively provide two laptops for the price of one and a spare screen. Nice.

You probably see two problems, though. First of all, a touch screen is a nice thing, but it's not the be-all end-all of user input, especially for things like typing or playing games. Second, the device is effectively useless for truly mobile applications, such as using it on a bus, plane, or any other place that isn't your home. I'll address these two things in turn.

First, provide for more forms of input by using things such as wireless keyboards and mice. Possibly make the keyboard have an attachment for displays, so you can use it like a standard laptop now, rather than having to hold the display. You still get the benefits of power, weight, heat, and some size savings.

Second, don't just rely on anchored desktop parts. If you never plan on leaving your home with your laptop, then fine, use cheaper, higher-performance desktop parts which require 120/240 volt inputs. But if you plan on using your laptop on the go, you make the base mobile, as it was before. Factoring in the ever-improving performance-per-watt ratio, hybrid or solid state hard drives, and the possibility for the disappearance of optical drives just as floppy drives once vanished, people should be able to make mobile computing platforms better than ever, without the size constraints of the display or keyboard. You could have something the size of a laptop base, or less wide but taller such as the Mac Mini, or an as-of-yet unimagined form factor. And everything is wireless, so you can carry the functional part of the laptop separate from the rest, in a backpack or computer bag or pocket if it becomes small enough. Take out and use what you need, leave the rest in your bag. If you plan on being both mobile and doing things around the home, synchronization of devices and data comes into play. You set up your laptop to sync data, programs and settings with your desktop as the changes take place, so when you go on the move, you can still have your most important files and programs. When the two units are together again on a fast network, they re-sync and merge the changes intelligently (or retain both of the files and harass you to pick which one you want to keep, if they're different). Which computational hardware you're actually using depends on which is faster. Or, if hardware and software develop in the right way, you'll be able to combine their assets and have the laptop help the desktop out, running some of its tasks to speed up performance.

This, I think, is pretty much the best solution we can look forward to without making drastic changes from our current tech direction. You can still use your laptop at home or on the go with a keyboard and mouse if you want, but if you'd like you can tuck away the functional hardware and just interact with the screen, mouse 'n keyboard... supplement or replace the hardware with desktop parts, and most importantly, use the computer in a more intuitive manner--point and click everywhere, with the faster pointing skills of your fingers. Throw in a mic with good speech recognition for voice commands, and you've got something which is very Star Trek-ish.

A few additional things to keep your eye on in the laptop space: fast-charge batteries, which can recharge to 90% or higher within 1-2 minutes of being plugged in--never anchor yourself to the wall for an hour just to get a full charge for your next unplugged excursion! Also, holographic discs or chips, which offer a sick amount of storage and also don't have to spin the disc--important if you need physical, removable media for transporting a lot of data but you don't want to take up a lot of space with loud, risky spinning objects in your mobile devices.

Also within this time frame look for file servers to become more popular. Microsoft has hit something which I think is spot-on--using file servers to do automated backups and distribution of files to your computers. If you can get them to synchronize nicely with your laptop it's even more appealing, given the risk of damage or theft inherent with taking your expensive toy on the road and in public. Having the bulk of your files, and backups of past states of your computers, on remote systems will increasingly become the norm, until and possibly after such time that you can fit all of your files into a cheap solid-state drive in your mobile devices. Then all you need are processing servers--basically just distributing your computing workload to any available hardware, should the performance gains from the added processing elements outweigh the latency and bandwidth restrictions of the network.

So what do we have at the end of this first phase of computer transformation? Mobile touchscreens which provide a front-end to your computer, be it in your backpack while on the go or basement while checking your morning email. And as long as you have a distributed computing system like that, why not standardize it with desktops and TVs too? Hook your cable (or video-on-demand) into your computer and control and play back the content on any display in the house, including large wall-mounted ones or projectors. So long as the displays can receive video and send back any input you might provide via touch screen, mouse, keyboard, remote, microphone or anything else, they can provide a gateway to your applications, files, and games from anywhere in the house.

Next phase: extending outwards from the house. Expect to hear about this in the following days.