Mobile Is Eating Desktop

In my last week's post on Google's Material Design and how it is the jewel crown of the mobile first strategy, I touched on the fact the laptop / desktop PC is becoming less and less productive (relatively to mobile). Looking for flights I first use Experia on my phone and sometimes I even do not bother to go to the desktop version. Same for browsing news, especially after the browser based Google Reader is gone now. Not to mention calendars, maps and navigation and continuously growing number of other mobile services.

It seems humanity has only limited resources that can be allocated to driving the innovation and they all have gone to mobile. Here is the story that proves my point.

I upgraded my desktop experience to 4k (Ultra-HDMI) displays. In my vacation home, in the office and in my winter apartment. Three 4k monitors from three different vendors (Samsung, Iiyama and Philips). Yes I love to experiment. They are all connected to my Lenovo OneLink docks (the greatest dock form factor ever!) via DisplayPort cables and after a little tuning on the software side, the Lenovo laptop plays with all of them very nicely via the single data/power OneLink cable. What is worth noting, each of the aforementioned displays is roughly half the price of my old Apple Cinema display I had used before, so they are really good value for money! Moving from the Apple Cinema to 4k has definitely been an upgrade in terms of the screen real estate and the resolution. But the user experience with all three monitors is far from ideal, because of one thing: clumsy controls. One great and underestimated feature of the Apple Cinema Display have been the brightness controls directly on the keyboard. The controls on the displays are simply unusable. They are touch-type and the sensitivity is not calibrated properly. I don't know if I should press harder or softer. There is no feedback whatsoever, but there is a significant lag with the actual response. On a $500 display they skimped probably $2 to make the controls usable. What is even more weird, the displays have USB hubs, so why do not make them controllable via the USB interface from the host PC? And what is really symptomatic, the story repeats across the board, none of the three leading display vendors has paid attention to the UX at all! This should be even called negligence, as all laptops today control display brightness via soft keys, so why a lapto connected to an external, high-end display should not use the same keys to control its brightness too?

Sadly, it seems the laptop / desktop space is abandoned by innovators. Apple laptops do not fold out and are not touch enabled. Windows laptops lack good modern OS support (sorry, Windows 8/8.1 is just a thin shell on top of the good/old XP) and good peripherals (pointing to my 4k display story). The gold rush is in the mobile space and it is accelerating at a phenomenal pace, leaving the desktops behind.