Now there's another thing on Earth that be can seen from space: UK lappy sales in pandemic-struck 2020

The one-device-per-person trend caused by the pandemic fuelled a boom in notebook sales across Britain in Q4 that resulted in a near year-on-year doubling of shipment growth. According to sales data from IDC, almost 4 million PCs were sold in the three months ended 31 December, a jump of 58.5 per cent. Desktops accounted for …

[Dave 126]

> demand is forecast to outstrip supply with a relative scarcity of panels due to remain a problem until midsummer.

[Assuming article means display panels] Samsung Dispay is finally getting around to making OLED laptop panels for OEMs. I don't know if this is related to any shortage of conventional laptop panels, or if Samsung has seen that there is a market for pricier laptops. Or maybe Samsung Display have improved their yields of bigger OLED panels.

There's also correlation with rumours of Apple bringing Mini LED displays ( effectively an evolution of the 'local dimming' approach, using thousands of LEDs behind an LCD filter to the extent that it approaches the contrast of OLED but with greater brightness. Further in the future, 'Micro LED' is commonly taken to mean one LED for each RGB LCD pixel, and it could be a contender) to MacBooks soon.

[Dave 126]

[Context: my Dell laptop is about ten years old but still largely for for purpose. However, I've never calibrated the colour of its LCD display. When preparing point of sale artwork to be sent off to be printed, I first check it on my Samsung Galaxy, the office printer, and my colleague's MacBook. The OLED Galaxy phone, MacBook and and printer agree each other and, I've found, with the finished promotional material the printers produce. Close enough for our purposes.]

[Snake]

Re: no colour calibration

You are very lucky then, or did you tweak the colours after your very through testing? I am running a completely colour-calibrated workflow, including my cameras, and still require auxiliary testing to confirm results on a variety of devices; in CMYK offsite professional printing I find calibration an absolute necessity in order to properly deal with rich vs pure black.

[Dave 126]

Re: no colour calibration

@Snake

My firm's marketing and Point of Sale material doesn't require *excellent* colour accuracy, just *good* colour accuracy. We don't tend to use, for example, pictures of people where perhaps strange skin tones would be noticed.

I know enough to know what I don't know, and that I would have some learning to do before working in a different sector such as, art, fashion or food photography.

It's like a carpenter might work in mm, but respects the metal worker working in micro metres.

Regards

[Dave 126]

Re: no colour calibration

Actually, where I've really noticed colour accuracy recently is when attempting to buy clothes from the internet (physical shops not being open for much of the past year).

I kept wishing that sellers on eBay would photograph their wares against a standard swatch card (since that seems a more realistic approach than hoping the seller calibrates their lighting, camera, work flow etc). As it is, it hopeless trying to judge the colour of something on eBay et al.

[0laf]

Whomever in marketing for laptop manufacturers could do with a kick in the nuts.

It's far too hard to get a device for reasonable money that has all the necessary items.

It seems all you can get are overpowered CPUs, alcking RAM and with undersized SSDs unless you pay a fortune. Even then generally you get an even more overpowered CPU with enough RAM but a miserly amount of disk space.

Screens are feckin tiny too, who actually want to spend a day at some working on a 12 or 13" screen. Not everyone has space for external monitors and keyboards.

It might be nice to have an actual selection of hardware in the market but they all seem make to the same specs by the looks of things.

[Version 1.0]

Most of the problems are seen with the operating systems, designed for large desktop screens. The older laptops with small screens worked fine with the older operating systems - my first laptop ran MSDOS and was easy to use. Sure I couldn't do half the stuff I need to today but it did the job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention most laptops under £1000 have 45% NTSC colour gamut which is appalling, even for just browsing the web.

[naive]

You couldn't be more right. There is a total lack of choice in affordable laptops, they are all the same, a large ercentage is sold with non future proof 8GB, sometimes even non upgradeble soldered on stuff, horrible keyboards and stingy drive sizes.

It probably won't change, due to non existing standards, laptops are still a heaven of proprietary design for manufacturers who easily get away with punch in the face after sales support.

Graphics performance is also lagging, the "M" designation in the graphics card type implies it has 30%-50% less performance when compared to the desktop variant.

[Arthur the cat]

The one-device-per-person trend

Counts …

Hmm, I might be overdoing it a bit.

[doublelayer]

Re: The one-device-per-person trend

I take hardware from people who want it disposed of. That which is too old to be useful, even with a lightweight Linux on it gets sent to recyclers. That which is modern but they didn't want it gets resold. That which is older but functional gets donated. That which doesn't fall into those categories, usually it didn't sell and the people I donate to didn't want it stays here and I end up using it. I'm far over my allocation of devices. For example, the laptop whose battery doesn't work and isn't replaceable, but as a desktop it works fine has been on my desk for at least two years now. I wonder when I'll stop collecting things like that.

[katrinab]

Re: The one-device-per-person trend

Same here:

16" Coffee Lake Refresh MacBook Pro

13" Core 2 Duo hackintosh MacBook Pro (hackintosh because anything later than High Sierra isn't officially supported)

Skylake i5 desktop

2 x Ivy Bridge i7 desktops

iPad Air 4

iPad Air 2

iPhone 8+

iPhone 6+

iPhone SE1

[TimMaher]

Re: The one-device-per-person trend

...and that is just your Apple kit.

[katrinab]

Re: The one-device-per-person trend

The 3 desktops are not Apple kit. They run Windows 10 (the i5) and FreeBSD (the 2 i7s)

[Snake]

Laptops

I mentioned this before in the El Reg forums: desktop equipment gets the media product hype but laptops get the actual, accountable sales. This has been true for many years now yet gamers and sys admins do not wish to acknowledge it.

[Fading]

Include me in these stats...

Picked up a Lenovo Yoga slim 7 with a AMD 4500U and I am impressed with the build quality and performance of such a small slim device (doubles the 3d Mark score of my Alienware 17xr4 - admittedly a 7 year old laptop but still going strong). SWMBO was very happy with it (helped it was Orchid purple rather than the typical silver/black).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Include me in these stats...

The Lenovo Slim 7 are excellent. Superb build quality. I picked up the 4700U not cos I needed the power but because I wanted the 500GB drive. Would have liked 16GB but had to settle for 8GB. Soldered :-(

The screen is excellent with 100% sRGB and 300nits.

Only negative so far is poor webcam.

[Fading]

Re: Include me in these stats...

The drive is probably the only user upgradeable bit - and with the AMD chip the second smaller M2 slot is available to use (need a half height 2242 NVMe drive though so choice is limited).

[TonyJ]

Interesting

So, presumably this comes from a mix of people who would have traditionally used a desktop device in the office and that subset of people who believed you could do everything on a phone or tablet, but had never tried to sit and do their day job on one suddenly having to procure a new laptop for the home?

It's always been great being able to do a bit of casual work on a phone when out and about but it wasn't something I'd have ever wanted to try to do all the time.

And for me, personally, a 15" laptop is the sweet spot. Anything 17" or above is just too big and bulky to carry around (and if it's only ever sat on a desk, get a desktop and get something that is both more upgradeable for longer and gives more bang for the buck) and anything smaller just feels cramped - details on the screen are so small to make it difficult to see at a reasonable distance for typing and the keyboards are always cramped. Great to carry around, mind you.