Is not even owning a laptop the new norm for post-college GenZ?
Thinking about it, I realized that, other than college papers, most normal people never type anything at length, and for shorter typing like quick DMs, your touchscreen iPhone is perfectly fine. And most professionals need a computer for work but your job gives that to you. And in this context, doing 100% of your personal computing, internet surfing etc on your iPhone so you don’t even need a laptop makes sense and this the assertion that most don’t have one or an interest in getting one reasonable.
Have you all seen this pattern as well?
While my analysis above makes sense so I can believe the pattern could be true… on the emotional level, I’m still shocked and a touch saddened by it. 20 years ago, I would have predicted that having a computer would be an essential 20 years in the future. And it makes me (at 47) feel old for something I never thought would make me feel old: always taking my beloved Macbook with me!
PS: minor clarification: I put “post-college” in the title. I don’t mean to emphasize “at the moment when you are 22 and graduate college”; rather I mean, just people in their 20s now - with the exception of those in college because presumably you still need a laptop in college.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] threadYeah, more and more people no longer need one, but having some sort of bigger screen helps a lot, even in reading or having multiple things open at once. I'm GenZ, and I can't imagine not having a bigger screen at home, or a laptop if I'm about to do anything more than read DMs.
TBH This says more about how clunky and annoying the desktop OS is. Do most people care about 80% of what it does? Especially when I just want to edit some docs, browse the web, and use a few apps? What's the argument for having a laptop?
Nice keyboard for typing.
> Do most people care about 80% of what it does? Especially when I just want to edit some docs, browse the web, and use a few apps?
ChromeOS provides that minimal experience.
Most of us have laptops for work only. We usually have conversations about ditching our laptops because we often associate it with the stress of our jobs. Being on a computer for me is almost the same as working, so if I can get away from my laptop I will do it.
Phones on the other hand are more associated with, well, everything else. Social contact, convenience, leisure (music, books) etc.
After I finished my master's the first thing I did was ditch my laptop and only used a smartphone for more than a year. Then I got a job with online marketing and had to get a laptop again because typing and having multiple tabs open were more convenient.
Take all of this as anecdote, however -- this is just me and my social circle. Where I live I know many GenZ who don't even have PCs (some don't even know how to use them proficiently). I however know a few GenZ who are almost PC addicts (gaming, hacking etc).
It’s a whole new world out there…
While it was possible to do college with no smartphone, it was painful, and so I think that students who realized that they were mandatory really just preferred to simplify, less to recharge, less weight, less theft.
Other instances included special apps for the Student Life folks, and QR codes on practically every official poster around campus.
As I say, I was able to get by without a phone and only a WiFi tablet, but sometimes I felt like a second-class citizen without a phone. I did use a notebook for classwork, but I rarely ever took the notebook on campus, just to experiment with the settings. I typically made use of the lab computers instead.
As for notebooks, yes, they are more useful for schoolwork and research, but again, the student terminals were ubiquitous in labs, libraries, and coffeehouses alike, and in the classroom for e.g. Group Communication, who needs a notebook for that? We were actually encouraged to write journals in a paper notebook, we'd turn them in and be graded by the instructor. He didn't really make a provision for electronic submissions at that point. So students would only bring their phones.
Theft is rampant and endemic on every college campus. You do not want to bring big-ticket items if you can avoid it. Therefore, any student who did not absolutely need a full-blown computer would not even put it in backpack. Students brought only phones to class; easy to pocket and easy to keep track of. It was easy enough to have a full-fledged computer at home that you would use for schoolwork and research, and most of us found it unnecessary to bring such a thing to a classroom. If we needed a computer during class, then they were already sitting on the desk in the classroom, and we'd need to sort of shove it out of the way to put our notebook down, and the WiFi was inferior to the wired GbEthernet connection on the lab computer, which had all necessary software installed, so why bother at that point?
There was a kid in our PC/Windows class who brought in a fantastic gamer PC notebook. It was ostentatious, had lots of shiny LED effets, and was big and heavy, especially its custom power brick. I sort of chuckled at that expense he made because it did not make a lot of student sense. It was not a few weeks before he was embroiled in an RMA because the power brick had indeed malfunctioned, and he'd had his heart set on using the personal machine instead of the lab machines.
I have an iPad for at home technology use.
However, If you're swiping over text, pressing, long-pressing to get prompts to copy/paste as on a mobile or tablet, you might never encounter these things or not enough for these operations to be automatic.
Kids today seem to easily get confused if something doesn't just work, seem to rely more on voice commands to do things, and get easily confused by context menus and other desktop-UI elements not common on touch devices. They're also awful typists.
None of the teens in my family have a computer, nor do they want one. They have their phones and tablets, but they don't see any need for a computer. Again, I contrast this with my generation where everyone wanted a computer for MSN Messenger and MySpace.
For me a laptop is my "default" device – 99% of stuff I do I'll want to do on my laptop. Emails, web browsing, even Signal / WhatsApp I'll connect to my laptop because I find it quicker and easier to type. I almost never use my iPad unless on holiday. I think kids today are the opposite – they see phones and tablets as their default device for all that stuff and tend to see laptops and desktops as just work machines for word processing, etc..