New Trends in Laptop Hardware

Hardware and software both are the integral components of computer systems. Software is taking precedence over hardware these days because hardware may not enlist as many jobs as software does currently due to the need and advances in software technology compared to hardware technology. However hardware cannot be eliminated completely. Trends keep changing according to the advancement of technology and requirement of users. In recent time, the laptop segment has seen some significant changes in hardware section. Let's see what are the new trends in laptop hardware.

CD drives are no longer an essential equipment for PC laptops and neither the seventeen inch laptop screens. An average user does not need as many programs that comes with most computers, so some companies such as Asus' EeePc product is coming with reasonably priced products. Network attached storage devices will be a new advancement that would permit to store large media files that can be wirelessly transferred onto external hard drives. Most PC companies are slicing costs and trying to lure new ethnic groups into computer owners.

Storage: The storage capacity of hard drives have been continuously increasing, and the likes of terabyte notebooks have already been launched. The enlarge capacity has been taken with both hands by the consumers but it still isn't the most exciting trend in notebook hard drives. Shift from HDDs to SSDs, means from hard disk drives to solid state drives, have been the most significant development. A SSD lacks the moving parts as found in traditional hard drive, which makes it excellently fast, have a longer lifetime, and run much cooler. However the solid state drives are quite costly. A 2.5-inch 16GB SATA SSD hard drive costs around $450, while a comparable 2.5-inch 250GB SATA traditional HDD costs $140. In other way, you would have to pay $28/GB for SSD and $0.56/GB for traditional HDD.

Optical Drives: The intense competition between Blu-ray and HD-DVD might seem to be ended. After the announcement of Warner Bros to go with Blue-ray camp, the sale of Blu-ray players has left HD-DVD units far behind.

Screen: Color depth and higher resolution has been the on the top priority in the evolution of laptop screens. OLED displays on laptops is the most exciting trend that we would see in recent future. Sony recently showed off many OLED monitors. Though the cost is gigantic ($2,500), but the promising fact is that Sony is able to build and sell such a brightly lit screen with an amazing contrast (1,000,000:1). The cost is likely to come down to realistic levels in future, and we may one day see such kind of display in our notebook.