Too big to handle?

So, I had dinner with a close friend of mine a few weeks ago. The conversation was lengthy, heartfelt, and inevitably irreverent, even if the food was nothing special. Anyway, the conversation eventually turned to mobile phones and how lucky we’d been to experience them first taking hold in our last years of school. This gave me the chance to finally deliver a joke that I’d been holding on to for nearly twenty years, namely that those first phones were the only devices where men competed to see who had the smallest. Borderline puerile humour aside, that joke also got me thinking. Or was that the beer? Anyway, for most of the time that I’ve owned laptops or tablets, I’ve tended to gravitate toward the more compact ones on the market. My netbook, the Aspire One 110L from Acer, the EeePad Slider from Asus, my 11” MacBook Air, or even more recent devices such as the Microsoft Surface Go 2 or the 6th Generation iPad mini have all been on the smaller side of the market. Granted, this was partially due to financial constraints on my part, even my MacBook Air was primarily the result of me stacking a number of Apple employee discounts, but even so, I’ve always found these smaller devices to be more convenient. They’re much easier to chuck in a bag, use on small coffee house tables or seat-back tray tables, and can easily fit in a backpack alongside your work laptop when larger devices just can’t.

While in retrospect, my Acer Aspire One with its 8.9” display was probably a little too cramped, even by 2009 standards. Its portability was pretty much unparalleled though.

The ASUS EeePad Slider with its 10” display was still very much on the compact side.

As far as I’m concerned, the 11” MacBook Air was always the perfect compromise between portability and performance,

So, what happened to them? Because if I look at the current laptop market, there’s nary a trace of these compact devices to be found. While putting together the notes for this blog post, I decided to check the website of our local electronics retailers here in Ireland, that means chiefly Currys, Harvey Norman, or DID. And out of the many dozens of laptop models they had in stock, ranging in performance from “calculator with delusions of grandeur” to “ready to simulate entire universes”, only seven had a screen size of 11” and ten had a screen size of 12”. Even 13” models were in the minority, with fifty-four 13” models available. The number of 14” laptops? 279! Even Apple has betrayed the smaller size range, with the 11” MacBook Air being quietly dropped all the years back in 2015, and the company completing its betrayal in early 2024 when it killed off the wedge form factor that had long distinguished the MacBook Air from its boxier MacBook Pro counterparts.

When did it become acceptable to consider 13” machines like the MacBook Pro as “compact”?

And it’s not just laptops. A similar inflation has taken place among tablets. When Apple effectively inaugurated the modern tablet era with the introduction of the first generation of iPad in 2011, it, the first wave of competitors/clones all had a screen size of around 9.7”, with some being slightly larger and some a little smaller. However, since then, the iPad range has ballooned in size as well, with the largest iPad Pro model clocking in at 12.9”. That’s nearly the size of a MacBook Pro screen, with the price tag to match, and from my perspective far too large for a tablet, which is still generally a handheld device. And it’s not just Apple. The situation is similar in the Android world, with some tablets from the likes of Lenovo or Samsung sporting some absolutely gargantuan dimensions for a tablet.

Granted, the iPad mini is deliberately designed as a compact device, but even so, devices like it…

…or Microsoft’s Surface Go series are becoming a rare breed.

It’s gotten to the point where even 11” devices like the iPad Air, are trending towards the smaller end of tablets.

For reference, 11” is the size of my first MacBook Air!

So, what gives? What is behind this ever-increasing size of devices. I think it’s safe to say that there are multiple answers to this particular question, and simply showing off by having the biggest baddest machine around is certainly part of it, call it SUV syndrome if you will. However, beyond fragile gamer egos, there are a number of, if not good, then at least understandable reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just a few of those.

The first one has to be interface size. I recently decided to head down memory lane and re-read some of the blog posts I’d written all the way back in 2009 and 2010 about my Aspire One 110L, that very first computer I bought with my own money. It was a lovely little machine and I still have fond memories of it. But there’s no getting around the fact that the 8.9” screen did not offer a lot of “real estate” for apps to work with, even by 2009 standards. Add to that the ongoing pandemic of skeuomorphism that at that time seemed to have infested every single part of the tech landscape, and the device soon felt cramped. And while modern day interfaces are thankfully much cleaner and less expansive than those of yesteryear, the basic fact remains that small displays don’t give you a lot of area to work with. As good as the minimalist interfaces of the likes of Word or Notion can be, I’m writing this on an iPad Air with Notion & Word in split screen mode, at a certain point, you simply won’t be able to avoid having to hide icons or put them behind multiple cascading menus. This is something that l’ve been dealing with myself, as my job regularly requires me to handle large datasets in anything ranging from Excel to Salesforce to tools like PowerBI, and even the 14” screen on my work laptop is often simply too small for that kind of content.

Then there’s the change of usage patterns over the last ten years, in particular the massive increase in streaming media consumption. Granted, YouTube already existed ten or fifteen years ago, but it was far from the juggernaut it is today, and platforms such as Netflix, Nebula, PrimeTV and others either flat-out didn’t exist or were just getting started. Now, granted, you can watch videos even on a smartphone or a device like the iPod touch, I’ve done both myself. But I’ll be honest with you, as excellent as the screen on my phone is, the viewing experience just isn’t the same, which is why my numerous iPads were often my first choice for YouTube and others. And that’s not just me, many people are now using their laptops or tablets as their primary devices for media consumption, with quite a few not even having a TV anymore, so a bigger screen is a definite advantage in that field. The same goes for gaming, something that laptops originally weren’t really suited for. However, as computers have become more powerful, their graphics performance has similarly increased, to the point where gaming laptops are very much a thing. And given how fast paced and confusing some modern games can get, a large, high quality screen just simply makes sense.

This increase in performance also brings with it another increase, and that’s in battery size. While battery technology has increased significantly over recent years and indeed decades, there’s still a certain maximum energy density that’s possible, even with modern battery technology. As a consequence, the increase in performance of modern mobile devices has also necessitated an increased physical size for their batteries in order to still provide a decent level of endurance away from a power outlet. This has only been exacerbated by ever-increasing demands for longer battery life, such as Apple’s endless claims of “all-day battery life”. It’s not just Apple who’s always trumpeting this by the way, they’re just at the top of my mind because I used to work for them. Just head over to iFixit.com or similar websites and check out any of their tear-downs. You’ll see that the space created by ever smaller CPUs and SOCs, by eliminating optical drives or replacing old-fashioned spinning hard drives with solid state storage has almost always been filled with additional battery cells.

With all that being said, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I completely abhor this trend of device getting bigger and bigger all the time, but that’s actually not the case. I really appreciate having a large screen to spread out on. I mentioned my work laptop earlier, but even in my private life, I currently own a 13” MacBook Pro and I intend to get at least a 13” laptop again once I can manage that financially. Not to mention that I’m currently writing this on an iPad Air which, in its current iteration, sports a 10.9” screen that is very close to that of my beloved MacBook Air. As much as I’d loved my iPad mini when I got it two years ago, the small screen was beginning to be an issue even before I clumsily managed to drop a mug on the screen. For someone who likes writing, like yours truly, an 11” screen is really the ideal size in my eyes. And yes, a review of that iPad Air is in the works already.

Still, I wonder how much longer devices in this size range will be around. It looks like even the iPad Air is due a size bump, if the reports on the likes of MacRumors or 9to5Mac are to be believed. And even Chromebooks seem to be leaving small footprints behind, which is a shame if you ask me. There’s just something about a device that can fits even into a small bag and that you can take anywhere without worrying about weight or bulk. For all their limitations, and there were many, the netbooks of the late 2000s were supremely portable and I for one wouldn’t mind a step back in device sizes. Bigger isn’t always better.

Oh, and bring back some bright device colours while you’re at it!