Over the last week, without consciously deciding to do so, I’ve been leaving my laptop at the office. This happened one Friday when I was going away immediately after work and didn’t want to carry it around all weekend. But it’s stayed there and I feel liberated.
I’ve even worked from home a few days without it. I have an iMac at home which can access all my email, contacts and documents through our online email and document management system.
I have an iPhone so I can pick up email and work the web on the move.
And when I am in the office, my laptop is there. And it might as well be a desktop. Is the need for laptops declining? I’m not saying we don’t need them, I can’t exactly run a client presentation from an iPhone (yet…) – but the automatic assumption that every employee needs one doesn’t necessarily hold true, and could save some money (until to take into account the cost of equipping everyone with an iPhone of course…) 
August 26th, 2008 at 3:51 am
I think there’s still the problem that there might not be a spare desktop machine everywhere you go, and if there is it might not have very good hardware, and even if it does, even with all the online tools available, you still might need to install the custom software and settings you use. Until that information can follow you around better, I think I’ll still need to take my laptop with me wherever I need to work.
August 28th, 2008 at 8:20 am
True – I am still waiting for that universal desktop to follow me wherever I log in. I think that some people will always require laptops, my experience the other week just cause me to pause and ask whether it really is as many people as we think!