dawn of the sofa surfers

If an iPod was the size of a room and cost over £1Million then they probably would not sell all that many.

I have used laptop computers for years. However combining a laptop with unmetered, always on wifi, so that you have wire free internet connectivity, and an internet that actually has compelling content, puts all the balls in the right place. Sitting on a sofa browsing the internet suddenly adds a whole new dimension to entertainment that was not available before.

Personally I do a bit of browsing, a bit of keeping up with my RSS feeds, a bit of exploring Google suggested blog articles, a bit of watching TED talks. I don't really know what the rest of my family does, but they do manage to find content that interests and engages them.

Being able to sit on your own sofa with a laptop is a different experience from sitting at a desk, however ergonomic your chair is. You sit on a sofa when you want to relax, you might read a book, browse a magazine, chat with friends, watch TV. It is time for yourself, when you are not some corporate drone chasing deadlines.

I recently bought a second laptop, one of the new aluminium Apple Macintosh laptops from the Apple Refurb store. There is just something about the design of the unibody laptops, suddenly everyone in the house wants one. It is a pleasure to handle, it is lovely to touch and stroke, it has a pleasing heft, the trackpad is much more intuitive and easy to use, the screen is a thing of beauty. It is almost as if they set out to create a magazine sized piece of aluminium jewelery. In the past I might spend the evening sitting on the sofa with the one and only family laptop sofa surfing. Now that we have two, I can be sitting on the sofa, with my wife, while we both sofa surf. Similarly anyone else in the family, if they get onto the laptop can spend their time sofa surfing.

It is not a new observation, but I believe that increasingly tv is a background to other more engaging and personalised content that we are browsing on laptops. So the television might be on, with four people in the room, but a couple of them are also browsing the internet, while one of them is reading, and someone else is flicking through a magazine, and all the time they are engaging in low level chit chat whenever one of them comes across something the others might like, so suddenly they are all watching a Youtube video of an acapella version of poker face.

Enjoy the future!