My three HP laptops I have serve as latter-day museum pieces of how technology has progressed. I am not trying to slag Hewlett-Packard. I like their printers, and despite their reputation, I also like their laptops. Today, I am mentioning them as a microcosm of how technology has progressed. What can be said about HP can be said across the industry. HP is nothing special in this regard. These are all full laptops with attached keyboards. They all have rotating displays with a webcam, onboard stereo mikes, stereo speakers, a touchscreen and a mousepad. Also, it is fair to say all of these laptops were purchased used (saving nearly a thousand dollars apiece off the prices when new), but all have been fully functional from the first day, and are still functional.

As you read the captions on each successive illustration going from top to bottom, what I don’t mention is that, of course, video is more advanced; and the last laptop, the Elitebook is, in my experience, the first to offer an internal SSD out of the box. The Elitebook also has nowhere near the heat problems suffered by my TX2.

But these advances are small compared to the greatest advance the progression of these laptops show: the elimination of major features, and the marketing effort on the part of computer companies that this is a “good thing”. By the time we get to the Elitebook, we no longer have a DVD drive, and have eliminated half of our USB ports. Neither of the two USB ports that remain are USB3, either. Not mentioned in the captions, are the elimination of the spare headphone jack, and the microphone jack. The combination mike/headphone jack on the Elitebook won’t support actual microphones, supporting instead, perhaps, mikes built into the headset. My headset uses a USB connection, and wouldn’t require an eighth-inch jack connection. But microphone support is terrible, making the built-in mikes your only good option.

One thing (out of many other reasons) that motivated me not to get rid of my two older laptops is the one reason anyone would buy a convertible tablet in the first place: apart from using the screen for direct windows navigation, you can also write documents in your own handwriting, or make drawings freehand on the tablet screen. I do make use of this feature, and found to my horror that the Elitebook has really terrible support of freehand writing and drawing. The other two actually have pretty good support, and it was a great disappointment to see this feature lacking in the Elitebook despite a faster CPU and graphics processor. Apart from not having a stylus, the craggy way it renders drawings of straight lines when you do use a stylus – and even if you use a ruler – has been well documented in many other blogs and video reviews.

But even with the HP EliteBook, Apple and Google have gone even further over the deep end with elimination of features, with consumers willing to pay more for equipment that can do less. It is a marketer’s wet dream, made manifest in reality. Who needs a keyboard at all, or any external connectors? Use Bluetooth for all your peripherals (nowadays, the keyboard is a peripheral), and “the cloud” as your external hard drive. And still, these pieces of crippled hardware are so popular, they almost sell themselves. Having only bluetooth restricts flexibility, since a peripheral that doesn’t use bluetooth, such as a USB drive, is no longer an option for owners of these devices. To store, I would only have “the cloud”, and I would have to hope I would have free internet access everywhere I go in order to access my data. It is quite possible that users who rely on cloud storage are paying monthly for their internet connection, and paying monthly again for “cloud” storage. Of course Apple, Google and Microsoft are happy to provide cloud services so you can store as much data as possible, and to autosave your documents in the cloud to maximize your use of their cloud services.