Laptop & Disadvantages

Standardization issues

While there are accepted world standards of form factors for all the peripherals and add-in PC cards used in the desktop computers, there are still no firm worldwide standards relating to today's laptops' form factors internally, such as supply of electric voltage, motherboard layouts, internal adapters used in connecting the hard disk, optical drive, LCD cable, keyboard and floppy drive to the main board. Most affected by this are users uneducated in the relevant fields, especially if they attempt to connect their laptops with incompatible hardware or power adapters.

Laptops are more complex than simple-to-use consumer electronics. A large number of different parts with similar functions may cause some difficulties to repair technicians, as they have to familiarize themselves with different sets of hardware, but this is part of the job in a specialized trade.

Compatibility issues

Any current compatibility problems in the laptop trade are reflective of the early era of personal computers, when there were many different manufacturers, each and every one of them having their own systems and incompatibility was more a norm.

Some mostly internal or proprietary parts made by laptop producers aren't interchangeable with other manufacturers' products, so that the same manufacturer's components are used with the laptop they produced. Some of the reasons for this are to ensure product stability, prolong product lifetime, to avoid dubious warranty issues and to protect computer beginners from harming their machines.

A significant point to note is that the vast majority of laptops on the market are manufactured by a small handful of ODMs.[3] The ODM matters more than the OEM. Major relationships include:

  • Quanta sells to (among others) HP/Compaq, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Fujitsu, Acer, NEC, Gateway and IBM - note that Quanta is currently (as of August, 2007) the largest manufacturer of notebook computers in the world
  • Compal sells to Toshiba, HP/Compaq, Acer, and Dell
  • Wistron sells to HP/Compaq, Dell, IBM, NEC, and Acer
  • Arima sells to HP/Compaq, NEC, and Dell
  • Uniwill/ECS sells to IBM, Fujitsu, and Dell
  • Asus sells to Apple (iBook), Sony, and Samsung
  • Inventec sells to HP/Compaq, Toshiba, and BenQ

To compensate, some manufacturers have and have had product lines where they have refrained from including some internal hardware in their products by adding in the number of standard hardware outlets and ports, thereby letting users choose their own hardware that they can connect.

In terms of hardware components standardization, PCMCIA/CardBus has proved to be a rather enduring standard. Older laptops lacking a USB port can have a PCMCIA USB/FireWire adapter plugged in. Modern adapters have two to four USB ports or they can be USB/Firewire combo adapters. Thus, such compatibility problems with getting hardware and peripherals connected has nowadays become a non-issue.

 

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