Laptops vs. Notebooks

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding just what a "notebook" actually is when talking about the differences between them and laptops in general. Where netbooks were born only a few years ago and have clearly separate design aspects, notebooks and laptops have been around for decades, with so many similarities between them that some have begun to believe that the terms are one in the same. Thanks to this, the two terms are often used as synonyms today, with no regard to their differing historical meanings.

The term "notebook" was first used in 1989 to describe an emerging line of portable computers that were smaller than the average laptop. These systems were about the size of an A4 paper notebook, and they emerged from the labs of NEC and Compaq, who produced the UltraLite and the LTE lines of notebooks respectively. Not long after they did so, IBM unveiled the ThinkPad to the masses, which popularized the notebooks and expanded the market several times over. Laptops before then (and many since) were usually wider, taller, and thicker than these notebooks. The larger laptops of that age owed their size to the limits of technology, but the larger ones of today exist so we can have larger screens or more powerful hardware inside. Or both, in a lot of cases.

For years after this initial introduction, the term "notebook" was common vernacular for these smaller laptops, which became really popular among businessmen and students for their light weight and more discreet size. The reduced size, however, came with a price.

Notebooks essentially traded ease of use and comfort for raw processing power, as the smaller portables generally contain weaker, more power efficient chips within their framework. This created a slight segmentation of the market, as notebooks made good companions but poor replacements for desktops, whereas the more powerful laptops can equal all but the most powerful desktops on the market. This remains somewhat true even today, years after notebooks have lost their original A4 size in favor of physical sizes that make them more or less indistinguishable to the more general laptops.

This does mean that notebooks are by and large "in the middle" of the scale, with laptops on one end and the new and very affordable netbooks on the other. Netbooks have become the lowest denominator in all respects, making them increasingly popular with the frugal crowd, which has been the notebook's primary market for decades. Netbooks, however, are a bit more limited as to what they can actually do, whereas notebooks can perform almost any task a laptop and desktop can.

With notebooks and laptops converging and becoming increasingly similar, it is possible that very soon there will not be any difference between the two at all.

On a final note, it should be mentioned that there remains one distinct difference between the two that has actually increased within the last couple of years. This difference is that an increasing percentage of notebooks now come with a touchscreen for hand writing notes and messages. While there are a few laptops out there that also have this technology on their screens, this has, for the moment, remained a notebook advantage, and one that can be immensely useful.