25 Ways Laptops Have Improved Our Lives

Laptops are one of the most diversely used electronic gadgets, they come at different prices, specs, purposes and dedicated uses. For this myriad number of applications, they are best described as ubiquitous as almost everyone has one need for them or the other and this will likely not stop being so. The diversity of their use stems mainly from their portability and convenience. They can be carried and used almost anywhere both on planet earth and in space. Technically, Laptops are however not too distinct from desktops as they basically operate in the same way, run the same applications, perform and execute same commands as well as give the same output. However and as you know, desktop computers are confined to the desk and are convincingly impossible to use on-the-go. Because of this limitation and many others, here are 25 ways laptops have improved our lives and probably will continue to, despite the competition coming from tablet computers and high-end smartphones.

How Laptops Have Improved Our Lives

Ways Laptops Have Improved Our Lives Socially

The expansion of social media gives much credit to the widespread use of the laptop. Without a doubt, the best contents on social media are often created comfortably with a laptop while many people also access same through their laptops. Communication is another thing everyone who owns a laptop does with it. It’s either your Facebook or Twitter account is signed in on your personal laptop or you have your Gmail and Yahoo mail signed in on your work laptop. We all get virtually interactive with each other every now and then and the best tool to relish this fun moment is, without a doubt, the laptop.

1. Communication- In the modern world, our thoughts are only a click away from being known by others. More so, it is cheaper and faster using this newer form of communication than letter writing. On our laptops, video calls are easily made using Skype, Facebook or any other platform convenient for you.
2. Vlog– A “vlog” is a video blog (or video blog) that acts as a diary, journal or blog in video format. It’s one of the most popular forms of online video content today and one of the essential tools Vloggers use is a laptop.
3. Video Streaming and Entertainments– Communication is not the only thing we do with laptops, a greater portion of time is spent streaming video on our laptops from one website or the other. Provided you have a fast and stable internet connection, you will have tons of free online TV websites to watch videos on.
4. Computer Games: The video game industry In 2015 was estimated to be worth 16.97 billion U.S. dollars and the source expects revenues to reach 20.28 billion by 2020. Much of these games are bought and installed on laptops and this is good business for game manufacturers. While game manufacturers make money producing games, gamer’s get entertained and improve the quality of their lives playing games
5. Information Access– The portion of Americans who ever get news on a mobile device has gone up from 54% in 2013 to 72% today. Two-thirds (66%) of Americans get news on both desktop/laptop and mobile, but more of those prefer mobile (56%) than desktop (42%).

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Ways Laptops Have Improved Our Lives With Jobs

In many ways, laptops have improved our lives with jobs and cost savings means of operation. Aside from the increasing number of IT companies that are springing up to render one service or produce another cost-saving gadget, we have a multitude of internet entrepreneurs/freelancers whose office and workspace is defined by their laptops. Freelancers now makeup 35% of U.S. workers and collectively earned $1 trillion in the past year, according to the “Freelancing in America: 2016” survey. Much of this freelancing services are advertised, sold and bought with the laptop as a communication medium. A few years back, this was largely impossible when Computers were the dominant point of access to the internet.

1. Web and Application Developers– Laptops offer application developers the flexibility the nature of their work requires to bring out creative and innovative ideas. This is especially true for those of them who move about a lot. Desktop computers don’t offer that freedom, neither do tablets or mobile phones have the ability to support such complex tasks.
2. Online Marketing– ClickBank alone has paid out more than $2 billion to affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is one way to make a living as a blogger and it’s the primary way most internet millionaires make money. Laptops is the most convenient tool to work as an online marketer. For flexibility, it gives you the convenience to carry your online workspace and work wherever you wish.
3.  Graphic Designers– Logo designers, Web theme designers, Book cover designers, Videographer all agree that laptops are the better options for graphics work. Most modern high-end laptops come with high-end specifications that can match even the most advanced desktop, if not do better.
4. Social Media Managers– Almost four in 10 (39%) of Americans who visit social media websites or apps say they use their laptop most often to log on, and 28% say they use their desktop computer. The power of social networking is such that, the number of worldwide users is expected to reach some 2.95 billion by 2020, around a third of Earth’s entire population. The region with the highest penetration rate of social networks is North America, where around 60 percent of the population has at least one social account. As of 2016, 78 percent of the United States population had a social networking profile. One of the benefits of this burst is in the massive jobs being created for social media managers, marketers and strategy developers.
5. Online Writers–  The primary weapon for every Writer, Copywriters, Transcribers, Translators is what the writing gets done on. Laptops give them the liberty to work from anywhere they choose to be at anytime.

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Ways Laptops Have Improved Our Lives In Business

Laptops have greatly changed the way businesses operate, customer-facing employees can take their jobs with them and work from wherever they choose to be. Moreso, many startups especially in the advertising and publishing business space are taking on the concept of virtual offices. Employees don’t necessarily have to converge every morning at a physical office and disperse to their respective homes by close of business. It is becoming quite obsolete and costly for businesses who still operate in the traditional concrete walled office sense. These days, employees have tons of online tools they can use to be productive and not limited by where they are. With laptops, they can work from wherever they are, interact with fellow employees, professionals and share ideas faster than office bureaucracies will allow. Organizations who have adopted this mode of operation for their client-facing employees have recorded remarkable gains in productivity. Laptops have improved our business lives in the following ways:

1. Collaboration and Productivity– Laptops are still necessary to perform work-intensive tasks. Collaborating on presentations and reports are just two of the many ways laptops continue to assist traveling or virtual employees in remaining productive in different locations.
2. Interaction– Laptops allow employees to virtually connect with customers at any time of the day. Employees can follow up with leads in creative and convenient ways as well as offer support through customer service chat platforms. Businesses have benefited in no small way because of this beneficial accomplishment.
3. Relevance– Laptops provide additional vehicles to generate and create relevant, up-to-date online content. Businesses that allow employees to help them increase their content marketing and social media presence stand to gain customer trust and brand recognition especially now that most consumers base their purchasing decisions on good customer service reviews.
4. Agriculture– Farmers can now easily store data on air, soil temperature, wind speed, humidity, solar radiation and rainfall on their laptops. The added benefit is that these data are easily accessible and can be analyzed anytime with only a click of a button on their laptop.
5. Presentations– Powerpoint presentations go hand-in-hand with laptops as it is now very easy to display your PowerPoint slides on a projector and be able to view your notes and decide what will be projected from your laptop. The big advantage here is that you can see your notes on your laptops as well as the next slide, while your audience only sees the slides in presentation mode.

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Education

There are probably more laptops in the hands of students than you will find elsewhere. Most things concerning the life cycle of a student in an academic environment are currently domiciled and done online and the best tool used to access such resources is the laptop. For convenience, it is compact and lightweight to carry about and has multiple options for sharing and receiving academic files and resources. Creating and working on texts, designs and just about any type of file is better done on a laptop, all thanks to the complete keyboard it comes with. Laptops have improved our lives in education through the following ways:

1. Online learning– In a recent research conducted by Michigan State University, they experimented with providing students with laptops in a one-to-one setting to facilitate learning and studied the results to determine if providing laptops to students significantly influenced their academic performance in a positive way or not. Their findings revealed that students who had laptops for use in the classroom and at home were able to improve their learning in a number of ways. They got more feedback on their writing, edited and revised their papers more often and had access to a wide range of resources to write on as well as quicker access to useful academic resources on the web.
2. Online Teachers– The benefits of laptops to education is not limited to students alone, teachers and particularly online teachers have also tapped into this unique opportunity laptops have presented us. They are now able to research and prepare their lessons faster than before, as well as deliver same lessons online to students scattered all over the world.
3. Teaching With Technology– By teaching with technology, we are making reference to the employment of more advanced teaching tools to deliver lessons in the class or online. Choosing the right technology to achieve this is the main decider on how well the intended purpose will be achieved. With laptops as teaching aids, we have access to better presentation software’s, course management tools, lecture capture tools as well as collaboration and conferencing tools etc.
4. E-Library Access – Suzanne Thorin, Dean of libraries at Syracuse University in Educause 2009 while speaking to the attendees, urged a crowd of university librarians to “move on to a new concept of what the university library is” — in her view, a place with fewer books and more space for students to sit around and access library resources on their laptops. In a simpler sense- a bookless library. With E-libraries easily accessed with the simplest of laptops, the days of wandering through bookshelves are over. Students and teachers can now easily access library resources on their laptops with just a click of the button.
5. Improved Computer Skills– Because laptops are found almost everywhere, children and young people are increasingly having access to them. Students with laptops wrote more frequently across a wider variety of genres and they worked more autonomously and gained experience in project-based learning. This allowed them to synthesize and critically apply knowledge.

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Ways Laptops Have Improved Our Lives In Preparation For The Future

Laptops have not only made our lives better in this current age, they have been able to give us a peek into the future with the advanced simulation of current real-life trends. Most of the ideas that will champion the way we will live, work and cohabit in the future are currently being conceptualized and domiciled in our laptop hard disk drives or cloud storage.

The world is changing and technology is what is driving the change. A big gap, however, exists between where we are now and where we will be in the future. Such gaps can only be bridged through an electronic medium that is not static in itself. What more can fill this lacuna, if not laptops? Right from their formative years when they were mechanically birthed bulky and could only perform a few task at a slow speed, to their current form where they do a lot more than we require. Laptops have remained dynamic and continued to champion the cause of our technological development. They, in no small way, have improved the ways we live now for greater access to tomorrows resources.

1. Future Laptops– Laptops of the new age will definitely be better than what we have now. They will probably run on a more integrated Cloud-Based OS, be upgradable and should have better hardware, charge wirelessly, and have the all-important long battery life. The benefit of these technological accomplishments lies in it being diversified and implemented on other devices.
2. Cloud Computing–  the concept of having everything stored and worked on centrally from the cloud is already gaining more grounds. Tech experts predict that by 2036 it will become wholly natural for everything to be on the cloud. The best tool to access such resources in the future and farther in the future will always be the laptop.
3. Steady Connectivity– laptops are increasing international connectivity for traveling business professionals. Thanks to Lenovo with the Lenovo e-SIM laptops which allow users to connect globally without swapping sim cards.
4. More Personalised Laptops– Currently we live in a time where Artificial Intelligence is gaining more popularity with more and more experiments being tried on it. In few years time, we will most likely have laptops that are more personalised to us. We can speak to them, they recognize us and interact with us. AI is what most applications and devices will run on in the future and our current laptops have given us a peek into this future and possibilities.
5. Machine Learning– When Google made TensorFlow open to anyone to use, every major machine learning implementation is available for free to use and modify, meaning it’s possible to set up a simple machine intelligence with nothing more than a laptop and a web connection.

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Conclusion

Laptops are one of the most essential and useful electronics items we use in the modern world. They have improved our lives in many ways, making it convenient for us to work from any place, communicate and get entertained wherever we choose to be with it. The advantages of laptops over its desktop computer predecessor are in its portability, battery, and convenience of use. With these features and more improvements continually being made, laptops will steadily continue to improve our lives.