> 30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer.

You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop.

It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN.

I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work.

The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks".

But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.

Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.

> But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so.

As far as I can tell, he was right, and still is. I see no evidence that more than a few percent of such people do so to this day.

> it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.

I don't see how that "disconfirms" anything at all. Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche? Because I don't believe that at all.

You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices? In fact the author was even more specific than that, and suggested that the kind of people who read the business section of the newspaper on the train, or the kind of people who used to fly to Comdex, would have no serious interest in using the time to get some work done on a computer instead. If we need evidence on this, here's a 2013 USA Today story http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2013/04/30/more-t... reporting on a small decline in the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop.

> Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche?

I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work, still less by people who were only going to use it at home. The Macintosh Portable was excoriated for its poor battery life, heavy weight and lack of a backlight because so many of the potential users wanted something to use on the road.

> You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices?

No, I wouldn't. Hotel room is more likely, but is just substituting for home/office.

Huge numbers of heavy office PC users exist. Only a tiny fraction use a laptop anywhere but home or the office, and a tinier fraction of those do so routinely. It is a niche market.

> the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop

There aren't that many business travelers in the first place. You're already looking at a niche market.

> I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work

My argument: On-the-go laptop use is niche.

Your apparent reply: Early laptop users used them on-the-go.

It's a non sequitur. That the ideal market for a product adopts the product does not mean that the market is not niche. The two have no relationship.