As Laptop Market Shrinks, Makers Woo Professional Buyers With New Features — Like Military-Grade Toughness

Unlike mobile phones where the market keeps renewing, as buyers replace and upgrade their devices, the personal computer (PC) market — desktop and portable — is seeing sequential decline. 

The Indian traditional PC market continued to drop, shipping only 3.22 million units, a decline of 15.3 per cent year-over-year (YoY) in the second quarter of 2023 (April-June 2023), according to a 17 August announcement by market analyst IDC.

While the demand for desktops declined by about 7 per cent, the notebook (the term is favoured by industry over laptop, as the devices become thinner, lighter) category fared even worse as it declined by 18.5 per cent YoY.

Under the circumstances, it is rather surprising that the government has chosen this category — laptops, PCs, tablets, all-in-ones — to bring under a licencing regime for import. The numbers consumed in India, would seem not to warrant such control.

And the global makers especially, of portable PC devices, tend to place their plants in strategic locations where the supply chain, the local taxation system and the logistics are most advantageous.

In Asia this has meant mostly China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia — and India.   

Except to relax the operational date, the government seems to have dug-in its heels on licensing, in the face of fairly wide-spread industry and analyst  opinion.

The consensus (except among associations of purely Indian companies) seems to be that such a return to 1960s and 70s-style import control is  unlikely to have anything more than a marginal effect in pushing the major tech players of laptops and PCs to Make-in-India.

This is especially true of laptops where the brands that currently have manufacturing facilities in India, both Indian and international players — including the biggest seller, HP — need to source as much as possible from local markets and therefore aim at the mass consumer market — home, education and individual professionals.

The challenge for manufacturers in a low-growth market is to add unique features which convert standard into premium products — and some of these features demand hardware or manufacturing plants that cannot be relocated overnight to India.

It does not make sense to disturb a well-established supply chain that has worked very well.

The gaming industry has created a niche demand for extremely fast-response laptops used in international gaming competitions, fuelled by special graphic intensive chips from players like Nvidia.

Military Quality In Consumer Products

Now a new avenue of adding premium features has opened up — ultra-durable laptops with military-grade components, that are being increasingly welcomed by  professionals, especially those who travel constantly, having to subject their carry-on computers to the gauntlet of airport security inspections, X-Ray machines and the like.

This is a relatively new category and I have had the opportunity of trying out one of these rugged laptops for a few weeks recently.

Among the popular military-grade laptop, the well known include versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad, HP Elitebook, MSI Creator or MSI Summit and Asus Zenbook.

Asus recently unveiled another rugged laptop category to India — the ExpertBook B 1402 — which combines toughness with extreme lightness: just 1.49 kg for a 14-inch full high-definition screen machine. 

There is a 15.6-inch model, the B 1502, that weighs 1.69 kg.

The unit I got to try is the former, fueled by a 12th generation Intel core processor, 512 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM. It is customisable with storage in increments till 1 TB and memory up to 16 GB, extendable up to 48 GB with additional RAM cards.

The operating system is Windows 11 and the WiFi meets the latest WiFi 6 standard. None of this is very remarkable. Asus reserves its bells and whistles for the rugged build quality.

Before we look at that, it is worth seeing how standards developed for the US military — like MIL-STD-810 — have now trickled into the civilian arena. 

The standard is not new: it was published by the US Department of Defence in 1967 and is today used as a benchmark by most rugged-laptop makers. 

It requires the device to go through multiple tests each representing an environmental challenge and manufacturers like Asus conduct at least 15 of them: they include drop, shock, vibration, altitude, humidity, spill (60 cc of water), force (25 kg of pressure on the laptop) high and low temperature (to work from 0 to 40 degrees Celsius) electromagnetic interference… the list goes on. 

For laptops, there are special tests which involve 20,000 openings and closings of the device’s 360-degree hinge which lays the laptop flat, as well as 5,000 operations on the input-output ports like USB (both Type A and Type C). 

And for this year's products, a new test, which checks for performance in an explosive atmosphere was added.   

The 42 watt-hour battery is capable of charging other devices like phones in an emergency. The rugged features are achieved by steel inserts into the body of the laptop.

Normally such tough builds come at premium pricing. Though Asus has not yet formally announced pricing of the ExpertBook B 1402 and B 1502, I hazard a guess that the basic configuration of the B 1402 with 512 GB storage and 8 GB RAM, is going to be offered in India for less than Rs 50,000.

Making and certifying such a military-grade laptop involves a certain expenditure on enlarged testing and special assembly procedures, which is why companies tend to concentrate their lines in a few countries and ship across the region. 

The Indian government, with its clear priorities, may try to persuade more and more makers of laptops and high-end PCs to set up such lines here, with production-linked incentives. Doable? Yes. 

But at the end of the day, the size of the local market and the complexity of local manufacture will dictate where the world’s leading electronics and computer peripherals industry players choose to create their more special products.

It’s all economics.