Look across the PC market, especially in the world of mobile computing with laptops or tablets. You will discover a wide selection of touchscreens and styluses, evolving in various form aspects from isolated screens to full-fledged keyboards. Some interesting orientations of screens and keyboards to suit the fashionable lifestyle.
Stacy Wolff brought these ideas to market twenty years ago with the revolutionary TC1000. It was certainly one of the primary 2-in-1 devices that could possibly be used as a laptop or a tablet, long before the iPad was even considered, let alone launched.
Brian Nadel from CNetfrom 2002 identified the TC1000’s three modes of use: “It starts as an extremely small, lightweight slate-style tablet PC with a stylus that’s superior to the styluses of other tablets we’ve seen. Pop on the keyboard and you get a thin and light notebook with an excellent three-hour battery life. Then dock it and voilà – a desktop machine… the TC1000 is considered a sleek, versatile leader in the tablet PC race.”
Stacy Wolff, Head of Product Design at HP
I sat down with Wolff, now HP’s director of product design, to speak in regards to the power of transformable hardware, starting with the TC1000.
“It was uncharted territory,” he recalls. “To put it into something so portable that you could put it in your pocket… That was a bit of a stroke of luck. I think that’s still my number one request when I talk to someone. It was one of the first products where we brought everything together, an intersection between new software development, emerging technology and a new demand for mobility.”
I used to be certainly one of the users who took the TC1000 with me on the road. It was my major computer while covering conferences, product launches and reports from world wide. It felt lighter than my major laptop, but additionally had a smaller screen and form factor. The ability to change to pen input and fold the keyboard away at all times caught people’s attention. My major memory, nonetheless, is that by removing the touchpad on the keyboard, the screen was brought forward and the footprint was much smaller. It was certainly one of the few Windows devices that would easily be used during economy class flights.
But there was little to suggest that the TC1000 would have such an impact on me or anyone else before they used this mysterious laptop/tablet combo. How did Wolff know the demand was there?
“We didn’t,” he laughs. “In this case, whether we did it through a focus group or by publishing plans with various parties, there were many early signs that the technology had advanced enough to make it practical and that there was a need for such a device.”
The HP TC1100, the successor to the TC1000.
Fast forward to the current day. The design ethos never really changes, so what’s Wolff using this month that he also utilized in the TC1000 design?
“I might say a couple of things. First, never assume you realize something simply because you do not comprehend it. Young designers often come into the world and say, ‘I do know the way to solve this!’ Maybe they comprehend it for themselves, but not for the various audiences.
“It’s about empathy, and I think empathy is probably the hardest thing to teach. Young designers should ask themselves, ‘How can you be more empathetic towards the customer?’ Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, like we do every day.”
How much is modern design today determined by science, research and focus groups? Can you continue to pick up a pencil and paper and design out of your gut?
“I think it’s a bit of a question of balance. After many years in the industry, I can tell you what my gut tells me. I ask, ‘Why are we doing this? Who is it for? What are the needs of the user? What is that emotional connection?’
HP’s latest Omen and Spectre laptops, announced at CES 2024.
The idea of designing for these diverse need scenarios was accelerated through the Covid pandemic because the world went into lockdown. One of essentially the most visible changes in each hardware and the best way we interact, says Wolff, was video calling. “Video and microphone immediately became super important and we became snobs, your video is better than my video. But I can share this and you can share that… at that one point everything changed.”
Cloud Wars in focus the rapid rise of video conferencing during lockdown: “One of those changes is the increasing use of video conferencing as a method of communicating or conducting work meetings. Zoom, for instance, had 10 million every day meeting participants in December 2019, but by April 2020 that number had risen to over 300 million.
With hybrid working, there was a renewed concentrate on hardware that would function in multiple scenarios. “Suddenly we saw that home and work were interchangeable. When we all went home, we had to solve different problems.”
Those lessons are still with us. Wolff chooses HP’s latest Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop. “It’s a very transformative product. For the first time, we’ve had a shift from pure gaming to a balance between ‘school during the day’ and ‘gaming at night.’ It’s a balance of power, not to the extreme, but it’s a lot. It’s not particularly thin and light, but it’s pretty thin and light.”
Dave James from PC Gamer: “So the HP Omen Transcend 14 is an effective gaming laptop. But it certainly doesn’t offer outstanding performance if I’m honest, as the focus is more on maintaining balance. HP has kept the internal components under control enough that it doesn’t get too hot on your lap (though the CPU does regularly exceed 100°C when under load, pfft, Intel, eh?).”
Switching between games and schoolwork is a rough example of fluidity, switching between different states. “The systems we’re developing now. I think we’re trying to solve bigger problems, and one of the biggest challenges we have overall is the fluidity of switching from one state to another. Look at the Spectre Fold; I can easily open it up. Make it flat, straighten it up, however you want to look at the position. It’s just whatever you want, right?”
HP’s Spectre x360 laptop, announced at CES 2024.
A superb design can delight the buyer with expected and surprising elements. “I think people love a bit of magic; they always like to talk about that magic. Just like with the TC1000, I think in the design process you find something that is quite nice and then it takes a lot of work to make it magical.”
What will Wolff do next? “I keep researching. There’s always a need and you just have to ask your questions or do a little different research to find it. I always find it satisfying when someone discovers that a product does something that relieves an itch… an itch that we thought about before they even knew they needed it.”
