This photo was only taken a few years ago, and everything here already looks (even more) ancient, except maybe the MacBook Air. Even so, they look incredibly even intimately familiar, in the way a CRAY-2 never would, immediately recognizable as portable, personal computing. It’s obvious yet still noteworthy that the laptop form factor is still largely the same as it was a couple decades ago, still a screen and keyboard+trackpad united by a hinge.

We can easily mentally update this image; we know what would sit on this desk to the right of the MacBook Air in this lineage of personal computing. We’ve got the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models and most recently the iPad Pro, and those still look much like these ancestors that came before them. Are future iterations of being productive with personal technology just going to be thinner, lighter, more powerful renditions of the laptop and tablet form factors?