Three years ago we started defaulting laptops for employees in place of desktops and we’ve never looked back. Laptops are so cheap, portable, and powerful that there are few reasons not to use them. When a laptop, especially a MacBook Air, is paired with a nice monitor (at least 24″) you have the ultimate modern workstation. Yes, some hard core CPU-intensive applications and games are better for high-end desktops but those are few and far between.
Here are a few items to keep in mind when you go to a company-wide laptop plan:
- Conference room laptops should be locked down because inevitably people will forget their laptops at home and borrow it without telling anyone
- Extra laptops and laptop chargers should be ordered and managed by someone in the event an employee forgets theirs at home
- Theft of laptops will occur when an employee forgets about it in their car, so be prepared with remote-wipe software and require a password upon machine start
- Ensure that laptops during meetings are used for notes and not email (do the lunch check: if someone calls someone out for checking email during the meeting and they are right, the person checking email buys the other person lunch and vice versa if they’re wrong)
Laptops for all employees has worked great for us and I highly recommend it.
What else? What are your thoughts on startups defaulting to laptops for employees?
David Cummings on Startups 
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