Photo by JARED KENDALL.

This data was gathered for a Redshtick article. I thought it’d be an easy find, but it took hours. I wanted information on the usage rates for laptops amongst college kids. Straightforward, right? Not so much. I eventually found some information from the Pew internet research surveys. But no data spanning years on college kids and their gear. Single year stats, sure — I could tell you what percent of college kids use laptops in class as of the moment. Data, however, becomes most interesting when it can be viewed over time, and you can try to spot trends.

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/GadgetOwnership/Dashboard1?:embed=y

Point is, this is actually fairly interesting, particularly the way it drives home the conversion from a desktop-centric universe to one where laptops are the norm. If you’re feeling adventurous you can play with tablet numbers and the like — that’s the point of these Tableau presentations. They leave a good bit of the control and the exploration up to the end user/reader.