in Japan ... you'd be hard pressed to find any young person (maybe not teenager, but at least university students) who does NOT have a laptop
My experience is the complete opposite. My wife's family has one computer in the entire extended family, everyone else uses their phone exclusively and I rarely see people using laptops in cafes, etc. My wife has multiple relatives that she can't even email without using a japanese prepaid phone because Docomo encourages invalid email username construction.
In the middle of Tokyo I see a lot of laptops in Starbucks but that isn't really the case in most of the cafes I visit elsewhere. Not a great idea to extrapolate from a metropolis of 20 million to an entire country. If laptops are doing so great in Japan why is Sony selling off their VAIO business?
My experience is the complete opposite. My wife's family has one computer in the entire extended family, everyone else uses their phone exclusively and I rarely see people using laptops in cafes, etc. My wife has multiple relatives that she can't even email without using a japanese prepaid phone because Docomo encourages invalid email username construction.