Maturity is boring.

Couple of weeks ago there was a news story about how Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time. Chromebooks must be pretty exciting, huh? Turns out it was mostly driven by mass Chromebook purchases by schools. Don’t get us wrong, it’s cool, schools having lightweight, cheap, useful little laptops. But it’s been years since we’ve gotten excited about school supplies.

For the last year, year and a half, Toshiba’s been withdrawing from the laptop business. They can’t make them cheap enough to be bargains or powerful enough to be worth higher prices, so their margins are getting squeezed on both ends. In other words, they can’t make laptops exciting enough to be profitable again.

Laptops are mature. They’re not getting much more powerful. They’re not getting too much cheaper. They’ve reached that point in the evolutionary diagram where they’re walking fully upright and wearing a suit. And with its balance of cheapness and power, the Toshiba Chromebook might be the most mature of all.

It can’t do everything. It can only do the vast majority of things you do in a typical day. Video streaming, web browsing, email, maybe work in Google Docs or Slack or Evernote, on a display described in reviews as “a feast for the eyes”, with a 9-hour battery life, in a three-pound package less than an inch thick: so boring, right?

And if you get all that for a price so low, you don’t have to worry about a kid dragging it around in his backpack for a semester or two, well, it’s nice that schoolkids get cheap milk, too.

Chromebooks are just as bland as every other mature gadget, the phones and tablets that work their ho-hum miracles a thousand times a day. We work ourselves up over the new stuff, the watches and glasses and VR headsets that can’t really do five percent of what the old boring stuff does. If those gadgets ever become fully functional, we’ll get tired of them, too.

So there’s nothing exciting here today. Just a fully developed technological marvel you’ll use all the time. Yawn.