While I worked at Google, laptops @ meeting were pretty much the norm. A note-taker (in our case the oncall person, or build master) would open a Google Docs document, or continue from a long going one (well known to everyone) and start typing notes, agenda, action items. At the same time the rest of the team can join (especially useful, if meeting is happening in more than one room, with people working from home, remote offices, etc.). And everyone can correct, fix, assign, comment.
Now there is a time, when the manager would say - please close your laptops, there is something important, sensitive, etc needs to be discussed.
I've never seen more productive use of them. And the oncall person for the week can respond to alerts, msgs, etc. - the build master person can check updates. I mean technically you can do whatever you like, as long as your attention is not needed.
People can leave if they see that this part of the meeting no longer concern them, or any other reason.
I can second this; at Google I've found that meetings are unusually productive because of the practice. For the most part, regular meetings will follow a fairly strict agenda, which keeps them moving and stops them from going off on tangents (not always, sometimes tangents do happen, for better or worse, but I've found that it's for better significantly more often than at previous workplaces). And the presence of laptops helps here -- people can add bullet items to upcoming agenda items to ensure that they are discussed, without having to interrupt the conversation currently in progress, and the use of a single document means that the historical record is easily accessible.
For meetings that are more oriented as design sessions or free-form discussions, the laptops tend to go away because they are not useful in that situation, unless you're at a point where data that can be quickly acquired can be useful.
To a degree, the same happens with a design doc - you may start it with a peer, or have manager oversee it, or pull someone from a team, from which you rely on specific technology to gain more confidence for you, and whoever later reads the design doc that all important bits are covered... For example decision to use system A (from your point of view) may be good idea, but owners of system A may no longer support it, or may have in plans to deprecate it soon, but haven't announced it yet, so adding key personnel there would help for sure.
I'm trying this new model at my new workplace, but I'm already seeing pain doing this with Outlook (the desktop version), the Mobile version is much better in this respect, though the comment system need some features, that I got used to (assigning action-items). The other approach would be google for business, but I'm not a decision maker here.
That sounds like not everyone needed to be in that meeting.
My old work banned screens in meetings (except for the note taker), it made it painfully obvious to me which meetings I didn't need to be in. Sometimes I'd sit there for half an hour with my eyes glazed over.
On the plus side, eventually I started being more assertive when questioning whether my attendance was necessary at certain meetings, or asking to leave once the relevant part of the meeting was over. There was no point in me sitting there while the iOS team discussed some specific issue that I couldn't give any input to.
I love the collaborative style for remote meetings. I'm still waiting for an opportunity to try it for meetings in a single room. I believe it could be nice.
Now there is a time, when the manager would say - please close your laptops, there is something important, sensitive, etc needs to be discussed.
I've never seen more productive use of them. And the oncall person for the week can respond to alerts, msgs, etc. - the build master person can check updates. I mean technically you can do whatever you like, as long as your attention is not needed.
People can leave if they see that this part of the meeting no longer concern them, or any other reason.