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The Desktop -- Time to Start Saying Goodbye?
Lucas123 writes "Robert Scheier at Computerworld writes that while worldwide PC shipments are expected to grow 12.2% this year, portable PC volumes are expected to grow 28% and will make up more than half of all PC shipments in the U.S. this quarter. Notebooks will dominate the worldwide PC marketplace by 2010. 'One researcher predicts it will be five to seven years before only the "die-hard" desktop users are left.'"
1. Cost 2. Upgrades
So does that mean that this time it's PC gaming that will die out and not console gaming?
I don't think its really a black and white comparison. Obviously desktops have advantages and laptops have advantages. You dont want to lug around a 22 inch screen on your laptop but for your desktop, you want that. You're not going to get the latest and greatest hardware on a laptop, but you can on a desktop. Laptops are portable and good enough for most people, but a bit pricier than desktops.
It's a different tool for a different job kind of thing, the summary makes it seem simpler than that.
I guess we can bury the desktop along with the mainframes which have "disappeared".
Ain't going to happen. Laptops have charged into the fray because they've finally become price and performance competitive. They're not desktops, and they're not the same things.
Ten years ago I owned 2 desktops, and 1 laptop. Today I own 4 laptops and 3 desktops. They're all heavily used, but for home use doing heavy duty, big screen, heads down coding and computer work, it's always going to be the desktop that makes the most sense.
The percentages may change as laptops finally "emerge", but desktops, IMO, will stay.
The only thing I can think of needing a desktop for is to play games. Video cards for laptops are usually under powered, mostly because of heat, space, and power issues of "real" cards.
For most everything else, my two year-old $400 Dell laptop works fine. It plays movies, browses the web, and runs productivity applications without a problem.
If and when a laptop can get a nice big 24" screen or larger, can have ultra fast, high capacity hard drives with kick-ass 3D graphics and components I can upgrade...then I'll get one. I don't see that happening in the next 5 to 7 years.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The big problem I see with this will be if lack of demand means that it will become more difficult to "build your own" to get a box with the specs you really want.
But even in my own experience, I find myself looking more at the ads for the latest laptop, rather than reading the specs on the motherboards.
I do have fond memories of browsing computer shopper (back when it was large format and over 1 inch thick).
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
People predicted that offices would go paperless, and that cars would fly too. But the reality is, if you don't need the portability, why spend the extra money to get a laptop? Plus desktops will always have greater power, easier upgrades, standard hardware, and more perhiperals.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No, no, no:
"2010: The year Linux makes contact"
What percentage of PC users EVER upgrade their hardware? I prefer a desktop for the ability to upgrade parts, and (currently) for the price. But the majority of people? Never gonna worry about it.
I'd say desktops are likely to be more limited to high-end users in the future. (As laptop prices continue to fall.)
It'd be a bitch to try and install two or three PCI tuner cards in one for a mythtv setup, and pretty few laptops come with digital audio out, much less HDMI ports.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These same "researchers" predicted that computers would make paper disappear from the office. Today offices deal with more paper than ever because electronic documents just don't do the job.
Laptops are popular with businesses because they can do double duty: plug into a docking station with a fixed monitor and keyboard for desktop use, but allow employees to take it home to do work after hours or on weekends. At the same time, though, those laptops are no end of hassle when dealing with the corporate network. Desktops, being nailed down to just one network, can just be configured and you're set. The laptops have to be able to deal with being on insecure outside networks, and the extra software to handle that is just a nightmare when they're attached to the corporate network. Not to mention that almost all of them currently are infected with several viruses and they're spreading them to the company net. The desktops aren't nearly as much of a problem in this regard. Business likes the cost savings, but a lot of people where I work are opting to keep their desktop boxes and use their own laptops instead of having the company give them a laptop (and take away their nice reliable desktop machine).
Then of course there's gaming. Very few laptops compare well to a desktop box when it comes to gaming performance. Gaming hardware eats too much power and throws off too much heat, and gamers don't like sacrificing performance.
My sense is that desktop PC shipments are dropping not because of any lack of demand for desktops. It's more that most people are satisfied with the box they've got now and are just upgrading components for a couple hundred dollars rather than buying a whole new system, and that people are going to white-box builders locally rather than buying from the big-name vendors. I know I can find higher-spec systems locally for better prices than I can find at Dell or the like. I mean, I built one for my niece earlier this year with hardware the equal of Dell's best gaming box but a cost around that of their mid-range non-gaming boxes. I've had to decline 4 requests to build systems since then, and pointed all 4 to local shops. I'm not surprised to see the big names seeing a drop-off in shipments.
I call bullshit.
Receptionists, shipping clerks, call center reps, cashiers, nurses, and most day-to-day office workers don't need the portability and form factor of a laptop. Furthermore, it's a lot more likely that a company will let a new hire or someone who has dealing with the public at the system use a desktop that's cumbersome to unhook and carry out the door than a machine designed for that purpose. People might not be any more likely to steal a laptop than a desktop in principle, but making it easier for, say, the guys who visit the Public Aid office to get in and out with them isn't necessarily a good idea.
Desktops are a lot cheaper to design and build for the budget role, and are more easily customizable for all the myriad business machines out there that require computer control. USB and Firewire are great, but they're still not as flexible as PCI and PCI Express. Extra drive bays make it much easier for IT to add storage or unusual hardware (ZIP, HD-DVD, some new memory card reader) that would have to be a separately inventoried if it was an external add-on for a laptop.
A desktop can easily be expanded into a cheap, low-end server. Most laptops don't meet this criterion very well. Memory limits asre often lower, the memory is more expensive, and you only get one hard drive in 99.8% of models out there. Lots of small businesses or working groups in larger ones tend to turn an old PC into an impromptu server for a while until the budget allows a proper server.
There might be some split into laptops for the masses, workstations for high-end work, and servers for rack-mount applications, but you can be sure lots of businesses will the just buy workstation or server machines as desktops. As long as the business world demands the mini tower, it'll be available for you to buy from Dell and HP. The enthusiast sites will probably still offer them long after that.
Besides, when has "lower growth" ever meant "decline in number"? Last I checked, growth meant more units sold, period. Less of an increase than last year, maybe, but still an increase. What if one day the market saturates and everyone only buys replacement systems? Will all the suppliers of hardware close and not bother?
The prediction overlooks far too many inconveniences that technology hasn't yet resolved.
The need to regularly plug in the laptop. Poor battery lifetime and recharge cycle performance (but see ultracapacitors for the impending doom of the battery industry.) The need to plug in various I/O devices (hard drives, scanners, various others for various needs.) The wearing out of laptop clamshell hinges. The low quality of laptop keyboards as compared to the awesome stand-alone keyboards available. The need for mice and drawing pads. The limited screen size of a laptop (you can of course make an ultra-large screen laptop, but then it doesn't fit in your lap very well.) The room inside a desktop for various hardware add-ons, such as PCI bus hardware, or highly accelerated graphics engines. Room for multiple drives.
A few of these things - such as connectivity, which will probably go entirely wireless - will resolve themselves as technology advances. Most will not. So as an IMHO, but one with a lot of data behind it, I call nonsense on the entire proposition.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The reason I like my desktop (computer) is because of the amount of desktop (display area) real estate I have. I have a 24" wide screen LCD as my center screen, flanked by a pair of 20" widescreens. I will eventually upgrade to all 24" panels. Show me a laptop that even comes close to competing with that (while still being "portable") and I'll consider this "it's the end of the desktop!" notion to be valid. There's only two ways I can think of this happening, moving forward. Option one is that my laptop will have a built-in projector that can display the ginormous desktop I desire. Option two is a HUD that projects said desktop directly onto my retina. I would surely welcome either option, but neither is really technologically nor financially feasible right now nor do I see them being so within the projected 5-7 year timeframe.
Also, as others have mentioned, I can get superior graphics performance from a desktop because it's easier to manage thermal output and you can therefore utilize video processors which have greater thermal emissions. "Graphics performance" isn't limited to games here, either; I enjoy being able to do high-polygon work in SketchUp with 4x anti-aliasing turned on.
The cause I see for the spike in laptop purchases is twofold. One, more people are buying them because they're affordable. Two, they're replaced more frequently than desktop PCs because they are abused (and therefore broken) more frequently than desktop PCs. I don't drop my desktop on the floor regularly, but everyone has been known to drop their laptop bag now and again without thinking. I don't have a tendancy to block the air vents on my desktop, but laptop air vents are often placed in very inconvenient locations. etc, etc. These two aspects are related, really. The drop in the price of laptops is mostly due to them being made more cheaply (not a "more bang for your buck" cheap, but a "lower quality" cheap) and therefore more prone to failure when mistreated/misused. I think that people are replacing laptops on a more frequent cycle than desktops, and that's why we're seeing this surge in laptop purchases.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I'm sure you can think of some better reasons, but most of the ones you've given aren't any good. Desktops have to be plugged in all the time anyway, so it's not as if limited laptop battery life can be held as a point for desktops. I/O devices plug in to laptops just as well as they do to desktops, now that we use standard connectors for peripherals (USB/Firewire). I've never seen a clamshell hinge wear out, though I'm sure it's possible. You can plug a desktop keyboard into a laptop when it's at your desk, and lots of people do. Same with monitors or whatever else.
The reason laptops are starting to outsell desktops is simply that the cost premium has all but disappeared. So people tend to prefer the mobility (even if they don't always use it) over the ability to add internal drives or peripherals (which they certainly never use).
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Seriously, when did you last see a docking station? There's a reason next to no-one uses them.
Well, I'd wait untill desktop shipments start to reduce until I call it dead.
It's not quite sane to call dead something that is growing 12% a year.
Rethinking email
Your arguments are much like the old Mainframe guys... The question is not if the desktop does anything better then a laptop. But more to the fact that Laptops are coming so close to desktops in perfomace and in major other areas that the need for the desktop is demishing. The gains from using the desktop is less then the gains from the extra mobility of the laptop. So more laptops will be sold and desktops will become more and more old fassion. Much like some mainframe guys who will still stick with their mainframes even though the PC and Laptops can kick the decade old mainframe sorry ass in almost all jobs. But there will be that one job where that mainframe will out preform the PC thus they will still stand by the fact that their 10 year old mainframe is superior. To a modern PC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think the laptop will no longer be the most common mobile device but it will still have a place. People that actually travel or commute with their laptops will surely want to replace them with a more mobile smart phone/PC. My brother got an iPhone on day 1 and he says he already doesn't bring his laptop home from work with him anymore, he can just carry his iPhone.
On the other hand my friend is not a computer power user; she only uses her laptop on the desk or in her lap on the couch. I think a lot of laptops being sold are merely desktop replacements. There is no reason for someone who only wants to do email/web/schoolwork to buy a full on desktop computer. I would bet money that most laptops being sold today are going to people who are not transporting them very far.
While my brother uses an iPhone and my friend uses a laptop I don't think I will give up my desktop anytime soon. Although i own a nice laptop i never use it, it sits in my closet. My desktop has a 21" CRT, 3 hard drives, and a real mouse and kayboard with a huge mouse pad (for gaming). I have played several video games competitively (you might have heard of the WoW guild was in) and a laptop just wouldn't have worked. Now that I don't play any video games anymore i still like my desktop. The huge screen is good for browsing and the mouse is much more accurate than a touch pad.
The article mentioned that die hard desktop users will always be on the desktop. That is of course correct but I think there are many benefits to doing normal stuff on a desktop too.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Most people with a home computer rarely have a desire to power down and go to Border's Books or the Bagel shop to do exactly the same thing.
Gamerz are still Gamerz and they only want the fastest biggest gear.
Laptops still have a 2x price premium for the same performance of the corresponding desktop.
Cheap laptops are much lower end machines than cheap desktops.
Desktops are upgradeable, laptops are not.
People like larger screens than the usual 15.4" laptop screen. And 17-19" monitors are pretty cheap.
But I will give you this - what the home user needs is a much smaller machine, like an all in one form factor of an iMac or miniMac or an ITX form factor, small fanless design with enough power to make it cost effective.
Bearded Dragon
Laptops tend to cook themselves and have limited cooling options. This limits what heavy processing you can do on a laptop since it will throttle itself down to keep from burning itself up. The small spaces don't help. Adding extra ram or storage space to an existing laptop can make the problem worse. A laptop trying to cool itself will probably be a noisy nuissance. Some of the noise reducing options available for a desktop machine won't be available to the laptop.
I'd thought about using an old vaio as a MythTV frontend in the living room until I realized that it was by far the noisiest thing in the house late at night. That laptop often gets shut off when we're in the living room because it's so noisy.
The other laptop is often scaled down to nearly nothing in terms of cpu speed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
These days I work in government, and we install a lot of specialty/niche software (have to go through RFP and bidding process, etc), and it AMAZES me how crappy and outdated this stuff is. Microsoft Office? OpenOffice? Any Adobe product? All are polished beyond belief compared to this stuff, and these programs we pay anywhere from $100k to $1m for. The latest one (a $300k purchase) is literally a 10-15 year old application written in Visual Basic. Nothing about it is intuitive. You search through these mile long menus to find this vaguely named option that you just have to know is there, only to bring up yet another unintuitive screen with a lot of non-descriptive labels. And then these things require INSANE workarounds to install on a system, and often crash just as often as first draft open source project. Of course if I were to find an open source program that did this same thing it wouldn't get a second look, because it's "unsupported", and the pay-product is "enterprise grade software" (which means it's expensive, but doesn't reflect in any way how well it works). It's my complete belief that once you get past the $5-10k price range, the price and quality of a software product are inversely proportional.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
...the video cards. Sure you can get a docking station to provide all of the other fun stuff that a desktop has (like (additional) serial ports, more USB ports, an extra LAN jack, etc...), however laptops still haven't overcome the limitation of un-upgradable video cards. Sure you can get expensive laptops with high-end cards, but when all of the games move to the newest version of DirectX, if you want to play them and keep the FPS up, you have to get a new laptop. Until the industry moves to swappable graphics cards, laptops won't be the be-all-end-all replacement for the desktop computer.
How come the whole debate once again boils down to "gaming vs productivity" apps? One comment, above: "My 400$ Dell laptop is good enough... for browsing the web, getting email and productivity apps." (like what, Word or Excel?)
:P)
I use a lot of professional sound editing and composition tools, as well as video editing tools. I understand the specs of firewire and usb but i can tell you: playing 75 1-8 second 96kHz stereo samples with a 8-second seek-ahead buffer off a usb-or-firewire external drive just blows wadly chunks, causing latency problems in the audio hardware and screwing up live overtracking. Add to that the overhead of SMPTE, midi and a software synth and i'd like to see the notebook that won't crumble with that kind of I/O. So, sorry; the "use an external drive" approach just doesn't work in this situation.
You can compose on a notebook, maybe even lay down some scratch tracks, but you aren't going to produce an album on one.
My laptops are satellites; useful for checking email, playing with drum loops, writing the occasional hate mail to the MAFIAA, etc. Two of them serve as troubleshooting and analysis tools and only have system software and utilities on them (of course running Linux
I'm only using them because clients have given them to me when they've rushed on to the next "upgrade" because they think they need 3GHz, 1GB DDR-2 and some craptastic ATI gutted integrated graphix to read their Hotmail or watch their cracked "Clueless" dvd.
You cannot replicate my full tower with 4 internal RAIDed hard disks, two cd/dvd disks, dual network cards and dual graphics cards in a laptop package; just no way. And i USE that power.
And, incidentally, it does come in handy for the occasional frag-fest x.x
I worked for Lockheed Martin for 2 years, and I had to fight with all my spare time to keep them from doing that to the app I worked on.
How does it happen?
1. Every "senior" decision maker is a relic, or is emulating a relic to get ahead.
2. Specs can be laid out YEARS in advance, turning a good application prototype into a slurry of good ideas melded to meet forgotten and often uninformed requirements.
3. Any interface difficulty can be addressed through enough training! But the truth is planned training is often the first thing cut from budgets.
4. Aesthetics and interface design are considered "premium" functionality, because most dev hauses have poor testing strategies (which are separate from QA). Just getting the product stable can be a major challenge.
Or so my experience suggests...
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Maybe, but then you can also get a $400 laptop that will do the basic web/email/schoolwork thing. And who, apart from us geeks, ever cracks the case on a store-bought desktop PC anyway? Most clueless PC users I've ever known just buy a new box every 2 years or so instead of upgrading, because avoiding the hassle of upgrading is worth the extra $100 or so. With every peripheral out there either USB or wireless (or both!), it makes no sense to even have PCI slots in bargain-basement brand-name PCs. When you add the whole portability/space-saving factor, laptops are beginning to look practical.
Desktops fulfill different requirements and because of this, they will continue to exist. Desktop users sacrifice the mobility deliberately in order to acquire the following great advantages:
-better performance/price ratio. Generally laptops are less responsive than desktops because they are made to save battery power and use energy saving features everywhere.
-desktop parts are less expensive that laptop parts
-the original IBM PC Keyboard Layout. Laptop keyboard layouts are not to my liking. I come from the electro-mechanical typewriter trained generation so I identify more closely with the desktop keyboard layout. I am not fond of tri-function keys. They slow me my keyboard input rate which is the same problem with cell phones which is why you won't ever catch me composing SMS text messages on cell phones.
-easily replace the internal hard-drive to try out different operating systems
-easily replace video capture cards
-easily replace audio cards
-easily add RAM
-cooling/silencing features are customizeable. The PC box can be simply opened to let in more air. TRY THAT Mr. Laptop lover. Putting a laptop directly onto the lap without wearing any pants can be a scorching experience from what I hear.
-theft deterrent. PC boxes are heavy and clumsy to carry along with the fact if you are carrying one, you are easily noticeable. Laptops get stolen so easily. I have heard of cases of laptops being stolen at bookstores, universities and restaurants in plain view during daylight hours.
Cheers
Sure, 20 feet isn't far, but if you want to check your email while sitting in front of the TV, it's 20 important feet.
When my wife got an iBook her computer usage went up by a factor of four simply because she didn't have to sit in the den to use it. She never takes it out of the house.
The cake is a pie
I CAN'T build a laptop. I will never buy a pre-built computer EVER. There is nothing else like building your own computer.
I would have to agree with you, except .... I don't see it.
I do everything at work on my work laptop. 3D cad, 2D cad, video editing, graphics, etc. Slap enough ram into a decent dual core laptop and it'll do just fine.
What, you say? A laptop can't possibly do what a real desktop would do? External 2nd monitor for that big workstation feel. An ESATA PCMCIA card for tons of real HD storage. Gigabit LAN. USB 2.0. Firewire. Internal 7200 rpm drive.
Seriously, you can have it both ways. Work with a "traditional" desktop setup, then close the screen, pick it up, (unhook all the wires) and take it with you. I've seen laptops with nVidia's workstation class video card built in! Get a "barebook" chassis and build your own laptop!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Many posters seem to miss a factor here: When laptops replace desktops for people, they aren't primarily bought for the ability to work untethered, "on your lap". They are used as desktops - small, light, quiet, stylish desktops that draw little power and that can quickly and easily be folded up out of sight if you have company, or if the kitchen table is the family work area and you need to clear up the table for dinner.
The need to regularly plug in the laptop.
As opposed to the desktop?
Poor battery lifetime and recharge cycle performance
Most laptops are never going to be used untethered for any significant amount of time. They mostly stay where they are.
The need to plug in various I/O devices
How many external devices do people actually have? I mean normal people, not people like us that read slashdot. And even I have a grand total of two external devices: an external mouse and a USB drive (plugged in only when doing backups). And again, the laptop is mostly going to sit on the desk and never move more than the twenty centimeters it takes to push it into the back to clear the desk space when doing the bills.
The wearing out of laptop clamshell hinges.
Not a failure mode I've commonly seen even among laptops that actually do see heavy use. The normal laptop will not see the screen shut often in any case.
The low quality of laptop keyboards as compared to the awesome stand-alone keyboards available.
But it is perfectly fine compared to the junk-level keyboard people get with their desktop purchase and which most people never think of replacing.
The need for mice and drawing pads.
Different from a desktop how? Especially if neither is actually ever moved around much. Besides, just plug your peripherals into a cheap USB hub (lots of cool designs and colors available), and you'll have one single plug to connect.
The limited screen size of a laptop (you can of course make an ultra-large screen laptop, but then it doesn't fit in your lap very well.)
It's not going to be on your lap. And most people get a 15-17 inch "value option" low-resolution screen for their desktop anyhow. That 14-15 inch high-res screen on the laptop is giving them a better display than what they would have gotten with the desktop.
The room inside a desktop for various hardware add-ons, such as PCI bus hardware, or highly accelerated graphics engines. Room for multiple drives.
Nobody but people like us ever open their case or do any other upgrade than possibly increase the memory. And then they do not do it themselves; they go to the store and have it done for them. A laptop is much easier to bring to the store than a desktop.
The basic mistake here is to assume that our needs and wants mirror that of the computer-buying population. We don't. We are the "die-hards" mentioned in the summary, and largely irrelevant. At my company we're only buying laptops for desktop use nowadays, and among my non-geek friends, nobody even considers a desktop when they ask for advice.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I must admit I've worked on a few. One was 1 mill with all of the options. It was originally written in HP basic in the late seventies. It had been written by an engineer who had a basic grasp of writing code. He didn't like to have code that wasn't used a couple of times. So to support that noble goal, there was a liberal usage of goto's. Apparently it did things that no one else knew how to do, so it was worth it to the engineering depts of some large companies.
I removed the goto's one summer and turned it into a simple vb project.
So, yeah when there is no competition, it doesn't make much sense to update code thats difficult to update.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.