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Flight of the Desktops
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo has seen the future of computing, and it's looking mighty bleak for desktop computers. In the last decade, portable computers have erased many of the advantages that desktops once claimed while desktops have been unable to shake their one glaring deficiency — they're chained to your desk. Last year, sales of laptops eclipsed sales of desktops for the first time, and it's been projected that by 2015 desktops will constitute just 18% of the consumer PC market."
And I always will.
If so, I'll buy the premise. If not, it's stupid.
Oh, I'd like a mouse as well.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The only chance of beating my desktop a mobile device would have is when it's equally priced, transportable, but can be quickly and easily "docked" in so I can use my real screens, keyboard, mouse and speakers.
But that is most laptops today. If you really need a larger screen, you can use an external monitor. When you go to a fixed working location, you can have mice and keyboards and whatever all set up... the one thing you don't really need, is a great big CPU box.
I personally don't even need any of that. I work entirely on a laptop, when I need more space well that's what virtual desktops are for. I find working without a mouse not hampering in the least.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I haven't read TFA, but I disagree, laptops are only catching up with desktops, because more people want and have to be mobile.
On the other side, desktops have a full-size keyboard, a big and nice display, sitting at the desktop doesn't make you bend down and breaks your bearing (I mean doesn't cause malposture), you can play all the latest games, you can quite easily interchange desktop components and upgrade your PC up to three years after you've bought it, you can enjoy crystal sound (by using a decent audio system/speakers), you don't have to burn your balls and lose your precious sperm cells.
Please point me to a mobile solution that has three 24" monitors, a decent fullsize keyboard (preferable a Model M) and a top of the range GPU.
No? Well, then I guess my desktop isn't going to be replaced anytime soon. Sure, I have a laptop in addition to my desktop. But that's not replacing, now is it?
It will still be many years before laptops are as durable and easy to repair as desktop computers are. Laptops are built with everything crammed close together on the inside. Even a small kinetic shock can damage a part, as can minor overheating from a ventilation problem. Repairing them yourself is quite risky unless you're a hardcore hardware geek, and expensive if you have a pro do it.
Desktops, conversely, have lots of empty space on the inside; they are easy to open up and reach into if you want to swap parts around or clean dust. (At least, the ones I've had are. I can't speak for Macs.) I've had the same desktop computer for six years. It's suffered a dead graphics card, a dead sound card, and a dust-choked fan that caused a CPU overheat. I repaired each of those problems in no more than a few hours each, and gave it a RAM upgrade too. I love my laptops too, but there's no replacement for having a machine you can safely upgrade yourself and won't break by dropping six inches. Laptops may outsell desktops but they won't drive them out of the market completely—at least, they'd better damn well not.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
Near future, perhaps not. But what if you could take your iPhone/AndroidPhone version 15 and set it on your desk next to a a pair of monitors, keyboard and fancy speakers and this FuturePhone would detect the devices and ask if you want to use them as your display/input/sound devices. When you're done, just pick up your phone and walk away without skipping a beat.
Give it 10 years, I could see this being how we work.
Atom core processor, 1GB of RAM, 30GB of Disk pace used,mused primarily for web and email. (Actually this is a laptop). I'm probably a more typical user.
The longer desktops last (and they're lasting longer than ever these days) the fewer sales the PC industry can make. And the lower the overall price tag on a system, the less wiggle room there is for taking on a margin.
But I think the posted article has the wrong focus... Desktop vs. laptop is a non-issue because they both cater to the same "personal computing" way of doing things.
The real drama is now between PCs and managed handhelds like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. If all these smartphones end up with bigger-brother tablets that sell well, then PC culture will shrink and the new normal will be systems like iPad that operate within walled gardens that have an anti-Web bias.
But most people need neither portable use it anywhere, or heavy power. Laptops will sit on a desk quite happily, and can take an external mouse.
Common tasks are email, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing. Any games are likely to be budget games aimed at low end systems or systems from a few years back.
Everyone here develops software, or is a gamer or does 3D graphics or video, or is just a fan of gadgets and needs heaps of power and lots of screen real-estate.
That's all fine. but you're not a typical cross section of PC users. You would have been in 1990 or so but people want PCs to play videos browse the web, chat to friends, email... You don't need multiple screens, advanced 3D grpahics or a quad core CPU for that.
Finally somebody with a little clarity! I haven't read every comment in this thread but a pretty big sample and what almost every person (with very few exceptions) seems to be forgetting is that we don't represent the majority type of user. If you're machine is spending a significant amount of its time compiling or you ponder what RAID setup to use then you're not the common user!
A laptop will be more than sufficient for the average user these days. I'm not saying the article isn't total rubbish but my seriously, some of the people here have to get a grip. We're tech geeks and our requirements from a computer aren't the same as Joe public.
Or we just grew up.
Seriously, I used to do that crap. Spend 2 months trying to find parts that all played nicely with one another and were reasonably priced. Ordering from 3 different vendors online. Spending half a day putting it together, and hoping you didn't accidentally ESD damage something on the way. Spending another day setting up Windows or Linux the way you wanted it.
Then, 6 months later, spending half a day figuring out which part just went bad, where the reciepts were, and which parts to RMA first. Being out of commission (or using the older box in the corner) for a week or two until the parts came back. Upgrading little bits at at time, till you hit the upgrade cycle where everything had to go at once anyway: new processor needs new MB. New MB needs new RAM and power supply. May as well upgrade to SATA while I'm at it.
Then, we grew up, got real jobs, and had better things to do with our time than babysit hardware on an upgrade treadmill. So I started buying Macs. If something breaks, it's 20 minutes to drop it off at the local Apple store and let them deal with it. No chasing down half a dozen dodgy Taiwanese companies, half of which are out of business now. The hardware and the software works, and I get reasonable lifetimes out of it. The MBP I'm typing this on is pushing four years, and other than a couple replacement batteries (which Apple replaced for free, the second one out of warranty) and adding another stick of RAM last week, still holds up as my daily workstation in the office and at home.
Sure, I'll replace it eventually, but I don't need to tinker with something that just works every six months just to be on the bleeding edge anymore, and I don't need to replace every part in a computer three times because I can. I can pick something off the shelf, use it for 3-4 years, and then trade up to something where every part has been improved substantially in the meantime.
This
And when I want to upgrade my processor...
Sorry man, but almost no-one does that anymore, not even with desktops. Yes there are still some but you have to admit that practice is declining. At this point you get a few more cores - maybe - and possibly an incremental boost in clock. For what? A 10% gain?
I used to be on that ferris wheel but I got off long ago when consoles started being a decent gaming alternative. I still play some things on the computer, but I'm way more into the practicality of a system and not tweaking to the nth degree.
Laptops these days are powerful enough to serve even as halfway decent gaming systems. I generally keep them about three to four years before upgrading, and that strategy has worked out very well.
In some ways laptops are better than they used to be too, because laptops used to be a bitch to get into but now a lot of laptops offer somewhat easy paths to change out RAM and your HD, and those are the things people upgrade anymore if anything.
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer
I found desktop systems to be hellishly time consuming to maintain, laptops simply do not need as much fiddling with. The time savings alone is a huge boost.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley