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The Desktop Is Dead, Long Live the Desktop!
theodp writes "'The desktop or laptop is now in decline,' writes John Sall, 'squeezed from one side by mobile platforms and from the other side by the cloud. As a developer of desktop software [by choice not necessity], I believe it is time to address the challenges to our viability. Is software for the desktop PC now the living dead, or zombieware.' While conceding there's some truth to truisms about the death of the desktop, Sall believes there's still life in the old desktop dog, 'We live in a world of computing where dreams come true,' Sall concludes. 'The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses. But at each step along the way, some applications find their best home – and other applications as well as new applications find the more convenient and smaller home better...So let's keep our desktops and laptops, our PCs and Macs. They are amazingly good at what they do.'"
I can say as a computer repair / consultant shop the desktop/laptop is not dead. people don't like windows 8 and when i tell them i can still get windows 7 they are ecstatic and want me to build them from scratch a computer!
Unless you are stress testing the latest and greatest PC games, very little development in my experience requires sustained high CPU frequencies. A lot of development requires little more than Notepad++ which I've got some decade old laptops that do quite well with that.
The primary limitation I've found at work has unfortunately been memory due to someone deciding 2Gb was just fine for a Win 7 machine. When running half of the corporate apps I'm already into virtual memory... ug. This of course has nothing to do with the power of laptops, just the unfortunate inability to get anyone to plug an additional $25 memory chip in my laptop.