Flight of the Desktops 430
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."
I still prefer desktops. (Score:1, Insightful)
And I always will.
Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'd like a mouse as well.
-B
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's by theodp. Mindless speculation and unjustified hype. Just ignore it.
But that is now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Desktops' future is bright not bleak (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Nonsense. (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Desktops last and are cheap to repair (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can inform you that most current laptops have an external monitor port, and a few USB ports.
Re:No notebook in my near future. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
There is in mine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Desktops' future is bright not bleak (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
For full size keyboard, displays, and sound, what about using a docking station at home?
Laptops generally aren't very far behind desktops for graphics cards, and if the market continues to shift towards laptops I think you'll see the graphics industry focusing more on the mobile graphics which should reduce cost and bring the latest stuff to market a little quicker.
As for upgrading... people just don't upgrade like they used to. Let me put it this way... if you're not buying hardware that will last at least 2 years for your purpose, then you're not buying the right stuff. And after 2 or 3 years when you start thinking about upgrading and go shopping around you'll see all this wonderful hardware that's ever so cheap and ever so fast... but it won't fit in your computer because those sockets didn't exist. So you'll look at the upgrades you can buy and compare them to the new stuff... and more often than not you'll end up just buying a new computer.
Personally I'm a desktop guy, but I can definitely see myself switching in the future.
That's their main problems (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What are these people smoking? I want some. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Yeah, but you're all geeks! (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but:
a) "Decent" laptops are way too heavy to carry around. Once you've tried a netbook there's no going back.
b) You still have to plug them in if you're going to do a full day's work.
c) You can't adjust distance between screen/keys or raise/lower the screen or tweak the ergonomics in any way.
d) Nasty laptop keys vs. Model M ... you decide.
The article may turn out to be correct for home users but it makes no sense at all in the corporate world.
Re:What are these people smoking? I want some. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Desktops' future is bright not bleak (Score:1, Insightful)
Yo grandma, 2002 called and wanted to let you know you can do this sweet thing called "DPI scaling" in which you don't have to settle for resolutions that were cutting-edge back in the days of Quake 2. It even allows you to manually adjust it on a "scale" so that you don't have to spend ten hours googling whether they make 24" 640x480 LCDs.
Re:There is in mine (Score:1, Insightful)
My netbook is 11.6" dual core , dedicated graphics, 500 gb HD, and 4gb ram.
Why are you all in the dark ages?
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:3, Insightful)
ill take a netbook, myself. I had a 14" thinkpad....damn decent laptop at the time, smallish, not too heavy. I used it at work for a while. Love the thing, but for an every day carry when I dont *need* that much, it got annoying. I got a netbook (an earlyish 10" model)
Id like either a netbook with an ion chipset and dual core atom, OR (preferably) an 11" notebook with a CULV processor. 3 -4 hours is usually plenty to get my by on battery life, the netbook is just slow enough to get annoying sometimes, but Im not unhappy with it at this point
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:4, Insightful)
...and a foldable 24" screen and full-size keyboard?
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:3, Insightful)
If only they would choose to lose the keypad but instead add the navigation block in the proper position... I'd buy one immediately.
Numpad = useless
Navigation block = priceless while programming*
* combinations like shift+home/end, shift+pageup/down, and various ctrl/alt/shift combination with cursor keys must be easy to use.
Re:But that is now (Score:3, Insightful)
And when I want to upgrade my processor...oh, wait, not with a laptop, at least not if you want to make a generational jump in processors (small upgrades may be possible, but going from 2 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz doesn't really seem worth the expense and trouble). When it's time to replace the DVD burner with a Blu-Ray drive...oops, no, none of that, either.
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
Don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a laptop right now in a hotel room. But when I'm home, and not surfing the net while watching TV, I want a desktop machine. When I bought this laptop, I went with a small, light laptop (13" display, 4.5 lbs) so traveling with it would be easier (and it has been perfect for that - much better than the 7+ lb, 15" behemoth I used to lug around).
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also got 4TB of disk space, 6 powered USB ports (4 in back of which 3 are in use, 2 in front of which I use one), memory card reader, DVD burner, and a cable-TV video card so I can also use it as a DVR. I copy all of my CDs/DVDs to it, and when I get a blu-ray player for my home theater, I think I'll go add a 1.5TB hard drive to the last slot.
The case is an off-the-shelf case with room for 8 internal drives. I can swap out the entire motherboard, CPU, video card, network card, and any other component.
Granted
My wife has both a very nice laptop and a so-so desktop. She uses the desktop most of the time because it's more comfortable to use and she doesn't have to plug/unplug the keyboard/mouse/monitor to sit comfortably and use it when she works. She'll use the laptop sometimes if we want to look up something on the web while watching TV, but for the most part it goes unused.
In our house, the death of the desktop is far off. To get enough disk space I'd have to add some type of wired/wireless file server slowing. Until they make them with easily swapable components and they come with docking stations, I think the added cost of the needed components just isn't worth it.
'But you already have a laptop' you say. No I don't, my wife does. She bought it because she wanted one, and has mentioned on more than one occasion that she shouldn't have spent the money because SHE NEVER USES IT!
Re:I still prefer desktops. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the issue isn't some sort of inherent problem with Indian programmers, but rather the fact that it's hard to hold them accountable and it's much harder for them to see how their bad code affects them personally. E.g. they don't have to sit in the office with the rest of the team every day and be friends with the people whose lives they are making more difficult by taking shortcuts.
Also, a lot of the very good Indian programmers are working in the U.S. or Europe, so there's probably a bit of brain-drain when you go to India to find some.
Re:That's their main problems (Score:5, Insightful)
> People are not engineers: they buy air conditioners, refrigerators and cars. Very few people can design, build and service them.
It's not about being an "engineer". It's about taking responsibility for yourself and not buying into American anti-intellectualism where it's actually trendy to be helpless and stupid.
It's so trendy to be helpless and stupid that you're discouraged from knowing enough to even recognize a well made device.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see .. I'm sitting in front of a desktop with 8GB of memory, a dual processor, two 22" monitors, a full sized ergonomic keyboard, and a Wacom pad.
You do realize laptops can have all of those things, right? That you can, in fact, plug input and output devices into them? And add memory?
In fact, the laptop I'm typing on right now actually has all those things except 8GB of memory (Because it's old and 32 bit, and I'm still running XP on it.), and the full-sized keyboard is not ergonomic because I hate those.
It's also got 4TB of disk space, 6 powered USB ports (4 in back of which 3 are in use, 2 in front of which I use one), memory card reader, DVD burner, and a cable-TV video card so I can also use it as a DVR. I copy all of my CDs/DVDs to it, and when I get a blu-ray player for my home theater, I think I'll go add a 1.5TB hard drive to the last slot.
You do realize that laptops can have all those things, right? (Although it's a lot easier to plug all your USB stuff into a hub and plug that into your laptop instead.)
In fact, most laptops come with 6 USB ports (And I have to point out that all USB ports on a computer are, by definition, powered.), and a DVD burner, and about half of them come with memory card readers built in, at least for one type, usually SD.
And, of course, USB memory card readers and USB cable-TV tuners are easy enough to get.
To get enough disk space I'd have to add some type of wired/wireless file server slowing. Until they make them with easily swapable components and they come with docking stations, I think the added cost of the needed components just isn't worth it.
And they'd need to come with a 'docking station' why, exactly? Most people just buy a NAS and plug USB drives into them if they want more space.
The case is an off-the-shelf case with room for 8 internal drives. I can swap out the entire motherboard, CPU, video card, network card, and any other component.
That is the only reason to have a desktop that you managed to list.
And as for your wife using her desktop...yeah, only a fool would sit there and unplug stuff from a desktop to hook it to a laptop to use it. OTOH, only a fool wouldn't have bought a KVM in the first place, which is what normal people who have both a laptop and a desktop do.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard? (Score:3, Insightful)
I never understood this argument. My laptop is 7.5 pounds and it's got a 17" widescreen and a full keyboard + number pad. I've brought it to work with me most every day for the past 3 years and have never suffered a hernia or exhaustion or even noticed it. And it's in a bag that adds several more pounds when I'm transporting it.
For those of us who aren't just carrying it to and from work, but are out all day, 7.5 lbs + a few more for a bag gets heavy quite quickly. I don't have an office, so when I'm not working from home, I might be out of the house for 12 hours, shifting between walking, public transport, a library, outside, coffee shop, classroom, conference hall, etc. The difference between having a 5.5 lb notebook and a 2.5 lb netbook is very noticeable when you have to carry it around all day long, not just to work where you drop it on a desk.
I bought the netbook a few months ago, and now the notebook rarely leaves my desk -- only when I'm going to be taking an extended trip somewhere.
Re:But that is now (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it can move?
My work computer is a laptop. 80% of the time it's hooked to a KVM at my house. I plug in a secondary monitor via USB. Another 10% of the time it's hooked into one at the office. (I work from home usually.)
That other 10% of the time it's hauled into a meeting, or taken to a client site. And because it's my actual work computer, all my shit is there when I need it, instead of hoping and praying I remembered to grab everything relevant and hoping I don't forget some password I changed on my real work computer or how to get into some obscure site. (And, yes, the hard drive is encrypted.)
The real joke is, at this point, the battery has entirely stopped working. It's a UPS, it functions for maybe five minutes. When I use it, I have to plug it in. And it's still much more useful than a desktop, because I can move it around, and it has a keyboard, mouse, display, speakers, and wifi all built in.
Now, of course, on the other side of the KVM I have my desktop, which is a medium quality gaming computer/HTPC. My laptop isn't really powerful enough to play games on...although a newer one probably would be. I think work's getting me a new one this year.
I find all the laptop hate here to be very strange. The article is really correct...90% of people who want a computer really should buy, and are buying, a laptop. And most of them don't even know they could set up a little 'docking area' with a keyboard and mouse and big monitor if they needed to do a long stretch of work on them, but they are buying them anyway.
The world really is shifting.
Sure, there's maybe 10% of the population that needs or wants someone else, and that number is probably disproportionally represented in on /., but for most normal people, a laptop is the better choice hands down.
Re:But that is now (Score:5, Insightful)
and anyone interested in anything more than browsing and IM'ing people pictures of their dicks
That's right, this article is crazy, laptops will never get more that 90%-95% of the marketshare! Only the vast vast vast majority of people who just want to use the internet and run Word and store pictures will buy them! The tiny minority that actually upgrades their own computer won't buy them!
Also, passengers cars will never catch on...how will people move around their pianos?
Seriously, half the people here seem to be in a weird sort of denial. Probably because they either think their computer speed is directly related to penis size, or they consider the intelligence to upgrade their computer related to it.
Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time, as are the CPU-speed wars. Computers have, and will continue to, get lighter and quieter and more energy efficient, not faster. And, thus, laptops will continue plummeting in price.
Re:TFA is wrong. Flight of the geek is more like i (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:But that is now (Score:3, Insightful)
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
The expected usable lifetime of most of this stuff is 3 years, and that's what's baked into the capital expense deduction accounting rules. In three years you'll have 2-4x the horsepower available for the same cost, a generational increase in battery technology, and a higher MIPS/watt that likely kept pace or exceeded the horsepower gains. Under three years, the good stuff worth buying is under warranty (or an extended one like Apple care), over three years you're going to get a far better value replacing it than fixing the mainboard anyway.
If you're a business, you've already baked that into your technology refresh cycles. We don't fix depreciated desktops out of warranty, period. We just replace them and start the warranty over.
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
There's an old joke.. A son comes home from college one winter, and while splitting wood for the fireplace one day, notices his father replaced the old Ax that had been handed down from his grandfather, and his father before that. At dinner that night, he asks, "Dad, what happened to Granddad's Ax?". His father looks at him and smiled, "What do you mean? It's still the only ax out in the garage. Of course, a couple months ago I loaned it to the neighbor, and he nicked the blade so bad on a rock I had to replace the head, and a last month that old handle broke so I replaced it, but it's still your granddad's ax."
Most of the people complaining about the ability to upgrade significant chunks of a box bit by bit are probably replacing their entire computer's worth of parts or more over a 3-4 year lifecycle. You're just not doing it all in one chunk, but if you consider it a feature you can go through 4 video cards in 3 years, you might want to reconsider how wasteful someone who just upgrades everything on a relatively stable cycle is being. Eventually you hit major upgrade blocks anyway that the only thing you can keep is the case, and even then it's usually not worth that.
...and that was Then (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I still prefer desktops. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because I can't drill holes in floors and walls that I don't own in order to run cables. I know others who only have Internet access via wireless connections. Neither one of these scenarios are that obscure.
Re:I still prefer desktops. (Score:3, Insightful)
Frelling morons deserved to be bought by Carly Fiorina and HP.