"Realistically, no-one I know, needs a Desktop Computer, for the rest of their lives."

[AMD64Blondie]

Also,how do some people manage to browse the internet,and type out emails,on a 6-inch(or smaller) smartphone?

Thumb typing is very awkward for me.

 

[dullard]

Modern laptops are just as powerful as desktops

That statement is quite a stretch of the imagination. Maybe if you compare a top laptop to a bottom of the line desktop it is true.

 

[KentState]

I'm pretty much like AdamK47 where desktops are being relegated to gaming and actual work is being done on laptops. Mainly because the actual compute is done either in the cloud or on a remote server cluster so the laptop acts mostly as a terminal.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I find with laptops you can't go by specs either. Take a Core i5 desktop and a Core i5 laptop with the same chip/specs. The desktop will run circles around the laptop every time. The mobile version of a given chip always performs less, probably for power savings. I find the same is true with small form factor business boxes vs a self build. The SFF will not perform as well even if it has the same specs as a self build. Something about the exact revisions of the hardware maybe, I don't know. One thing I did notice is our work SFF boxes use a crazy small amount of power, like 15 watts I think? You would never be able to do a custom build that uses so little power unless it's a Raspberry PI. So laptops/SFFs have their use such as in business environments, if for power savings alone. But for home nothing beats a custom build or a regular form factor prebuild.

 

[foghorn67]

I've always felt laptops slow down like mobile phones over time. And no matter how fast I spec my MBP to be, my not-special-at-all i5 desktop at home seems blistering fast with no hesitation for anything. No jank, no chug. Maybe for rendering or encoding, the MBP has it beat, but I still get jank with the it.

 

[Brainonska511]

That statement is quite a stretch of the imagination. Maybe if you compare a top laptop to a bottom of the line desktop it is true.

It's also more like: many laptops are plenty powerful for office work revolving around MS Office products.

 

[dullard]

It's also more like: many laptops are plenty powerful for office work revolving around MS Office products.

Your's is a much more correct statement. Most office workers don't need anything powerful, therefore laptops are sufficient for them.

But if you need the power for your work (complex calculations, 3D modeling, rendering, video editing, compiling large products, etc.) then even the best laptop struggles against say a decent desktop. I think that I was mostly offended by someone working for IT management thinking that laptops are as powerful as desktops. People in the industry, of all people, should know the difference.

 

[sdifox]

Your's is a much more correct statement. Most office workers don't need anything powerful, therefore laptops are sufficient for them.

But if you need the power for your work (complex calculations, 3D modeling, rendering, video editing, compiling large products, etc.) then even the best laptop struggles against say an i3 desktop. I think that I was mostly offended by someone working for IT management thinking that laptops are as powerful as desktops. People in the industry, of all people, should know the difference.

RDP to VMs is a thing

 

[ultimatebob]

Yeah... we now live in an era where an iPad Pro can have more CPU horsepower than a low end laptop. It's weird.

 

[rh71]

You will pry my desktop and 34" screen from my cold dead hands. While they are bulky and stationary, they do everything better than a laptop for me. Gaming with mouse/keyboard, I cannot live without. We don't own a laptop (except my work laptop) since if we're walking around the house we just use our phone to look stuff up. Or stream media on the TV's.

Both my 12yo boys game on their desktops too. They have iPad minis and S9 phones but it's always the desktop unless it's just watching YouTube on their device.

Smaller is for convenience, not necessarily optimal and in many cases it absolutely isn't. Lastly, if there's 1 thing I hate most, it's typing on a device. Between autocorrect and typing non-words like usernames and passwords, that's when I give up on life.

 

[Fritzo]

Which USB dock would you say is the best?

We're an HP vendor, but honestly Dell's USB-C docks are the most solid. Plugable makes great products too...they're the ones we usually deploy.

 

[Fritzo]

That statement is quite a stretch of the imagination. Maybe if you compare a top laptop to a bottom of the line desktop it is true.

We have several clients running CAD stations off of HP ZBooks. They're coming with Quadro video cards build in and can push video to 3 27" monitors with no issues. They're as powerful as desktops.

Enterprise level hardware and home gaming PCs are two different tools.

 

[Fritzo]

RDP to VMs is a thing

Remoting into a virtual desktop is going to be the standard within 5 years. The trend I'm seeing is local hardware going away, and having a base-level laptop/PC/mobile device that docks with a monitor and remotes into a cloud desktop.

Betting gaming machines will follow this model as well.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think the OP's conclusion is flawed because it's based on the assumption that the user's needs are static.

I agree that my needs haven't changed much in 20 years, except in two ways:
1 - Gaming. My R9 380X is the most expensive graphics card I've bought. I'm not a gamer that has loads of recent games, just the occasional new one which means that either the GPU or whole platform needs upgrading. My 2010 build (AM3) was in time for StarCraft 2, my 2015 build (Haswell) was because I suspected the AM3 board was dying (in fact it was the graphics card with an intermittent fault), then I bought the 380X for Witcher 3. Cyberpunk 2077 could trigger another upgrade if my rig isn't good enough, though considering my current situation, maybe I'll wait.

2 - I'm ripping my DVD collection, one disc taking just shy of 10 minutes. It'll change my storage needs (though I have a string of old HDDs), and it could spur me on to getting a really meaty CPU so I can do more transformations with say older films/series.

What I say to customers is go for a desktop every time unless the mobile need is too great. The fact of the matter is that desktops have that one limitation and that's it.

I'd be inclined to bet that my Haswell rig isn't still in use once it's reached 10 years old. At some point my needs will slow down more than they have already (I'm 40 now). That's aside from the possibility that something dies of course.

One thing I do think is increasingly sensible though if you're a serious desktop user (as in you're in it for the long term), is to invest heavily in the bits that can be re-used such as PSU, case, CPU cooler (I've noticed a lot lately that the big-name coolers have compatibility spanning at least 10 years worth of generations).

 

[sdifox]

Remoting into a virtual desktop is going to be the standard within 5 years. The trend I'm seeing is local hardware going away, and having a base-level laptop/PC/mobile device that docks with a monitor and remotes into a cloud desktop.

Betting gaming machines will follow this model as well.

It annoys me that corps are so slow on updating their workflow. Still need each dev to install software on their laptop. How about just spin up a VM with software suite configured when you onboard a dev? I told them to switch to that model five years ago... Crickets.

 

[mikeymikec]

Also,how do some people manage to browse the internet,and type out emails,on a 6-inch(or smaller) smartphone?

Thumb typing is very awkward for me.

My wife has a desktop and a smartphone. She has almost completely abandoned the desktop for the phone, despite YouTube ads, the shitty size screen, she doesn't even gesture type, my mind boggles.

 

[rh71]

I don't like typing on a laptop keyboard either. They are a step above typing on a phone or tablet, but nothing beats a proper desktop keyboard - a decent one. It seems a lot of them are trying to imitate laptop keyboards now. I like normal keys and not flat ones.

I hate typing on screens but a low-key keyboard whether laptop or actual keyboard I love because I can type so much faster on it than the clicky ones. No need to be deliberate with keystrokes.

 

[rh71]

My wife has a desktop and a smartphone. She has almost completely abandoned the desktop for the phone, despite YouTube ads, the shitty size screen, she doesn't even gesture type, my mind boggles.

Youtube Vanced on Android = no ads. FTMFW. More ammo for apple haters .

 

[KentState]

It's also more like: many laptops are plenty powerful for office work revolving around MS Office products.

Even at that, so many companies are going to Office 365 or GSuite so the work is done in a browser. I do work with a large company and even on the development side, there is a little use of having tools locally. Everything is either done in a console application, in a web browser or on remote servers. With all the restrictions on where customer data can be viewed and accessed, the ability to do things locally is quickly being stripped away.

 

[dullard]

Remoting into a virtual desktop is going to be the standard within 5 years. The trend I'm seeing is local hardware going away, and having a base-level laptop/PC/mobile device that docks with a monitor and remotes into a cloud desktop.

Betting gaming machines will follow this model as well.

That will be great, eventually. Until then, I get to wait 2 minutes every time I open a file for the slower than molasses server to deliver my tiny file.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Remoting into a virtual desktop is going to be the standard within 5 years. The trend I'm seeing is local hardware going away, and having a base-level laptop/PC/mobile device that docks with a monitor and remotes into a cloud desktop.

Betting gaming machines will follow this model as well.

People are already doing so with unRAID servers and KVM / Linux virtualization / IOMMU, and NAS units with beefy x64 CPUs, like some QNAP and some Asustor (and probably others, basically all of the x86/x64-compatible CPUs can do it, no ARM/MIPS, as long as the NAS also has enough RAM).

 

[PowerEngineer]

Even at that, so many companies are going to Office 365 or GSuite so the work is done in a browser. I do work with a large company and even on the development side, there is a little use of having tools locally. Everything is either done in a console application, in a web browser or on remote servers. With all the restrictions on where customer data can be viewed and accessed, the ability to do things locally is quickly being stripped away.

There is only so much you can do with Office 365 in a browser (such as limits on the size of the files you can open). I am working in an Azure-based secured cloud, but I can only do my work in desktop apps of Excel and Word (extensive use of VBA). I use an encrypted drive for a local copy of my OneDrive to avoid the delays involved in regularly downloading big data files. IMHO there is a quite a ways to go before everything gets moved to the cloud.

Or maybe it's just me. I'm old enough to remember how it was to work under the thumb of the IT departments when everything had to go through the mainframe. The liberation we felt when the first personal computers came out. Computing power directly in our hands! And then the relentless efforts of the IT departments over the following decades that has gradually eroded the PC user's freedom. It will be a sad day if I am ever finally forced to go back to operating through a terminal on the cloud-based equivalent of a mainframe. 😢

 

[CP5670]

I'm like AdamK47 and mostly use my desktop for games and movies/music, and do all work on a Surface Pro laptop. It's much slower than the desktop but easily fast enough for web browsing, office work and even software development. Beyond a point, the portability is far more useful than extra speed. Even phones are powerful enough these days, and I see teenagers often use only phones for everything. As said earlier, games and content creation are the only reason to use desktops anymore, and most people I know who aren't into either of those things have gotten rid of their desktops.

At work, I have usually had laptops with desktop displays and mice/keyboards for the last 10 years. One company used SFF desktops only for security reasons, as they didn't want anything to be remotely accessible.

That being said, I would always keep a desktop around at home (with a TV as a monitor). My desktop has 30 years of games, apps, emulators and Windows customization I've built up over the years. I've migrated them across many builds over the years, and it's become like a personal project at this point. I just did an upgrade of most of my hardware.

 

[Midwayman]

My wife has a desktop and a smartphone. She has almost completely abandoned the desktop for the phone, despite YouTube ads, the shitty size screen, she doesn't even gesture type, my mind boggles.

Mine too. Even when a laptop is literally a couple feet away. She wants to be on the couch, browse facebook and constantly rewind shows she's half paying attention to. I get frustrated in a few minutes of trying to do anything more than super casual stuff on a mobile device.

 

[MrSquished]

Mine too. Even when a laptop is literally a couple feet away. She wants to see on the couch, browse facebook and constantly rewind shows she's half paying attention to. I get frustrated in a few minutes of trying to do anything more than super casual stuff on a mobile device.

I went down to the Jersey Shore for 4 nights last week, brought my fast xps 15 laptop but never used it. I read the news in apps, forums on tapatalk, social media apps, even did some shopping on mobile chrome, on my Pixel 4 XL. Definitely use the phone in a lot of instances where in the past I'd have used a computer. At home though I'm mostly on my desktop.