What's the future of the desktop?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There is a lot of talk these days about the decline of the desktop; for example I read this articletoday by Farhad Manjoo in Slate. I don’t have any strong opinions on this and it’s possible that the desktop skeptics are right. However it seems to me that desktops have several strengths which are often overlooked:

  1. Desktops offer a greater choice of peripherals: you can choose the monitor,keyboard, mouse and speakers that you like and position them just as you want. Laptops can do some of this but not as well and the more you use laptops like a desktop replacement the more inconvenient they are as mobile devices.

  2. Desktops are much less likely to be stolen, damaged or lost compared to laptops.

  3. One of the points that desktop skeptics make is that for many users specs and performance matter less these days nullifying one big advantage of desktops over laptops. This is true but the flip side is that it makes desktops much cheaper on a per-year basis. You can buy a low-end desktop and use it for longer without worrying about obsolete hardware.

  4. Hardware is so cheap that you really don’t have to choose. Why not have a both a desktop and a laptop? Computing is now practically a necessity and even if you primarily work on a laptop why not have a cheap desktop as a backup especially in light of point 2. Also there are more and more choices when it comes to mobile devices these days: netbooks, tablets, smartphones. For many people a desktop/netbook or desktop/smartphone combination might be better than just having a laptop.

Overall I think that desktops may well continue to decline in terms of market share; however I wouldn’t be surprised if they prove more resilient than their skeptics believe.

2

I have 3 personal computers that I use (excluding gaming consoles and cell phones). A desktop, a laptop and an ipod touch. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

I would never want to game on a laptop or ipod touch. The ergonomics of playing a game for 2 hours on a laptop aren’t appealing to me.

However using a laptop computer as a desktop PC tower would work. Just keep a monitor, keyboard and mouse on your desktop and when you want to game (game is a verb now) just use your laptop as your PC tower and connect everything to the laptop. In a situation like that I’d have no real reason to own a desktop tower

Another possible issue is loss. Not everyone wants their PC with all their private data and porn to be so portable and easy to lose or have stolen. Not everyone wants their sensitive data to fit on a laptop in a leather bag that you can easily forget in a taxi or at a restaurant.

3

It’s not just the peripherals, either: Desktops also offer much more flexibility in the internal components. You can put in a bigger hard drive, or swap out a better video card, or even get a faster processor, much more easily in a desktop than in a laptop.

For my most recent computer purchase, I would have preferred a desktop for this reason, but the only desktop Apple makes any more (not counting the Mini or the iMac, which are just as inflexible as laptops) starts at over $2000. Yes, I’m aware that by buying a Mac, I’m paying a premium, but that’s too much of a premium: It was just about double the cost of the laptop I ended up getting.

4

The obvious advantage of desktops is screen size. For many people that’s not an issue, but as a programmer, it makes a huge difference to me–I have two 19" screens side-by-side, and use it all–IDE in one (displaying several tiled files), browser in another, floating windows. Desktops will always have that advantage as a large work surface for those who like to display lots of things at the same time.

Likewise, photo and film editing, graphics work, all benefit from screen size that laptops simply cannot provide unless they’re hooked up to a large screen, which negates their advantage of portability.

5

Moved to IMHO from Great Debates.

6

Imho, all great innovations split, and each segment takes on a new life of it’s own. Poetry, for example, split into the “art” form and the “pop” form. The “art” form is still popular today among enthusiasts, but the “pop” form (rap, songs, etc.) is much more popular.

I think the desktop will always have it’s fans, but the more portable versions will be more popular.

Currently, in the DIY world, desktops are getting bigger and bigger, and cases often will have custom paint jobs or art. Water cooling systems are sometimes bigger than the computer itself. Screens have always been big, but recently, as LCD projector prices decrease, more and more people are using displays that take up an entire wall.

I think we’re going to start seeing more and more fragmenting of what people think “a computer” should be, do, or look like, and for most people, having 4-5 computers on their person at the same time might become commonplace.

I think we might also start seeing more specialization to justify having this many computers. Right now, we have many devices that can do everything, but quality suffers. 15 years ago, computer video cards had tv inputs. Nowadays, people want to watch TV on their TV’s, and use their computers for other things. It’s nearly impossible now to find a video card with integrated TV input, although many today come with TV output.

I also think TV’s and computers will become one unit very soon. As screen size increases, we’ll be able to use part of the screen to type with the TV show in the background.

7

Most people don’t care.

Most people don’t care.

Most people don’t care.

Convenience (plus, most people don’t care).

8

I think you’re wrong. People do care about those things.

9

I love how convenient my laptop is, but a custom-built desktop is still way more affordable and better for gaming. Hence our hideous living room decor: 21st Century LAN Party.

10

I hate laptops. I hate their crappy inadequate keyboards, their tiny screens at irritating angles, and their inherent flimsiness.

I don’t own a laptop, and avoid them, but I think I am in an ever-shrinking minority.

11

The kind of people who don’t care are the same kind who when you ask them what they use their computers for say things like “Oh you know: surfing, checking e-mail, word processing”.

12

Yes, and for those folks, the laptop (or netbook, or iPad, or whatever) would always have been sufficient, had it existed. We’ve moved from an era where the desktop was the only option (even if it was overkill) to an era where there are more options, some of which fit some users better. As it (apparently) turns out, the laptop form factor fits the most people’s needs the best, and desktops declined.

That said: I’ve worked for several large and small software development companies: almost no software developers use laptops as their primary system (although almost all developers have one…or more). Ditto with motion picture artists, large-scale graphic artists, and practitioners of some of the more cpu-intensive sciences. These folks alone are enough to keep the desktop from disappearing altogether for another generation or two. One thing these folks have in common, for example, is a prevalence of multiple, large monitors – something that’s expensive to get in laptops.

Given enough time, it’s likely that desktop form factors will continue to get smaller, to the point where they’re easily laptop (or cell phone, or flash-drive) sized, and alternate display possibilities (foldable, projectable, holographic, paint-on-retina, whatever) will fill the needs desktop users have. When that time comes, maybe the desktop really will disappear. And it’ll disappear from the “average consumer” market before that – some might claim it almost has already.

13

I can squeeze ten years of service out of desktop, with incremental upgrades. I can also be confident that I’ll be able to find peripherals that meet my needs as they come up during that period. I can even choose to replace the motherboard and keep the majority of those peripherals. When I finally replace my towers, I often repurpose them as dedicated devices – a file server, a stand alone MAME machine, a media PC for the spare room, etc. Hell, I am still using an old Pentium that was my main machine in 1997 - as a firewall & proxy server for my home network. These secondary uses are possible because the modular architecture makes it easy to find cheap peripherals to give the hardware a different role if necessary.

I’ve never owned a laptop that didn’t start to feel creaky after three years. Upgrade? Forget it.

A laptop is fine if your needs are very limited (eg; word processing, web browsing, etc.) but they are a long way from replacing desktops.

14 
Yeah like I said you can use a laptop as a desktop replacement in this fashion but it's not exactly convenient hooking it to an external monitor since the laptop monitor gets in the way. Plus you don't have a choice of keyboard. And if you want to use the laptop as a mobile device it's annoying to keep attaching and removing the peripherals. The desktop is always available exactly the way you want it.
15

…And very, very few laptop video cards are decent for gaming on a large monitor. Or in many cases, even a small one.

16

Me too. I owned a laptop for a while and never used it. When I did I was not comfortable and I don’t have sound through my Bose speakers. I like to listen to music. My Mom likes her laptop but she travels all the time and is rarely home. I think for a person like me a desk top is my choice.