Someone on a thread I made listed desktop PCs as outdated, and it got me to thinking. With how rapidly technology advances, will laptops, smartphones and tablets become as powerful as desktop PCs, eventually making them obsolete?
Until better old eyes and hands are invented, there will be room for computers with larger screens and keyboards. Even if we could somehow go to an all voice input, big screens will be desired. You should see some of the screens that sit on my colleagues desks. Twice as big as standard screens – and those are youngsters with good eyes. They set their fonts at sizes I can hardly read.
None of the lesser devices offer the full services of a desktop computer. For some applications, size is unimportant; convenience and power is everything. Take video editing, for example. Although portability can be useful on occasion, the tiny size of laptop keyboards and screens and the limited expansion possibilities make laptops absolutely impractical for my primary editing unit.
And trying to edit video on a phone would be an exercise in personal torture.
No. Because of power consumption and waste heat, the top end portable device processors will continue to not be as powerful as the top end desktop processors in any given period. (The top portable device processors can be and are faster than the top desktop processors (and supercomputers) of the past.)
Also, processor technology is moving at a slow crawl compaired to earlier decades.
I do it–with this.
The configurability of desktops (towers, that is) is far better than anything else, too. I’ve never needed to look in to completely replacing my hand-built PC that serves as my media center, or the HP Pavillion I bought for my home office (both around 2010 or so) because their parts are SO easy and cheap to replace. I’ve replaced hard drives, video cards and wireless cards but that’s it. Eventually I’ll max out on processor and RAM and need to replace the mobo, processor and RAM but I’ll still be able to use the cases, hard drives and hopefully the video & wifi.
I see desktops going out of style for non-power users, for casual users, either in favor of phones and tablets or laptops. But the desktop is still super practical for a lot of things, and can keep the pace just fine.
I sure hope that is a whoosh, as I am familiar with that software, and the comments in that link suggest it is a lemon. Except for short, quick video clips, I can’t imagine combining multiple video files, images, sound clips, etc. on a phone. My latest edit took 6 hours on a desktop and it wasn’t the most demanding I ever had, either.
Doubtful because larger cases mean more space for chips (CPU, GPU, memory), more airflow for cooling (or watercooling runs), more storage capacity and all the rest of it. Even if you waved a wand and made a tablet as powerful as a high end desktop, you could just stick three in a desktop case and link them together (not literally as such but in concept).
You would need to reach a point where more space couldn’t help add more capacity and I can’t see that happening.
And cost! My workplace paid 5k for my desktop last summer because I edit video. For the hell of it the IT guy priced a few comparable laptops and 5k looked like a real bargain compared to 10-14k.
Plus if you spill your coffee on the keyboard, it’s only a $10 replacement instead of thousands.
If I spill coffee on my laptop, I follow up with a splash of a Bloody Mary. Kinda evens it out, y’know? 
I can’t find any flaw in that logic.
They’ve been “almost dead” for 15 years now. Until a $2000 gaming laptop can replace a sub $600 desktop, I think not.
We currently have an annoying problem at work with the newer Levapro laptops. They have a single cable which provides LAN, power and the signal from the monitor.
Monitor. As in, the cable doesn’t have enough capacity for two monitors, which are still quite convenient for the kind of work we do, especially as a large enough single monitor would be prohibitively expensive.
At least that’s what IT tells us. Or they just want to save money and not buy a second monitor.
We buy desktops at work whenever possible because they cost less than comparable laptops.
I had used a laptop, but it never left my desk, so now I have a desktop. Every if I had a laptop, I’d add a full-size keyboard; laptop keyboards suck rats.
I was thinking of getting a laptop (with a separate keyboard) when I need a home computer, but now I don’t see the point, since if I want portability, I’ll just use a tablet.
I was thinking computers would evolve into portable modules.
When you’re on the go, it’s your phone. When you’re at the house, you plug it into your “desktop” which is basically just an empty shell that connects your module, keyboard, and monitor together.
My employer’s default is to provide employees with laptops for reasons of portability; employees can take their laptops to meetings and on business trips. When employees are using laptop PCs at their main office desk, the PC sits in a docking station that connects it to an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor(s), providing them with interface devices that are no different from a standard desktop PC.
Real desktop PCs are only provided when an employee has a clear need for egregious computing power (3D rendering, numerical simulations, etc.).
Large screens are useful for people with uncorrectably shitty vision, but they are also associated with higher pixel counts - the latest and greatest, AFAIK, being 4K (3840 x 2060). More pixels means more information; with a big screen and 8 million pixels, I can have numerous applications open and in view at the same time. Not only is each app big enough to see, there are enough pixels available to render each app with clarity. Even with good vision, you can’t do as much with a 1024x768 display as you can on a 3840x2060 display. My desktop monitor at home is 43", and I know someone whose desktop monitor is 65 inches.
Price drops are at least partly responsible for the increased popularity of large monitors. 22 years ago I was excited when I bought a 21" CRT; it was well over $1000 at the time, the equivalent of $1600 today. My 43" flatscreen monitor - with over four times the area and over four times the # of pixels - cost me less than half of that.
Only tangentially related, but another person in the thread said that landline phones are obsolete.
I didn’t know landline phones were outdated until a couple of years ago.
I guess I’m behind the times.
For gamers, especially, desktops will always be the thing because of the video cards you can put in them that you cannot put into a laptop, and because of the very large monitors we like.
Nope.