I still stand by my comment that for the foreseeable future, the proportion of desktops to tablets isn’t going to change too muchQUOTE]
the figures I can see here pretty much back you up…
Tablet sales shot up in the early 2010’s and have been declining since 2014. Desktop sela have been slowly dropping for many years. Laptop sales are pretty stable comparatively.
of course the answer is “smartphone”. There’s an “also” though. When I sold PC’s in the 1980’s/90’s, each new PC [Intel] processor meant you could do new things & new apps & OS’s came along to use teh greater processing . Nowadays, with the exception of gaming, rendering and a few other vertical applications, any PC will pretty much do anything you want, so no need to chop and change every couple of years
Eventually desktops will be obsolete, but it’s not like it’ll happen at some specific cutoff point. We’ll just see a long slow slide into irrelevance, where fewer and fewer people need them.
I think my work is a good example. We do software development, and we have plenty of tasks that require beefy hardware. But we mostly don’t use desktops any more. I have a laptop that I do my development on. When I’m at work I plug it into a single cable that hooks up a large monitor, keyboard and mouse. When I’m not, I use it as is. And when I need serious cpu crunching, I spin up a virtual machine hosted on a seriously massive server in a rack somewhere that has the capabilities I need and set it running.
None of those things are desktops, which now largely exist in a space that’s not mobile enough to be useful for low-resource tasks and not powerful enough to run the high-resource ones. That gap is likely to keep increasing.
I know a lot of young folks, like 18-23, who are always talking about and showing off their “rigs.” So, I would think if they were to become obsolete it would be due to younger people not using them. However, I find more younger people using desktops than those my age (40s). They just seem to be more customized for gaming. Then you have businesses that will keep desktops for awhile. I think the decrease is mostly in casual personal use.
You don’t need a desktop to run a monitor. A laptop hooked into a docking station or even just plugging the monitor directly into a laptop through the HDMI port works just as well.
One client I worked for didn’t even have computers. You connected to a “virtual” desktop in the cloud, either through what were basically “dumb” terminals in the office or through a VPN connection from any computer outside the office.
Works for me- the occasional “can’t do anything because the internet is out” is more than made up for by the fact that I can get at my files or records from any thin client in any of my employer’s offices - at one point, I might have been working in any one of eight different offices on a regular workday and there were three or four more that I might have been sent to for training or meetings. An actual desktop wouldn’t have worked, and I don’t think a fat client would have been much better than a thin client- anything I wanted to access from multiple locations would still be inaccessible during an internet outage.
Local processing power doesn’t translate into capability. I expect neural implants to eventually drive personal devices off the cliff - screens and keyboards too, which are the most obvious bits of “desktop” systems, along with other peripherals like printers. Sure, I could run a WiFi network of I/O and other devices from an Android hub. But link my nervous system to The Cloud and that hardware becomes superfluous.
Desktop PCs will not be obsolete as long as we desire big displays and we need eyes and fingers to control our systems. Antiquarians will lust for them anyway. Some perv may even desire my Heathkit H8 with the octal keypad and display on front. Just don’t plug the 0k board in backwards - it’ll smoke and explode.
Note that large displays and input devices are independent of desktops: You could have a big display and keyboard which are wire/radio-linked with a phone/tablet/laptop.
Having your files with you is also independent of desktops: You can carry a thumbdrive.
For computing that’s both maximal power and minimal latency, it’s difficult to think of something that could replace desktops; Mobile platforms have heat limitations and cloud platforms have latency limitations which make them unsuitable for the more demanding types of gaming. Desktops might end up being 90% GPU and everything else being a vestigial 10% in price, weight and volume. The only way I can see them completely disappearing is if consoles completely replace them for non-mobile gaming which is possible if console buyers are willing to drop a grand every half decade for their gaming platform.
This is going to vary massively depending on what sort of thing the user is doing. I have more internet problems than many people; but I also have very little if any need to be able to get at my files or records from multiple locations. If I’m intending to travel, I can load what I might need while travelling onto a tablet, and take that with me.
Different systems are going to work better for different people. Because a particular newer system works better for some people, that doesn’t mean all previous types of setup have become “obsolete”.
Like with most things, it’s different strokes for different folks. I work from home and if I have no internet connection, its basically a non-working day anyway. No email, IM, data warehouse or intranet then I’m not getting much work done.
Same with desktops - for those requiring extreme performance, extremely low-cost performance or kitting out a guaranteed fixed workforce (such as a call center) then they make sense. For most other cases laptops make a great deal of sense and in the developed world the cost of a laptop every three years is a drop in the ocean of employing a white-collar professional.
I have a laptop with two screens, cordless mouse and keyboard which I undock maybe 2-3 times a year for a week at a time. But on those rare times when I do, it’s super convenient to just take it with me. It’s also super convenient when it needs replacing or if there is ever a major issues which tech cannot fix remotely. Toss it in a padded envelope and overnight it to the country HQ for someone else to deal with.
Common enough that almost every AAA title has a PC port. As long as that continues, I think PC’s will still be the top choice for “hard core” gaming enthusiasts.
My eyebrow did raise however when I fired up Jedi: Fallen Order, and a popup came up that said gameplay was optimized for a controller. I have an XBox controller for my PC that I use occasionally (mostly flight and driving portions of games - this game had none of that). The game was perfectly serviceable with a mouse and keyboard, but it got me thinking that developers might start getting lazy in their ports of PCs (that already happens occasionally with poor optimization).
Too easy. Whole-body advert experiences await you, especially direct stimulation of your pleasure and pain centers. A Pepsi bottle appears in your mind’s eye - TORTURE! A Coke bottle pops up next - ORGASM! We’ll all be reprogrammed to submit to our Pavlovian masters. We’ll have no choice. The political implications are profound.
Back to desktops. I gladly relinquished mine for laptops. I constantly added new, exotic, bizarre circuit boards to my PCs, which required diddling system files. I spent more time configuring than computing. A laptop’s fixed hardware platform forces me to focus. Yay.
something like 80 percent of pc sales is for gaming …
But the thing is even if a tablet or phone can get powerful enough to make a “real game” mobile gaming has to totally change its business model if it wants to get rid of pcs …
That surprises me. Everyone in my office has a desktop but I’d guess most don’t have a home desktop for gaming. But maybe people replace gaming desktops me frequently?