The LifeHacker site had an interesting poll last week, on whether people prefer a laptop or a desktop system. Most of the people who said they preferred a desktop system gave one of four reasons for it: bigger monitor, more comfortable keyboard/mouse, expandability, and running the latest games. Those who preferred a laptop liked it’s portability and size.
I’ve had several of each kind of system, and for most things, the laptop wins hands-down these days. Yes, it has only a twelve-inch wide-screen monitor built in, but that’s no problem because I plug it into my 20.1-inch external monitor whenever I’m in the office and use both simultaneously. I use an external keyboard and mouse when I’m in the office as well, eliminating that consideration too.
The laptop does suffer slightly on the expandability front. But when you think about it, that’s nowhere near the problem that it used to be. What do you want to expand, anyway? Memory is usually pretty expandable, even on a notebook system — I’ve just put 4GB of memory in this one, the most that it can handle. The hard drive is easily replaced too, and now that the perpendicular-recording drives are increasing their speed and capacity, there’s a viable replacement as well. I think it’s even possible to replace the CPU on some of them, including this one (not a big problem, the times that I’ve replaced a CPU without simultaneously replacing the motherboard could be counted on one hand without slowing my typing much at all). Most other things come with USB or FireWire connectors these days, or (like my recently-acquired Xerox printer) can connect to the network, wired or wireless.
The one big exception to expandability is the built-in graphics card. You’re pretty much stuck with the one that your notebook system came with. If you’re a gamer, that can be a problem. But notebook graphics cards can handle a lot of things these days; GoddessJ and I team up against several computer opponents in Age of Empires III on a regular basis (me on this notebook, booted into the rarely-used Windows partition; her on her dual-core desktop system), though it wouldn’t handle Dark Star One when I picked it up last year.
There are two other drawbacks to a notebook right now: if a piece breaks it’s a lot harder to repair than on a desktop, and there’s a price premium on really good notebook systems. Both are trumped, in my opinion, by the ease with which I can pick up my entire work and take it with me, and turn it on pretty much anywhere I have some spare time — something I do at least two or three times a week.
My current desktop system is set up as a file-server only, basically to give the notebook some place to do it’s nightly automated backup to. That task could easily be handled by a network-attached storage drive these days, so I’m considering shutting it down completely. And the rising notebook sales figures suggest that a lot of other people are seeing the same thing.
The desktop system, as we know it, is on it’s last legs. As the prices of good notebook systems drop, and the expandability and ease of repair rises, I think the desktop will go the way of mainframe and minicomputer systems — something that you’ll see rarely, and usually in a dedicated server room (where it will be greatly outnumbered by rack-mounted systems).
Laptops are very nice, and for general and much non-general use they are perfect. Desktops though do get a lot of bang for the buck and upgradability though, my desktop is 5 years old and it’s still not obsolete with simple and cheap upgrades.
A high-end Dell XPS laptop like you have is expensive compared to the equivalent desktop, though of course you need portability, and I don’t at present and if I did I’d probably get a bottom-basement model as a second computer, which is comparable in price to a desktop. I’m not sure actually if my next computer will be a laptop or a desktop, but if the former I may be spending serious buckazoids (your geek-cred goes up if you remember that reference) if I get a machine that’s usable as a primary system, and I need that since my current 5yo system is getting long in the tooth now that I’m seriously stressing it.
(Besides, I always wanted an SMP, now that’d be dual-core, system for serious compiling for AUR stuff (ArchLinux’s user-contributed-repository – their regular repositories are binary, while the user-contributed stuff are files that grab and download the original source from host-sites which makes the whole process easily checked) or *BSD.
Of course, that brings to mind Gentoo Linux, though I’ve sworn off the latter for a few years since their development team seems to be mostly consisting of whining and unskilled people now, and even in its heyday, when it wasn’t so buggy and DRobbins was at the helm, Gentoo’s portage seemed quite inefficient compared to BSD ports, for example, which it was modeled after – so something was perhaps wrong, though it was quite flexible and had excellent* documentation.)
Yes, for a high-end system, laptops can quickly become a lot more expensive right now. But the low end is plenty powerful enough to run just about anything but the most demanding games, and larger low-end laptops are nearly as inexpensive as desktops of equal power, once you figure in the price of the battery and charging system.
Also, several of the largest laptop manufacturers are putting together a standard specification for laptop parts, which should dramatically reduce the cost of building and repairing them soon (not to mention vastly improving their upgradability). And with the price wars that computers are subject to, those savings won’t take too long to reach the consumer market. I think we’ll see desktops start to disappear in the next few years.
A standard specification in laptop parts would go a long way towards solving some of my (minor) objections to them. Although a low-end laptop and low-end desktop are comparable in price now, the former will have to be replaced and will break a lot sooner than the latter. Laptops are already slightly more popular than desktops, incidentally.
Interestingly enough, Apple is selling laptops to the point of being a top-five laptop seller in the US, but is a minor player in the desktop market. Apple’s own sales figures indicate this too, they sell a lot more laptops than desktops.
(I happen to think MacOS though is terribly overhyped, especially compared to Linux if all you’re doing is all you’re doing under MacOS anyway, the web, email, etc. (with the exception of Photoshop and the like which don’t quite have a counterpart in The GIMP) but that’s another topic. 🙂 Of course, you can run Linux on Macs, Linus does now on his main home system, a PPC Mac desktop, probably to help program the kernel better on the non-intel CPUs.)
It’s not necessarily true that a desktop will outlast a laptop. If the laptop is treated with care, it can last just as long — you’ll probably have to replace the battery every year or two, but that’s the only part that wears out any faster than on a desktop.
I recommend using an external keyboard and mouse with a notebook computer whenever it’s convenient to do so (i.e. if you regularly use it at home or in an office), because I had problems with the internal keyboard wearing out after a year on one of my first laptops. That was probably due to the over-all cheapness of the laptop though, and likely won’t affect modern ones.