Soon there will be no reason to have a big, boxy computer on your desk. | Hacker News Reader

Soon there will be no reason to have a big, boxy computer on your desk.

slate.com

11 pointsFlemlord23 comments

I might be in the minority here but I've never found a desktop PC to be particularly restrictive[1]; the main things tying me to a desk when I want to accomplish something are a good chair, a few large monitors and a quality keyboard. I could buy a laptop, sure, but I'd still need somewhere with these amenities and saving a couple of cubic feet of living space seems irrelevant.

[1] The words "big" and "boxy" seem needlessly pejorative to me. I don't complain about my big, boxy sofa which indisputably takes up more of my house.

I agree completely. Laptops are expensive and underpowered. Desktops are cheap, easy to maintain and upgrade, and are easy to make powerful.

Let me know when I can get a sub-$1000 laptop with a 4 core CPU, SLI graphics, 6G RAM, and a 3TB RAID array. Until then, I'm sticking with my desktop.

(When I want to be "untethered", I just use my laptop. I have a 3G modem, so I can go anywhere and just ssh into my desktop. If the laptop gets lost, no big deal -- there's no data on it, and it costs $300. The important stuff is locked inside my house.)

Not only that, but there's such a backlog of great, reliable desktop machines from the last decade! For most stay-indoors purposes, a seven-year-old Dell machine is just fine, and due to the numbers produced is effectively free (or near-free if you need to add some more memory and a new video card before it seems right).

Of course I remember laughing at the crusty oldtimers who, back in 2000, swore they were happy using a '386 running Debian for all their needs. Forgive me if I'm sounding like one of them.

>Laptops are expensive and underpowered

Netbooks are inexpensive and underpowered. I bought one partially to see what all the fuss was about and partially to hack it into a hackintosh :D

The small screen makes them useless for anything other than casually browsing the web. I had intended to do some development work on it, but the slow response time and limited screen real estate make that a real headache. The cramped keyboard slows down your typing also. I'm going to buy a fully-fledged MacBook instead.

Btw, if I wish to just quickly go on the web, I still fire up the netbook and browse away - I'm commenting on my netbook right now ;-) So it's not a complete waste of money. I can envision myself doing all my real work on a MacBook, while using the netbook to iChat my co-founder or to have tech manuals/webpages open on a separate screen as I need them as reference.

I meant to use the word "netbook" instead of "laptop" in my last paragraph. Netbooks are great.

You can get almost all of that, minus the graphics and RAID array, for not much more than 1k.

Just saying. I'm on a dual core that I originally got for under 1k 18 months ago and I'm happy. Will probably pick up a desktop for power but this realistically does most of what I need, and there's EC2 if I'm getting really serious.

If you have to give up the SLI graphics and RAID array then I don't think what you have left constitutes "almost all of that".

If you're using a RAID array you should probably be buying a server, not a laptop.

Your needs are not the same as most computer buyers. Laptops satisfy users' needs better than desktops. As the article mentions, performance is similar for typical tasks, but laptops are portable.

For me, using a laptop isn't about saving living space. Instead of having a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and a laptop for the rest, I just have a fast laptop that I can connect to a big monitor at home or work. No need to deal with synchronizing files between computers and I only have to back up one computer.

Dropbox helps a lot with that synchronizing thing. :)

Its more likely that the average computer user will gravitate toward more portable machines.

Agree completely. Most people don't need to do graphically-intensive tasks, such as gaming or heavy Photoshop editing or other performance heavy tasks, i.e. things that increasingly are becoming the only reason to buy a desktop.

As far as gaming is concerned, I have a relatively powerful PC myself, but I still opt to use my xbox 360 for gaming as using the 360 controller over the keyboard/mouse makes it easier to dive into a game, plus I don't have to worry about install headaches, incompatible drivers/hardware, patches... etc. The 'next-gen' consoles (360 and PS3) have made many of the reasons for buying a gaming PC redundant - networked consoles over Xbox Live! and Playstation network, and advanced hardware that allows graphics and performance to approach high-end PC performance (granted you can spend a few thousand on a gaming PC that will blow any console out of the water, but that isn't a realistic option both financially and in terms of ease of use for most gamers).

For most of the tasks that people want to do on their PC - browse the web, email, compose word docs, skype, instant messaging - I would advise my less tech savvy relatives to buy a cheap laptop.

Considering 'The World' around me ceases to exist for me when I'm at work (as mentally I'm inside the computer/network), I completely agree with you. So long as I can see the screen, access the mouse and type on the keyboard, I don't care if my desk is laden with screaming baboons.

Outside of work though I admit a laptop is tantalizing. Not for space savings on my desk, but for portability.

It might actually be true this time, but haven't articles like this been coming out every year or so for the past 20 years? Maybe longer--- it was sort of the rhetoric Apple was using in the mid-80s, when they pronounced the era of the big bulky box dead, heralding the era of sleek, light-weight machines like the all-in-one Macintosh and the fits-in-a-briefcase Apple //c.

I'm no longer tied to a big boxy computer. Instead I'm tied to a big monitor and an assortment of external hard drives.

I found this bit the most interesting :

'Joshua Topolsky, Engadget's editor, recently called for tech companies to create what he calls the "continuous client," a system that will enable you to leave one device and "pick up your session in exactly the same place on the next device you use,"'

I really think this is the next big step. It's become to me quite an obvious issue since I got my iPad. I want to be able to play a game on my iPhone and then pick up exactly where I left off on my iPad. Or do the same with videos; newspaper apps etc. The devices should just be a different window into your same data world.

My Mac Mini is easily the best computer purchase I've made. This is coming from someone who used to build own PC systems with the fancy cases, fans, etc. some years ago.

It's tiny, it's quiet, and it works like a charm with two 1600x1200 displays. It takes no space on my desk.

I did upgrade RAM and the hard drive myself, though, and don't recommend it for the faint-hearted. It was incredibly nice to see Apple introduce an openable case in the latest update.

I've been down the same road. There was a point in my life where I had full-sized towers serving as a development server. And I mean full-sized -- as in 30 inches tall.

I built the last and final home-built computer in mid-2007. I probably spent about $100 extra in eliminating noise despite having a powerful setup. I was spoiled at the time by my Mac Mini which was silent. A lot of fellow raiders never seemed to "get" that. I guess your computer sounding like a jet engine is fine if jet engine computers are what you're used to. They didn't understand the difference having that same computer being silent makes.

Still, cables. The big box that has to be put somewhere. The power draw. More cables. The switching between it and the Mac. Wireless cards that never seemed to have fantastic range. Not being able to get built-in bluetooth and resorting to annoying dongles. More cables. Forking over more money for a beefier UPS. Another $10/month on the electric bill.

Desks have shrunk over the years as I've shrunk down. From a massive corner unit, to the current 4x2. Next, I'm building it into a slightly smaller than a 4x2 closet with nothing getting in the way of my legs. Whenever I look at old photos, or visit someone, I'm still taken a bit aback as to how much physical space was allocated to the computer. A large desk, large chair, plus the room for ingress/egress, etc would easily eat up 40 square feet.

For now I'm down to a new Mac Mini (with 8GB of memory) and an older, aluminum 23" cinema display until the 27" iMac is refreshed with a better GPU. It's dead-silent. It does nearly everything I need. The 7 1/2 square feet of desk space is barely occupied by it giving me tons of room to spread out documents, notes, etc.

Enthusiasts will always be enthusiasts. That's fine. There'll always be a burgeoning market catering to them. Though for me, I'll gladly pay extra -- considerably extra -- for something that minimizes its intrusion in my environment.

My big, boxy "desktop" isn't on my desk, it's in the closet with long cables to my desk. This keeps the noise and clutter down.

You can't switch parts in a laptop/nettop. For this reason there will always be a reason to own a tower for savvy users who own multiple computers. One is to be left home while the other is taken on trips. There are enough reliable sync solution, so it isn't an issue.

iPads already have 6% of the market for 2010? Oh, that's a projection too.

My netbook is great for working in cafes, and very fast as a development machine, but it is too underpowered for many websites - especially consumer websites that make heavy use of javascript and flash. As the hardware gets faster, software soaks up those cycles, so it's hard for smaller computers to win with moving goalposts.

But the iPhone/iPad seems to have managed this, perhaps mostly by eliminating flash. If they take sufficient market share, websites will have to adapt to it.

Good thing I got a mac mini to run linux on (no other 10W box out there I can get with the same performance), no big boxy computer for me!

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