If I had to guess, most consumers can get by with their smartphones for 80% of the things they need to do. For the other 20%, they can probably use their aged or shared laptop.
Except for web development. I can't imagine sitting at a laptop writing code compared to dual 24" monitors.
I can agree about your spec on PC's. I'm still running a 1.7 processor with 4GB of RAM. I just upgraded to WIN8 and have been surprised with its performance. With 7, no way I could have PS and Dreamweaver open at the same time. Now, I can run both with no issues, and the only thing I changed was upgrading to WIN8.
I'm also about to build a PC from scratch and have found the prices for fairly high end parts is coming down drastically. You can get a totally loaded system (Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 2GB Video card) for well under $800.
And yeah yeah, I need my dual 27" as well, but for an entire a year I wrote code+LaTeX for my entire undergrad thesis on a 11" netbook (was too poor to afford anything else). When you really need to get work done, it does the job– the rest is luxury.
" Two displays: 2560p, 2760p, 8460p, 8560p. Three displays using integrated Intel graphics: 2170p, 2570p, 8470p, 8570p. Five displays using AMD Eyefinity Technology: 8460p, 8470p, 8560p, 8570p. "
That's without a dock. All do have docking stations available.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.js...