The demise of the desktop computer?
JT and I were having a good ol’ geek conversation the other day where I mentioned I was thinking of buying a SSD (solid state drive) for my desktop. Call me old-fashioned, but I get a certain amount of excitement from editing a paper, a report or a book manuscript on my desktop. In fact, I feel much more in control of how I blog and so on. Somehow, my brain is wired to think “big desktop computer = great editing capabilities”. Don’t ask me why, it may be just me. I guess I also associate the fact that I completed my doctoral dissertation and 2 book manuscripts on my desktop computer.
JT thinks that as we move more into the world of mobile devices (smartphones, tablet personal computers, etc.) slowly but surely bulky, heavy, not-moveable desktop computers will find its demise.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
I just bought a Macbook Air – pretty small thing lol
I had a desktop, mainly for gaming as it had dual-video cards, and big power supply and a few hard drives inside.
I don’t think the desktop will ever go away, laptops and other mobile platforms can only hold so much. Things can’t really get smaller unless we can someone defy the laws of Physics; faster things generate greater heat, making them smaller increase the heat factor right? Don’t want things to catch on fire!
Why get a SSD for your desktop? Do you require the speed? You realize a 120GB SSD is like $200? A 2TB 3.5-inch SATAII drive is $89?
They do make Hybrid drives, part SSD part HDD, cheaper than a SSD but faster than a regular HDD.
a 250GB SSD is close to $400 also đŸ˜‰ I think I saw recently NCIX got a prototype 2TB SSD? It was like $10,000 or something!
My macbook has a 128GB SSD – It’s speedy fast and since no moving parts, I don’t mind leaving it on while I move it around. The disks can’t get jostled because there are none. I will need to use external storage for photos etc as 128GB (split for macOS and windows) isn’t very much. But i needed the ultra portability of it.
Besides, word-processing doesn’t take much horsepower. You could easily blog on a Commadore 64 if you wanted to be really geeky and unique!
I bought a desktop for the first time last fall and I never regretted it.
1. Screen space. I could not go back to a 11 or 15 inch screen ever again. I love the real estate of my 27 inches of screen–either for watching TV or for working with several windows. When I start learning web design, I’ll be glad for it.
2. Disk space. I always had to worry about what was on my hard drive on my laptop… now I don’t need to anymore.
3. Comfort. To work from home, I couldn’t handle having a laptop all the time. It’s really hard to customize the position of the keyboard vs. how close you are to the screen.
Laptops and tablets are great for stuff on the go, unless you want to carry around an enormous and very expensive and heavy super-powered laptop. I think that the desktop will still have its place, and laptops and tablets supplement it.
For the time being, there is still very much a future for desktop PCs. You get a lot more horsepower for the same amount of money compared to notebook PCs. It really depends on how you want to use the machine; for the average consumer who only watches YouTube and checks Twitter, a laptop will usually suffice. For people who need more power for gaming, multimedia editing, and so on, a desktop PC will always have more power for less money.