Open Thread: Laptop or Desktop? Or a Whole Wardrobe of Computers?
We love our laptops. The largest contract notebook computer manufacturer in the world has reported the highest ever single month sales for laptops: 2.4 million in March. In the fourth quarter of last year, laptop sales were up over 20% compared to the year earlier.
Laptops make good sense for most of us, whether we work in offices or from home. You could use a desktop system, but that not only keeps you from going Bedouin at the nearest café, it also means you can’t move to another room in your home when you need a change of scenery for stress relief. Though professionals like graphic designers, video editors, or enterprise software developers with heavy-duty computing requirements might want the more affordable power that comes in a desktop system, many web workers will indeed find that laptops offer what they need.
Still, we don’t necessarily want or need to live by laptops alone. You could supplement a powerful and budget-minded desktop with an ultra-portable Internet appliance like the Nokia N800 or the HTC Advantage. Maybe later this year we’ll see an ultra-thin 12″ MacBook Pro, which might be a good mobile complement to a 20″ iMac at home.
What’s your choice for computing: desktop or laptop or both? What would your ideal “computer wardrobe” include?
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As a web/graphic developer, I’m trying to sell my 17″ widescreen workhorse HP laptop in order to build a desktop.
The reasons? I thought 17 inches was enough when not plugged in, and the 200GB internal drive sounded like enough when I bought it, but it just isn’t. That single core Turion isn’t as fast as it used to be… It’s time to upgrade again.
The lack of upgrade ability is what has driven me back to desktops.
Under $800 at NewEgg will get me a dual core AMD with two gigs of RAM, a nice video card, all the bells and whistles and a 22″ widescreen LCD. All OSX86 compliant parts too :)
I work as a senior online content producer and I have both a desktop and a laptop. I use the laptop more often than the desktop because, like you said, with the desktop “you can’t move to another room in your home when you need a change of scenery for stress relief.”
I hate being tied down to one place. It makes me feel like I’m in timeout. That’s the beauty of wireless technology. (although, I have fallen asleep in bed with a laptop while working, probably not a good habit….)
With two web workers, heavy software development and testing, hosting web sites at home, and kids being brought up in the computer generation, we’ve got a litter of computers here. Two big servers running virtual machines for backbone, a couple of standalone servers that I haven’t virtualized yet, Windows, Linux, and Mac laptops, hefty desktops for serious work, and the kids get the hand-me-downs. It’s an addiction. I count 14 running boxes at the moment…I think.
I do most of my work on my tiny Dell XPS M1210, which I love. At 12.1″, the screen is probably too small for many web workers, but much of my work is in communication, IM, web, and email, so I don’t need that much screen real estate. When I do have to sit down to graphics processing, running a virtual worlds event, or similar, I fire up my home-built desktop powerhouse and keep my m1210 on the desk as well as a comm station.
My husband has a similar setup, which means we run four computers most of the time, and have a myriad of older machines tucked away for testing purposes.
Currently – I’m kind of chained to the desktop to do most of my work – a Tiger Direct built by myself computer, I have an old laptop-thinkpad that I have now installed Xubuntu on; still messing around with it, “my” laptop that my other half uses now – older thinkpad, my file server; another Xubuntu box, and then my video/audio workstation, not networked.
What do I want? Macbook Pro would be nice! I hate being tied to one spot to get work done. I’d much rather sit on my couch or lay in my bed at times.
The word here is – Laptop donations are accepted — in trade of course for an ad on my site(s)!!
Rex :)
Laptop(s), laptop(s), laptops.
A nice big beefy laptop (aka desktop replacement) running Windows XP as the main machine, with a Mac on the side running Parallels, so I get the best of all worlds.
At home our main computer is a 15″ Toshiba Satellite A40 laptop and typically “feels” like a desktop because it is normally connected to an external 19″ monitor, full-size keyboard, a printer and a real mouse. When we want or need to go somewhere else with the computer, we just disconnect it, pick it up and go. Here are a couple of disadvantages I have found in this setup:
(1) The main annoyance I have found it that if the default BIOS setting for video output is set to select automatically, then if we boot up with the external monitor connected, and later want to disconnect it, the system doesn’t detect this, so the system is left in a state without any video. Alternatively, I can set the BIOS video output setting to always go to both the laptop screen and the external monitor, but then I am restricted to the resolutions of my laptop, and to add more grief, my external monitor is a widescreen LCD while my laptop screen has “normal” dimensions and so the graphics are stretched somewhat on my external monitor. (When I “upgrade” in the future, I’ll likely get a widescreen laptop—unless I find I want to dump my widescreen monitor too.)
(2) The audio port is located in a place convenient for connecting headphones (on the side, near the front), not speakers, so the speaker cord is in the way of the DVD drive and not nicely tucked away at the back of the laptop like the other connections. It would be nice to have a digital audio connection at the back for connecting Dolby 5.1 speakers and a regular audio port for headphones at the front of the laptop.
Another thing, our external monitor is DVI capable…and I have not seen any laptops on the market that have a DVI output port. Has anybody found a laptop with digital audio and video output options? I would love to find a true media laptop with digital audio and video output (for both monitor and TV) and then I can’t think of a compelling reason to go back to a desktop.
We also have a couple of old desktops that are used by the kids or are intended to be setup as mirrors of the laptop (I’m considering using a combination of Unison and a version control system like Subversion or Mercurial), so that we can work on either sync’ed up computer.
I use a MacBook, but hook it up to a flatscreen monitor and external keyboard when at home. This has been a good combination for programming, writing, graphic design, etc.
At the moment I run a 14.1″ HP DV1066 which is about three years old. The Pentium M processor and gig of ram are starting to show their age but it fulfills all my needs – communications, downloads and lots of graphic design. The 14″ screen is the most important part, its the optimum balance of portability whilst remaining usable for graphics. I have a more powerful desktop but never touch it. I really want a Blackbook but can’t justify it until it can offer something my current rig doesn’t (other than OSX of course). With that I’d team a big HiDef flatscreen and and Apple TV.
@Mike Gunderloy… and I thought I was a bit extreme! I don’t really have any servers inside the firewall at home (other than network backups), just 2 Mac laptops, 1 Windows desktop, 8 assorted Mac desktops, occasional Linux, and a few other odds and ends network devices. I do a lot of images and video, so CPU, disk space, and RAM are all important, and keep me mainly on a desktop. I tend to get a long life out of my workstations, so I don’t like to skimp on specs. But for communication, I have been migrating largely to web-based so that aspect is more portable.