
Soon there will be no reason to have a big, boxy computer on your desk. - Flemlord
http://slate.com/id/2257495
======
philk
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.)

~~~
patrickk
>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.

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

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_delirium
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.

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ojbyrne
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.

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simonsquiff
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.

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d_r
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.

~~~
MrFoof
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.

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WalterBright
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.

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norswap
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.

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10ren
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.

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icefox
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!

