I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers (opens in new tab)

I prefer a desktop because:

1. I like big, big monitors.

2. I prefer a full size keyboard.

3. I prefer a separate mouse.

4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed.

5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk.

6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.

7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.

8. I can replace/alter parts of the machine without buying a new one.

9. Desktops are cheap.

10. I can build what I want with parts from newegg. Premade powerful computers are always "gaming machines" and I don't want a gaming machine that comes with a graphics adapter that sounds like a 747 taking off.

11. I want an all-metal case because a machine caught fire once.

Edit: 12. My desktop doesn't have a microphone or camera, so they cannot be surreptitiously turned on remotely.

> I know that new "open" laptops are still available, but most of them--the System76's, the Purisms, etc.--are overpriced in my opinion

This quote suggest to me the author is an integral part of the problem.

Companies are ALWAYS trying to increase their profitability. If they can lock down the computer, they can drop the price while _increasing_ CLTV.

That’s why System76 is more expensive. They’re NOT overpriced. They’re priced as “general purpose computers” must be to be competitive.

I agree with this author, but this suggests that the strength of his conviction is maybe $400.

From the article: "What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for the masses is that so few seem to understand that it is ending."

Correction: Has Ended. The vast majority of people using computers has shifted to phones and tablets. I have a friend who's a millenial who barely knows how to use his desktop PC (It's a Mac) but is fluent on his iPad/iPhone.

Most people are not content creators, they are consumers. The people who are still building their own PC's are mostly enthusiasts. There's no profit in building custom PC's anymore, so local computer shops aren't selling them (And if they are, it's at a hefty premium).

The author of the article calls the 1980's the "Golden era" of personal computing. I disagree. Networked computing is an amazing thing, but it's also been monetized and now the consumers are the product being sold. And happily so. The outliers are those who buy pre-2012 computers so they can skip UEFI and are happy to live under their rocks to do it. That's okay with me.

Personally I need a faster computer than that, so I'm stuck with UEFI and because W10 is the right OS for my needs, I'm stuck with it phoning home. This doesn't mean the golden age was in the 80's or 90's. It means that by the time we figured out how to make computing awesome, we also figured out how to make computing itself profitable, not just the computers. The golden age the could have been, never was.

Instead of blasting UEFI, take a minute to learn about tools like `efibootmgr`, and how to install your own keys, so that you control your own machine. UEFI is a bit overengineered, but it's OK.

- Most computers' UEFI firmware, desktop or laptop, allows you to install your own keys.

- And every computer I've ever heard of with UEFI will allow you to disable secure boot.

- Linux runs just fine on UEFI.

I'm worried about a lot of the trends in laptops and smartphones, but I'm not yet worried about UEFI.

I have been reading this same article for the past thirty years. Yet, I can still install and run whatever operating system and software I want on my laptop _and_ desktop, and I don't see any sign that that freedom will go away anytime soon.

It is true that the billion-dollar media companies have decided a subscription model is more lucrative than a one-time-purchase model for the mass-market content they produce (movies, TV shows, music, etc.).

But also unlike the author, I don't think my ability to consume mass-market media on my own terms is a moral imperative or has much bearing on my overall freedom. If Warner Brothers doesn't want to sell me a copy of Transformers 43 that I can play with VLC, I don't see that as much of a threat to anything I care about.

What's crazy to me is how insanely overspec'd mobile devices are for what they deliver. If you went back in time and told 1999 me the following:

I'll give you a computer with the following:

* 256GB of solid-state storage

* 6 CPUs @ 3+GHz

* 8GB of RAM

* Weighs only 200 grams

* Battery-powered, lasts 5+ hours

* 1440 x 3168 resolution display

I would have been absolutely gobsmacked. Such a machine absolutely outclasses every desktop up into the early 2010s!

And then you would tell me that it's mostly used to shitpost on reddit and Twitter and would be completely useless as a development machine, and the manufactures would do everything to make it impossible to put what software I want on it...and also it would spy on me everywhere I went in order to sell me garbage...

We took a wrong turn somewhere, didn't we?

What seems odd about this to me is his complaint that what he wants is out there, in the form of laptops built for linux and set up exactly like he wants, but they're "overpriced". Uh what? If you're gonna be that picky about your setup, then it's time to pony up and pay for it. This stuff is never gonna get more manufacturer attention unless people buy it. If you wanna pay the lowest price, you should expect to get lowest common denominator in terms of setup.

I don't understand the conflation of uefi with secure boot. Uefi can be independent of secure boot—I use uefi and have never enabled secure boot—the purpose of uefi was to consolidate definition and discovery of various bios-level APIs. Probing memory, setting video modes, and more; these things were poorly specified, and implementations frequently differed. Uefi is huge and overengineered, but it's still a definite improvement.

It's frustrating to me (as a UEFI engineer) to see and read the fear-mongering on blogs like these. Much of what I do is focused on open-sourcing and making the industry as a whole better.

I tend to side with others in the thread that the "end of general purpose computing" isn't a result of manufacturers pushing in a direction but rather following consumers. The percentage of computer scientists, programmers, and enthusiasts that consider the openness of their hardware a deal breaker grow smaller each year. For the rest of the population, they can find something that's general enough for their use cases.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for opening hardware up and making it transparent. But until we as general consumers (not just the fine folks of Hacker News) care enough to let that sway our buying decisions, this trend is going to continue.

There will always be general hardware. It's just going to get more expensive.

I find it strange how the article puts forwards having to build a desktop computer as some kind of weird, horrific, form of torture. Oh no man! Don't build a desktop computer. Anything but that! The problem can't possibly be so bad that... h-he is considering --building-- a computer... Does the author not know how many computer enthusiasts do just that every day and what a basic task it is? They literally teach you enough about hardware to put together your own PC in most introductory college courses. These days its like lego blocks.

I don't think the assumption that processing power is decreasing and all devices are becoming dumb terminals is true, either. Moore's law... Look at the new chips released by AMD and Intel. Look at CPU benchmarks: the more recent chips blow older generations out the water... and there's no conspiracy to keep these advancements out of consumer's hands. Anyone is free to buy a server rack and build a small super computer (should they have the cash.)

What this article raises that I agree with is the complaint that many chips contain proprietary blobs that can't be inspected or removed. Unfortunately, technology like this is how companies try protect trade secrets. It's definitely not ideal, and backdoors + security flaws have been found in these areas in the past. I think if you're concerned about such flaws you really have to ask yourself whether you need to protect government-secrets... or whether your laptop is just going to contain your shopping list and other mundane data. Once you decide what type of data you're going to be working with. You can decide on an appropriate security strategy.

I doubt it makes sense for most people to stick to decades old hardware to avoid the possibility of having someone exploit (and risk revealing what would probably be worth millions on the black market) something in their firmware or microcode.

Pretty much anyone who works for more than 1hr a day at home and doesn't do so on a big beautiful desktop has been making a mistake. (Presuming no limitations like affordability, literally can't fit a desk in their bedsit, etc.)

Anyone who consciously thought desktops were a good idea to move away from in the above case made an initial, much bigger mistake. (Again presuming it was a general lifestyle choice and not some necessity.)

It's as simple as answering the following question:

Would you rather have a) a tiny monitor with a bunch of expensive fragile dying-to-have-coffee-spilled-on-it shit jutting way out at you in the horizontal, always at a weird angle or too low or b) a couple of big beautiful monitors and loads of desk space? If you think you can have both, you're probably wrong. Even a nice dock setup requires you to do things like install brackets under the desk to shove your laptop in to, and disable its monitor lest it become a weird bastard screen full of junk you have no intention of looking at.

All the docks and laptop stands and extra monitors in the world can't solve the problem that laptops are broadly speaking, unpleasant to use. I think the only times I've actually been grateful to have my expensive and pretty laptop, are during power outs - watching netflix in bed. Though the whole setup is reliant on a well practiced construction of pillows and an external bluetooth speaker because no laptop has ever been made with speakers worth the power they draw.

If you can even remotely get away with not using one, don't use one.

> I understand that firmware malware is a legitimate cause for concern, UEFI seems to me to have been more about locking Linux out of the laptop market to insure that Microsoft Windows remained dominant.

Ignorant nonsense.

UEFI, while overengineered, allows for a computer-OS to tell the firmware how to cleanly boot it, so you can have several OSes installed in parallel without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes.

Basically it simply and cleanly solves the dreaded and always unreliable dual/multi-boot situation which almost exclusively Linux users have had to endure, with Windows update accidentally overwriting their bootloader every now and then.

But who complains about UEFI and the solutions it brings and clings to legacy BIOS boot with all its warts and complications? Yup. Linux-users who are so politically opposed to UEFI that they cannot bother looking into the actual technology to see if their political opposition is warranted at all. Talk about FUD, eh.

It’s a sad sight. And I say that as a happy (UEFI booting) 100% Linux desktop-user.

I sometimes answer questions in the tech-help reddits to get a feel for the kind of IT-problems everyday users are battling with.

The amount of people asking if they can upgrade the CPU, GPU, SSD/HDD or memory in their new-ish laptops is disheartening. Most of the questions concerns the CPU og GPU where the answer is no 99.99% of the time these days. 90% of consumer grade laptops have the RAM soldered to the mainboard too now. Luckily the HDD/SSD is usually replaceable or upgradeable in case of failure, performance problems or lack of free disk space... but for how long?

From a purely ecological standpoint, the laptop producers should be forced to buy back and recycle all their shitty unupgradeable, unrepairable, made-to-fail consumer electronics. It's a shameful situation we are in.

If societies can get 99% of glas and plastic bottles recycled using bottle deposit money, we should be able to reach the same figures for consumer electronics like laptops.

I much prefer desktops and don't even own a laptop at the moment, but what's with the fixation on UEFI? I'm not well versed in the technical differences between BIOS and UEFI, but I don't think it really matters? All these people like Richard Stallman and this guy make their lives harder as a method of virtue signaling. I'm convinced they get off on the masochism of making their life hard for the sake of "freedom."

Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to get work done: my Arch Linux desktop that boots with UEFI is functionally identical to one that boots with BIOS. So.. really, who cares?

> The golden age of personal computing in the 1980's is long over.

When an article starts with a statement[1] like this I know I'm in for a whine-fest about how everything sucks now and we need to Make Computing Great Again.

What the author wants is a ThinkPad P Series or a Clevo clone. I don't know why the author is making the assumption that a more modular, utility-focused laptop or portable device doesn't exist. They absolutely exist. Just don't be mad that it's a niche and that other people who just want an appliance have different needs than you. Don't be mad that other people in the world aren't necessarily any more interested in computing than they are in fixing their car.

It's also entirely inaccurate to say that the 1980s was a freedom-loving general purpose heaven. In reality, users still bought into ecosystems and proprietary technologies, perhaps even more-so than today.

For example, remember when you had to worry about what format your floppy disk was formatted in? Remember when the same productivity program on a different platform had different save formats? Remember when different platforms had different ports and physical connections for things as simple as a mouse? It's not like Amigas and Commodores and Apple ]['s were just oozing interoperability with each other.

I've owned laptops for the past 16 years, and not once have I ever considered leaving my desktop computers. Sure, laptops are portable, but that's all that can be said for them.

When you've set up your laptop to be ergonomic to use, it's as portable as a desktop, so that one thing it did well, it turns out, it couldn't even do that.

Laptops are portable, when you REALLY need to be able to compute at some different place than usual.

They're expensive and even then, still underspecced compared to desktops..

My desktop has 20 tib of storage and 64 gib ram, has a 5 ghz cpu and it runs silently most of the time, I can't even buy a laptop with those specs, if I could it'd be super expensive and noisy or frequency throttling.

This is unfortunately going away a bit, but I still have many more upgrade options for a desktop. Now everything is USB but with the right adapters, I can still use those weird ISA cards I've got hanging around, I can still read 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, and CDs and ZIP. (and yes, the "easy" way to read those disks is using a isa floppy controller on a USB to ISA adapter).

Also, I guess I just don't need to move around that much, but when I do, I have a second-hand I7 machine with 16 gib memory that runs linux off of an SSD reasonably well, if I need "performance".. If I only need connectivity, I'm using a this small blue HP StreamBook 11 that I bought for around $200 years ago, it also runs Linux well enough, but it's pretty much limited to running a terminal and ssh.

Over the last 10 years or so I have transitioned to having two big desktops, one at work and one at home, with with a large dropbox folder keeping them in sync. I found I just never needed to carry a laptop with me and could get better price / performance in desktop.

I do get a little nervous being without a computer when I'm on holiday 5-6 times a year, but in 25 years I've never actually had to do any emergency work while on holiday. I think the risk is very small.

I never properly moved to laptops, I just put my desktops on a shelf and wired them to a network, and use a laptop, an obsolete N900, and an Intel NUC attached to my flatscreen (controlled with a bt mini keyboard) with no important local data on any of them - to interface with the desktops. All the drives on the desktops are encrypted, all long jobs and services are run on/from the desktops, the desktops are on Debian stable and the laptop and tv are on testing.

If the day comes that I can't get a laptop that I can unfuck, I guess I'll just have to work in a remote desktop on a VM in one of the servers. I can always keep the laptop and devices from chattering through the routers. I do have a real fear that it might become hard to find routers that I can install OpenWrt on, or that OpenWrt might go the way of Firefox.

There are a number of misplaced points in this article, but I will focus on two.

UEFI, properly implemented, is a huge improvement over old BIOS. It isn't required to be 'locked', and I have never encountered a Windows laptop or desktop that didn't not allow you to disable secure boot within the BIOS. I am not as familiar with Apple hardware so I will not comment on that.

UEFI and it GUID partition layout is superior to traditional BIOS. I develop within embedded systems that rely on GUID partitions to provide granularity of storage. One current system I support has 34 partitions, to support redundancy, safe image updates, and soft recovery.

With UEFI on the desktop, you can implement the same strategies.

So those are two statements in the post that I found to be misleading, if not outright wrong.

On the hardware front, yes, current era consumer laptops have become completely sealed boxes. If you want to own a laptop that can be upgraded and maintained, you need to buy either a gaming or enterprise laptop.

For most people, and enterprise laptop is only going to be slightly more expensive than a consumer grade device. It is not going to be as slim and 'sexy'. It t will likely have useful ports down the side.

On desktops, as long as you are buying a full sized desktop, I have not seen any (yet) that are not completely equipped with appropriate connectors and cabling to support upgrades.

I have seen 'mini' systems that are completely soldered down, but that is the price you pay for small. Connectors consume real estate.

I can't grok why people fall for laptops in the first place. Laptops are a bunch of compromises in every detail: screen size, storage volume, keyboard, sound etc etc.

I got my first PC 30 years ago and never bought a new one ever since. It was always upgrades, small or large. Even stepping up MB and CPU I've kept my drives, graphics card, most of the smaller peripherals, sometimes even RAM, so even the largest changes are always in several hundred dollars ballpark. The process is fun, interesting and makes me keep tabs with industry.

I've bought a laptop when switching to "digital nomad" lifestyle for several years, and it was my very worst experience with personal computing. I've spent about 15 hundreds bucks and never made worst investment ever since.

I don't understand what the author is concerned about. Are there PC laptops being sold today on which you are prohibited from installing Linux because of UEFI / Secure Boot?

My current desktop is getting on about 7 years old. I used to build new computers every year or two, so the idea of getting almost a decade out of the same box is wild and represents how much PC tech has plateaued.

However, I have a nice laptop from work and I really like my work setup, where I just connect a couple ports and instantly have a couple more big monitors, a good keyboard and mouse and other stuff.

So I've really been considering replacing my desktop with a decent laptop at home. I've also seen some benchmarks that are putting fairly commodity systems within spitting distance of what my old workhorse can do, meaning if I invested in a decent laptop I could probably keep about the level of performance I have today, but gain portability.

Then in the last few months we got the new Nvidia 3080 line (with AMD's RDNA 2 coming soon), the AMD 5000 series processors, new classes of SSDs like the 970 Evo Plus which have performance that used to be what we saw with DRAM.

All of these combined in a new system are going to be an entirely new class of desktop performance that my old system won't even come close to touching and portable machines won't touch either.

So I'm thinking of going with a new desktop sometime next year once inventory and prices stabilize, and if I need it a rock bottom budget laptop for traveling. Target price <$3k all-in.

The subtext of the article seems to be the loss of "freedom to tinker" and the loss of control over your gadgets - both valid. Personally, I find the NUC a nice hybrid that is portable and modular enough to keep my inner nerd satisfied :). It currently sits under the TV and runs a Plex server. In addition, as a father of an inquisitive 6 year old, I find the PC a tad better for the following reasons:

- Ability to show the internals (from a few feet away!) thereby spawning curiosity on the possibilities of technology

- His coursework can be seen on TV and ensuring that TV is not merely entertainment

- "Certified" media for him to consume (we don't have youtube installed in any of our devices so I use youtube-dl to download astronomy stuff for him)

The desktops are more rugged and robust in every means at most of the times.

I do not remember using a laptop as my primary dev machine in last 10 years, I use the same 10 year old c2d 2.5ghz machine with newer motherboard(2014-g41mcombo gigabyte) and enough ram.

The system runs both ubuntu and windows 7 at ease and I am not considering update in at least next year. that describes the robustness of desktop. It is not that desktop does not break, they do quite often. But mostly we can manually troubleshoot them, In 10 years I have fried a motherboard, bricked 2 psu, ram and 3 harddrives. Its that I can just fix broken part and get going.

Hardware upgrades are only required if you are resource constrained, like require multiple vm, or multimedia editing and some crypot type gpu and cpu intensive stuffs. Even in those cases desktop shines.

Laptops are really great for mobility and they are really capable machines which can be configured to comparable performance with most of the desktops but not in durability and flexibility.

The more I see articles like this, the more I think about Urbit.

I wish people interested in this gave it more of an in-depth look and actually played with it.

It really attacks the problem at its source in a way a lot of these other methods don’t.

You can use a desktop, but services are still going to be largely centralized. We need a from first principles correction to fix broken incentives.

I agree with the point that modern devices like smartphones ad tables aren't a PC replacement. But having to buy a pre-2012 laptop just to be able to install a Linux distro is false: nowadays mayor distros support secure boot and if this isn't the case of your distro or it complicates the install process you can easily disable it in most of the cases. Actually I was unaware of the existence of motherboards preventing you form disabling secure boot before reading this article. AFAIK the only laptops where you could actually have problems installing Linux are MacBooks due to a security chip (it's called T9? But also I'm not informed about MacBooks so maybe there's a way around), on all others you shouldn't encounter actual roadblocks, in the worst case scenario you could have some minor hw incompatibility.

While were on the subject I'm tired of these BS laptop keyboards. Stop trying to cram a numeric keyboard on there and shifting all the keys and trackpad to the left. It's great for the 1% of the time I need a full size numeric keyboard but sucks for the 99% of the time I don't.

I never left. Assuming a full Laptop with secure boot disabled, running Linux (Fedora) counts.

Unlike the author I do use recent Laptops with Linux. Like the author I like to actually own my machine.

I would never trade this for a "gadget" running Android, ChromeOS, or IOS - other than my phone that is.

I notice the lack of user input/output options. USB requires you to jump thru hoops to use it and does not give the constance bandwidth I got with older ports that the CPU could bit-bang.

Today I have multi-GigaHertz machines that I can't build the simple projects that I could use with my Amigas because I have no way to interface directly to the buss.

The latency of what present computer supplies is horrible.

I switched to a Linux desktop since wfh from a MacBook Pro. It’s superior in every way except portability - but there’s nowhere I could take my laptop right now anyway. I can get tons of NVMe storage, lots of fast memory, a wildly powerful CPU with 8+ cores, an unfathomable GPU(coming from laptops) for the same price as that laptop.

None of this is news but it definitely makes the development experience so much nicer, and I can play any game with max settings on it too. Building desktops is also just a lot nicer than it used to be. There are tons of quality of life improvements in the cases, PSUs with detachable cables, silent fans and cooling solutions, etc.

Does anyone have any recommendations if I want to keep using macOS, but I'm not tied to a MacBook?

I realized I hadn't taken my main MacBook off the dock in 9 months. When I go out, I have an older one that I'm happy to use away from my desk. Since it's acting like a desktop now, I though maybe I'd replace it with a higher-spec mac desktop. But a high end mac mini isn't much different than a high-end MacBook.

It seems if you want a high-performance mac but don't want to spend 6k+ on a mac pro, a specced-out 16" MacBook is the best choice. Is that correct?

I worked on a laptop for 18 months, I'll never do the same mistake again.

It was awful on all dimensions, even the portability as the thing I choose at the time was not light, I used it at home only once.

Not worth it.

For previous work I had a big workstation (HPz620, 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram, large GPU)

Whilst it wasn't portable, it was _fast_. Granted not in single threaded performance (they are all old hat nowadays)

But I could run a bunch of containers, VMs if I wanted and run slack and chrome (although I use firefox mostly)

New work has given me a fancy macbook. Which is fine, but I miss the extra resolution of the 4k screen (which I suspect is perceived rather than actual. I have very small fonts)

I also miss linux as a local dev environment.

For me the most important factor against using a laptop is cooling. With a desktop you can go to the extremes and install water cooling. With a laptop you're always compromising on performance because if the load gets high the processor starts throttling and thus its performance is severely reduced. As a side effect there's also the issue with noise. A laptop fan is way more noisy than a desktop one because there's so much more space inside the box.

I'll never give up my desktop PC. Never. Pry it from my cold dead hands if you dare.

The author seems to care mostly about UEFI and secure boot, but there are other advantages to desktop (not to mention the likely partially permanent shift to remote work post-covid). Personally, I run a bit of a hybrid setup.

My new Dell XPS 13 came with Ubuntu pre-installed (which I replaced with Void Linux) and for the most part allows for a lot of tweaking. When I'm at home, I connect to my eGPU unit with one cable, allowing me to use my secondary monitor, a proper mouse, and external hard drives (although internal is already 1TB SSD). The eGPU unit is a Razer Core V2 with a GTX 1060, which is good enough for VR games, which play well on Linux these days surprisingly. Then a lot of my stuff is self-hosted in the cloud anyway, like a media server, backups, servers for development, even an IRC bouncer. I also run my own smart home software on a raspberry pi.

So while at the moment this might not be typical for an average consumer, the trend towards edge computing will really make the laptop into an "internet appliance" as the author says, and the browser an OS. Hell, with 5G, cloud gaming for VR may even be viable, and then we're back to the equivalent of terminals and mainframes.

The only real issue then is the ownership of these services — I don't agree with the author that everything will become a SaaS and no more open hardware will exist. It will always exist as long as there's a demand for it, you just have to accept that it'll be more expensive and less consumer-friendly. E.g. I have to accept that I can't hotplug my eGPU on Linux like you can on Windows, and I need to pay for my servers. Spotify and Netflix will always be cheaper than any legal means of acquiring media otherwise specifically because of their size.

I would like a pc that would be silent, small and would actually look good. Most cases have "gamer" or "office" aesthetic, neither of which I like. I think the only decent looking is Streacom DB4: https://streacom.com/products/db4-fanless-chassis/

I’ve always had desktop PCs at home, and I’ll always have. For me, a laptop PC has always been a complement to a desktop PC, not a replacement. My desktop PCs are sitting on the floor, so they don’t take up much space.

Author: the site reads comfortably for me at 50% zoom, the default is very hard to read on, um, desktop.

In January I knew the pandemic was going absolutely destroy everything so I bought 3k worth of parts for liquid cooled AMD build. After developing on OS X for 20 years, I’ve been working from home on Manjaro (gnome) for 8 months and never once regretted it.

Totally done with laptops, honestly.

Even "appliance" devices can be used in a manner which increases freedom, e.g. retain iPad flexibility and reliability while using it as a thin client for self-hosted content and services on FreeNAS/TrueNAS on open hardware. Choose iOS apps (e.g. Omni, 2Do, DevonThink, GoodReader, Codebook, Netnewswire, LumaFusion, Textastic, Working Copy, Secure Shellfish, PhotoSync, Jump, Screens) which support synchronization protocols like CalDAV, WebDAV, ssh/scp, SMB, DLNA, RDP etc. With the recently introduced iSH (user-space Linux) on iOS, more integration options are available. You can also use an iOS remote desktop with mouse/keyboard to drive remote desktops and VMs that have less OS/app restrictions.

If more people are working at home, in one place, the value of a laptop decreases quite a bit

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see a resurgence in desktop computers since all the places a laptop shines: coffee shop, train commute, working on a plane, aren’t all that important anymore.

Not to even mention these shitty island type keyboards in all laptops.

From all features of pre 2012-NOW laptops the REAL KEYBOARD is what I miss the most.

I really hoped that Lenovo will make something more from its 25th Anniversary Edition ThinkPad (some name id T25) but from what I know only 5000 pieces were made and finito. Or ar least that Lenovo will PERMANENTLY provice a classic/retro ThinkPad with every new generation with REAL KEYBOARD.

That is why I still use 2011 ThinkPad W520 and ThinkPad X220 - to have REAL USABLE KEYBOARD with REAL PGUP/PGDN HOME/END INS/DEL keys block in the top right space.

Future looks very dark since years in the laptop space.

The more I look into laptop computing (and often computing in general) the more only single word stands out.

D I S S A P O I N T E D

It's nice to hear that I'm not alone. I still have a music library, and rip dvd's with handbrake. Ripping a dvd with a 12 core desktop machine is a breeze, and so are other general computing tasks.

I know I'm probably a dinosaur. I run a lot of desktop applications for work, and run most my models locally. I use the shell to automate tasks, and rarely use the "cloud" and try to limit browser tasks.

What's funny about this post is that I'm actually in the market for a new laptop, and am quite paralyzed in the process. I can't get myself to spend $1500 on some mediocre machine where everything is soldered on the mobo, I can't replace the battery, and that will become garbage in 2 years.

If your place of work is static, like an office desk at your company or at your home, why would you not want to use a desktop for work?

I really wish my employer would just give me a desktop; they keep insisting on giving me a laptop that I immediately close and plug into a dock. But, it's just not a fight worth having for me.

way late to the game here but...

I too have been considering going 'back' to desktop recently, but it's to do with the pandemic. Laptop died last may, I got a new one, and... it's still reasonably good. However, I've been far less mobile in the last few months, and that will likely stay that way for a long time.

I've been primarily on laptops for the past 12-13 years or so. Much of my work involves traveling and meeting clients, sometimes doing some work on their premises. This was not an every day thing, but it was enough that I considered the laptop the primary tool. And I would typically get the higher-powered laptop models when I'd get new ones, as it's the main day to day tool.

The last 6+ months have changed most of my movements. I haven't met a client in person this year. I don't expect I will for at least another year. If it's sooner, it's sooner, but probably not. Being forced in to being non-mobile, my thoughts are turning back to desktops. I'll still want a laptop, but price/performance, I know I can get some more from desktop, and I'm considering switching to desktop as 'primary work tool' in the next couple of months. I'll keep current laptop (18 months old now) and it will serve fine as a secondary tool.

I'm curious how covid will impact other peoples' decisions in this area. I can't be the only one in this situation thinking about this decision.

I recently replaced the laptop that 80 year old relatives where using with a "desktop". It is just a small NUC box, 24" monitor, webcam, wireless mouse & keyboard. Cheaper than a laptop of similar power. And they love it. Because our eyes and hands worsen with age, and mobile computing something for younger people. Maybe this is me in the future, or maybe I'll be using voice control and a bit TV. But for all of us living to an old enough age, small devices will become a problem.

If you care about performance you should not be using a laptop as your primary workstation. Period.

Surprised to not see more love for USB-C docks in this thread?

Have set up three USB-C "workstations" with montior, keyboard and mouse (USB via Logitech Unify) in the house: One cable dock for any of the household laptops. There has been some toothing pain, but with USB-C reaching corporate machines, these are quickly becoming a non-issue.

Have been moving the SO and kids to USB-C laptops over the last couple of years (used Thinkpad X's are great value -- and tend to get full teen approval).

My current desktop system is a Raspberry Pi 4B with a 64 bit quad core ARM processor at 1.5 GHz and 4GB memory (8GB version is also available). It runs BSD's and Linux distributions, it has no UEFI, and I can tinker with it to my hearts content. It's great for writing and coding and everything else I do. If I want to play games, my son has several games consoles.

I recommend that you take a look at the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. They're cheap too :-)

Humm. The author is a bit too security conscious isn't he? To be polite. Also, he talks like using a laptop is the thing to do by default.

Excluding his exaggerated motivation, why would you use a laptop for real work anyway, when you can run a multiple monitor desktop with tons of storage, no thermal problems and a real keyboard to type on?

Personally I use a desktop 95% of the time for work. I own a laptop but I only work on it when I have no choice.

Just the other day I reluctantly put in an order for a laptop with Dell. I hated using laptops for software work. Nothing was powerful enough and specs were limited. My last laptop had a max screen resolution of 1366x768; I was disgusted when I booted it. I don't like Macs.

Due to Covid I moved away from our central office, but next year I'll have to commute there every month or two for meetings. Obviously I can't lug a massive desktop around on a train.

So I bought a customised Dell Precision Mobile workstation. It cost a small fortune, but I reckon I'll have this for years. The CPU will probably outperform my current 4790K and it allows more RAM (128GB) than my current motherboard (32GB). I can also stick a 4G SIM card into it so I'll have broadband pretty much anywhere I am. Ideal for these days of remote working.

I'll get work to buy a M.2 drive and I'll stick a VM on it and restrict work activities to that. If I leave I can just send that back.

I'm not sure I'd buy another desktop if my current one goes kaput. Potentially for gaming, but I don't do that quite so much these days. (Ryzen would be a temptation though.)

I did this a few years ago, I maintain a desktop at work and a desktop at home, and soon, a second desktop at home so one can be dedicated to work.

I have a low powered laptop for 'on the go' but I only tend to use it to take notes in meetings, and rarely if never use it for work.

Gone are the days of buying a 2k-3k laptop every 18 months and being disappointed with the performance!

I can fully get behind the thesis of this post. But I still love using my thin laptop.

My solution: run desktops at home as your own private cloud and use them in various ways from you laptop or phone. Create your own services or use oss services to fulfill your needs from your thin internet devices, no middle man/woman needed, use your desktop/s anywhere. This won't solve your uefi problem if you use modern laptops, nor will it solve your usb 2.0 problem if you stick to old laptops. But set up your own services, don't let them take over! It's quite a bit of work to setup, but maybe it'll get easier if more people take on the challenge. (Disclosure: this is my personal pipe dream, and I'm in the early stages of working this out myself.)

On a side note, the open laptops you refer to can be more pricy, but if that's what you believe in, then support the cause!

Wants “open laptops” but won’t pay for them, dismissing efforts by Purism as “overpriced.” I can’t take this seriously.

Shouldn’t this be an obvious option? When did desktops become a non-thing?

I know it’s not a practical choice for everyone, but I’ve always maintained both a desktop and a laptop. The desktop tends to be both significantly cheaper and more powerful, and it typically also survives a couple laptop upgrades before being replaced.

As long as you work essentially at one place, don't need to work on the go, don't need to show your work to a customer when meeting in a cafe, and genuinely can use a ton of processing power and storage, a desktop is a clear choice.

I suspect a lot of the movement towards laptops was and is due to the desire to run macOS. It just so happens that Apple desktop computers are either way underpowered or way expensive. An MBP is basically the sanest way to run macOS. So MBPs tend to become makeshift portable desktops, with external screens, keyboard, mice / trackpads, power bricks, and cooling pads.

If your work processes are not beholden to Apple software, building (or ordering a customized) desktop is a refreshing gulp of power. You suddenly can afford much more, or spend way less.

I'm writing this from a Linux desktop, and I'm quite content with it.

Bought a desktop computer last week for the first time since 2005. Installed Ubuntu. Still SSH’ing into it mostly from MacBook, but it’s such a boon to productivity to have an always-on machine right here. And yeah the modularity of a desktop form factor is really amazing compared to Apple product line

I went one step further.

Use a server! , You can get cheap used, Dual Xeons 12 cores, with like 128G of ram on ebay for about 1000$

And that's not the only thing you get compared to a regular desktop you get:

  - IPMI
  - Dual Power supply
  - Hot swappable drives!
  - ECC Ram (nice for zfs)
  - A decent Motherboard with PCI extensions

But yes it sounds like a airplane, but the idea is to put that computer away from your desk in a closet or in your basement.

Thanks to Fiber Optic based DisplayPort cables, I have my server 30 ft away from me in the basement. My work area is dead silent!

Note I also use a usb extender and a usb DAC, so I got 2 long cables and I get keyb/mouse/audio and 4K 60Hz video.

I think a comparable spec new desktop would have cost about 5-10k..

With the savings I was able to get a PCI card with NVME drives, and 2x16TB drives and that was still cheaper :)

At best I'd agree on something like VSCode remote: performant _local_ client and remote server. All the things like RDP access to powerful machine or even something in-browser (yes, I know that VSCode is also having electron underneath) are just too slow and too inconvenient.

I had desktops for a while. Then I decided to switch to laptop and bought latest Thinkpad X1 Extreme (at a time). It throttles, it struggles to play even relatively easy games. Occasionally it loses connection to the lenovo dock and I need to restart it. It can't have more than 3 monitors.

When the time of next upgrade will come I'm certainly going to desktop + some light laptop like my wife's X1 Carbon. I don't like macs and I strongly believe that Win + WSL / dual boot to linux are much better for development.

Regarding the "tragic" part of the post... It feels like there are more people learning Python and other things like that than there were 10 years ago. Linux is built into Windows, there is a lot of github activity, is all of this a sign that there will be more tinkerers in the future? That tinkering will be more for everyone rather than a few experts?

Also since you have a lot of computer science majors, and coding is a thing everyone knows about (?), it seems like there will always be a sizable portion that will need proper computers and a proper OS that isn't just a "device". I mean without programmers and technical people in the future the companies themselves will not be able to run so there must always be proper options for those who want it

>>Now, nine or more years out of date in computer technology, I am still using laptops with mostly USB 2.0 ports and internal SATA SSD's.

I'm also using old laptops (T500s) so that I can replace Intel's firmware with libreboot and also install alternative wireless cards.

The USB 2.0 thing is a problem, and reading this article made me think that there might be a way around that, and sure enough, you can get a PCMCIA card with USB 3.0 ports[1].

I know this isn't a long term solution, but it might be an immediate solution to the time spent making backups.

[1]https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00GU-00075?Description=PCMCIA%2...

I get what the author is saying, on several levels. There is freedom (in the Richard Stallman sense) of having a better chance to control your hardware and software. There is something good about having one specific place to work; it is too easy to turn a laptop on in the living room at night when you should be paying attention to your family, friends, or roommates. Desktops are cheaper .

All that said, I have moved 100% away from desktops. I really do like to be able to work outside (two areas to choose from), kitchen table next to our parrot’s cage, living room, or bedroom. Sometimes I need to work while traveling.

Finally, iPad Pros (or similar products) are simply better devices for reading, doing research, and watching entertainment.

I produce music with hardware from Universal Audio, which, if you want true zero-latency monitoring (and yes you do), this is your only valid choice, thus you are stuck with the Apple ecosystem. That means either one of their extremely overpriced and underpowered laptops (like my MacBook Pro), a Mac Mini, an iMac/iMac Pro, or a Mac tower, all with high cost of entry and completely non-upgradable and non-user-servicable. Sure you can try to build a Hackintosh, but I want to spend my time making music, not f-int around with incompatible hardware. So unless I want to shell out $6,000+ for a bare-bones Mac Pro which cannot even be upgraded nor can I repair it myself, desktop is not an option for me.

I used to have a dream computing setup back when I was in college:

A beefy desktop computer - high performance/$ CPU and GPU with several terabytes of storage so I could not worry about how much stuff I download and have several OSes installed without having to shortchange some on storage.

A netbook - one of those 10"-screen dinky little things that had just enough compute to run some basic desktop stuff. I would use this as a remote terminal to the desktop so I could still use the desktop's power from my couch.

As wifi speeds have increased, netbooks have all but disappeared and laptops mostly suck, I'm seriously considering this again, but instead of a netbook I'd jerry-rig a Raspberry Pi into a "laptop".

I cooked two HP 17 inch laptops running finite element analysis tools for --the irony-- a thermal management project. They just couldn't handle the sustained load, even with external fans aimed at their air intake areas.

I've always used self-built desktop towers. When it's time to upgrade we build them five or ten at a time so every system matches. It makes for a much simpler build and bring-up experience.

In this case I needed to continue working, and so I decided to task two HP laptops on the network as external processors for the FEA tool. I have to say, they worked great for about four weeks. During that time they experienced about 18 hours per day of continuous processing. Fun while it lasted.

Old man yells at cloud.

What these people usually don't get is that computer at the end of the day is just a tool. It is a means to an end not the goal. Having a powerful computer for the sake of having a computer doesn't accomplish any meaningful.

To me desktop computer means there's a place where I work. A fixed place. Moreover, as I use my computer a lot, my family knows where I am. It also mean I sit on a chair, not on a sofa.

(it also means it can run Linux properly, not with battery issues...)

I've been thinking along similar lines, especially now that - with WFH likely to be the norm for the foreseeable future - my need for a portable computer is much diminished. I could get a lot more bang for my buck and build a system that was specced exactly the way I want.

The rub for me is that I really dislike Windows. I use it for work - I have to - but it's not an OS I'd choose for myself[0]. I like OSX but the problem there is that, unless you go down the Hackintosh route (which soon I suspect won't really be a viable option anyway with the move to ARM), you have to buy preconfigured Apple hardware.

And then there's desktop Linux, which fills me with dread simply because I've not had great experiences in the past. Moreover, some key software that I need simply won't run on it. Notably Ableton Live. (I know Linux-compatible DAWs exist, but I really like Live and don't want to have to give it up.)

A decade ago, for me, buying a Mac was unequivocally the best option. Now that's perhaps no longer the case and, worse, there aren't any other great options that I can see. I'd be glad to be proven wrong though.

EDIT: Actually, maybe what I could do is dual-boot Windows and Linux. Use Linux for software development and most everything else (even Office 365 will run on Linux under Wine nowadays, apparently), then use Windows for Ableton Live and games. With UEFI it might not be the worst thing in the world to set up and maintain either.

[0] The main beef I have with Windows is that it just doesn't get out of the damn way. It really wants you to know it's there, from the dreadful multi-DPI multi-monitor support[1], gimpily inconsistent UI, the shitty 10 second dance all your desktops and windows do when you plug in another monitor[2], and crappy update mechanism, to the driver issues, WiFi connectivity issues, ropey audio support, instability and blue screens. And there's always, always, ALWAYS some random thing or other sucking CPU and running the fans. Don't get me wrong: every problem that bothers me on Windows also bothers me on OSX. It's just that on Windows these problems bother me several times per day, whereas on OSX I'm bothered by one of these issues maybe once a month. The upgrade to Catalina was initially painful and enraging but after the first couple of weeks, having upgraded everything, all was well again and remained so.

[1] Granted, likely to be less of an issue with a desktop system where you're likely to purchase monitors with identical DPIs and resolutions.

[2] Also less likely to be an issue with a desktop system, unless you need to use a KVM so you can share your desktop displays with your work laptop.

I don't understand why the author only buys laptops without UEFI: I never had problem installing Linux on any machine.

And as far as USB2 limiting backups speed, I would look at a NAS with gigabit Ethernet which any old laptop should have.

I have never liked using laptops for software development for all the reasons (and more) listed in the comments. Also consider using Raspberry Pi for portable apps and development, I am also into open hardware, great projects like the Arduino and pure electronics on bread boards and designing your own pcb. Linux, once the bellwether of of tech freedom is slowly being diluted by corporate interests and bad decisions. There are still places to explore, the amazing world of materials like graphene which is fairly simple to synthesize. To quote from Breaking Bad, "It's Saul Goodman!"

I just bought a system 76 ubuntu native build with 64gb ram and 12 cores. It cost a little over 2K. It was not over priced. There is a demand for these machines in AI and data science. They are not going away.

I never left. I have a few subnotebooks around for emergencies and travel, but all real work is on desktops with a good keyboard, a big screen at eye height, a mouse, and a fast wired Internet connection.

Personally, I already pulled the trigger 2 years ago when I first starting to write Rust professionally. A laptop just becomes far tooooo noisy compiling Rust code. These days I use 3 machines:

* A fanless Chromebook with decent screen for travel use

* An Intel NUC that is hooked to a big monitor, which is also the device I'm typing this on

* A beefy Ryzen desktop that sits in the corner of my balcony, which I usually connect via ssh and perform all the heavy tasks

To me I'm getting all the benefits of each computer, and the combined cost is still less than a so-called macbook pro :)

EFI as a standard needs to be better implemented, but TPMs are your friend when you can change the keys.

I switched back to desktops when the 1st gen Ryzen 8-cores came out and haven't regretted it for a second. Bigger screens, beefy specs, more connectivity, and all of it is incredible value given the price of some 13-14 inch laptops!

I can go actually as light as I would like on my laptop now, even something ARM so that's a plus too, if you don't need mobility and beefy specs at the same time.

Recently I built a small form factor PC for playing video games and streaming and I love it! Here it is, Condensed Anthem Lazer Power: Frostblade NeWT:

https://hypertexthero.com/pc/

Two problems, it has: Weight/portability for when I do need to take it somewhere, and that it runs Windows and I prefer Mac OS. I keep my MacBook Pro because of these but am thinking of making the PC a dual-boot Hackintosh.

I really wish the technology was there for a thin client laptop that can hook up to a more powerful desktop machine, GUI and all, sharing hardware etc.

I've tried VNC and other remote desktop solutions but the but the performance has always been abysmal, it's a niche idea and obviously comes with the network requirement, but I think it would give the best of both worlds when you need the portability of a laptop around the house, with the power of a desktop.

I guess plan9 tried this approach....

The whole time you have been apart from desktops I have been using one.

I recently stepped up the game a bit and built a homelab.

I don't care if most people move on to using dumb devices that limit what they can do: they are probably not the people who were really using computers anyway.

Everyone who wants a good PC will have one, nothing is threatening the existence of PCs and the esports industry will keep them alive.

As for a brick and mortar computer store? If you're lucky you live near a microcenter or something.

Around 2015/6 I went full laptop (Razer Blade 15) with an eGPU and multiple monitors after trying the same with a MacBook Pro (poor nvidia integration) and after years of crashes, overheating laptop shells and weird Wi-Fi issues when returning from sleep with the eGPU, I just gave up.

A couple months ago I got full ATX case with the 16 core AMD CPU, the best GPU out there and it runs cool, quiet and I just RPD to it when needed (prob less than twice a year)

I never moved away from desktops. It’s too much fun to spec and then build the beast of your dreams. I have a cheap laptop for web browsing and low power tasks.

Ive been mainly using a desktop for years, ever since I started working from home. I have the keyboard, mouse and monitor on a sort of 'breakfast in bed tray' type thing I made. This tray fits on top of a little desk I made. So I can work at the desk or in a bed sitting up on cushions if I want.

When I'm not in my computer room I dont want to be using a computer anyway, so theres no downside for me.

I'm also considering going back to a custom build desktop. Lots of flexibility, much more stronger, cheaper, upgradable, etc. I'm already connecting my laptop to a display and mechanical keyboard and mouse. Specially now we work from home and probably continue doing so which I enjoy a lot, I can just put the laptop aside for rare cases I need a mobile computer.

I think the idea of the 'Personal Computer' has been grossly warped over the past 20 years from a tool that primarily serves our personal goals to a 'Device' that's designed to serve the goals of a corporation. The general public has become 'ok' with the concept of paying for a premium for a device but not really owning it.

What I'm really concerned about is Secure Boot, Notarization (and Windows equivalents) and Mandatory SSL being pushed by browser vendors.

Those three things taken together, with a well-targeted government intervention, could turn the internet into a walled garden, in the name of stopping scams/terrorism/child porn/piracy for the first few years, obviously.

I use a docked (TB3) laptop. I have a 49” LG ultrawide, powered by an eGPU.

A desktop would definitely be faster. My wife has a low-end desktop that blows my top-end laptop out of the water.

But I don’t play games, and need to take my system on the road, occasionally, so I need the laptop.

I do have a couple of screamingly fast external USC-C SSD drives. They work nicely, and are teeny.

I miss the modular ability of desktops, but I do not miss their lack of portability.

The best camera is the one you have with you.

The best computer is the one you have with you.

But, I am annoyed heavily that I can't play some great games due to lack of graphic cards, and would like to investigate the whole usb-c/thunderbolt plug in video card thing.

When I bought my current desktop computer it was not so very easy to find one without windows. I live in the Netherlands and I actually ended up ordering one from Germany. It used to be that I could just buy a windows-free pc from the local computer store. I find this a bit worrisome and shocking...

I like mini-pcs (NUC) for dev work, they run linux without much drama, are nice and cheap, and crucially, are not intended to be carried everywhere and stay at the office. I enjoy being physically removed from my work machine. Covid has altered this relationship in a way I'm not sure I like.

I am surprised by this article. Obviously laptops are vastly inferior as desktop machines. The trouble now is that laptops are becoming crap as laptops as well. The thermals on my new XPS 15 are garbage and looking around there doesn't seem to be anything better out there.

I keep a light laptop for traveling, but at home I much prefer a desktop. The fact that I can upgrade incrementally as time goes on and have a choice over which HW goes in is something a laptop just can't beat.

That said, pretty much every point of WalterBright also applies.

The threat on cloud / data side seems a lot more real than on the hardware side.

I personally don’t care what boot stuff is under the hood if it can boot Linux.

Cloud eating everything on the other hand does worry me. Busy building a home server to get away from that a little

Just buy an Intel Nuc i7 or an AMD Ryzen mini-pc. A 1TB m2 slot SSD and 32GB ram. Perfect for programming. You can fit it in your pocket if you need to move it around. Big screens, keyboards and mice should stay at the desks where you work.

I have a big website about finances. Today 80% of the traffic is "mobile". I seriously don't get it.

Because personally I hate to do 'research' with my phone. Of course on the go, or for a quick lookup that's perfectly fine.

Agree. Keeping a work desktop is better option, combined with a low-end MacBook Air, or anything you prefer. There are times when you still have to head to meeting rooms, work outdoors, or in front of TV. Laptop is handy at that time.

Personally, I prefer using a Workstation Laptop, such as the System76 Serval or Bonobo. Most of the time, I'll use a big monitor and mechanical keyboard. But if I'm travelling, I can still use the machine as a laptop.

The level of abstraction at which the average tinkerer is tinkering continuously increases over time. Certainly makes things harder for those who long to tinker at a lower level, but I don't see it as a tragedy.

You’ll be happy you did. People talk about how laptops are “fast enough” which they are, but when you’re using them all day, things happening a tiny bit faster makes for a much more pleasant experience.

I would like a desktop computer (i) with a case that isn't ugly, (ii) that's completely silent, and (iii) core- and librebootable. Any suggestions?

I use a 6 core 64 gb ram thinkpad, I also have a desktop I can use for long running, large disk tasks or virtualisation, when doing so I use RDP.

Already there.

1. 104-key is in my muscle memory and i'm much more efficient.

2. Laptop plus keyboard plus power supply = desktop.

3. By being flexible, I can use only secondhand hardware.

I built my first PC recently, a desktop that I'm running Linux on. Cost me under $600 and is powerful enough for my needs. I love it.

Any good way to use desktop computers while lying in bed? It's so much more comfortable than actually sitting at a desk.

If you really care tham much, don't bitch about the price, but pay for your privacy and convictions.

/linux laptop owner who paid up

If I go back to desktop I would need a swivel monitor. Moving from a desk chair to a couch has made my life radically better

Yep, laptops are horrible for productivity.

I built my desktop about 3 months ago after 16 years of using a laptop.

It’s great!

I also had fun researching how to get the best deal ~$2,000.

Always use desktop when available, better specs = better performance...

I do use a laptop when necessary, on a plane, etc...

If you really care, don't bitch about the price, pay up. Vote with your dollar.

/linux laptop owner who paid up

I was just starting to think about whether I'm ready to move from Macbook only to iMac + iPad pro

I love my maxed out Mac Mini. I hope the Arm processor version breathes some life back into this line

sounds to me more like he should upgrade laptop more often than once in 8 years, if he clearly has issues with performance

mine laptop (T520) was released 9.5 years ago and I have no issues with performance after upograding SSD hard drive and adding RAM

why not compromise https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-mini-desktop...

It seems obvious to me laptop is only superior if you need to carry it with you.

I like big monitors and I can not lie All you MacBook losers can't deny

My main concern with desktops is that they’re much less power efficient than laptops, and therefore create a lot more heat in my office.

Something like a Mac cheese grater is probably more power efficient than my custom built PC, but you lose a lot of the value going with a prebuilt system.

Much of this is the reason for every laptop of mine has a docking station

Never left. On work, I had no choice, but @ home, always desktops.

We're not going to be truly free until we start building our own chips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrEC2LGGXn0

...I didn't realize SW people were leaving desktops?

Glad to see it's not just me :p

I never left

good for u

I bought an HP Elitebook, it was quite pricey, about $3500 but I figured it will be reliable at least. So far the keyboard broke, the screen broke, the motherboard broke (the USB-C connector was loose) all in less than a year. Since replacing all three those the motherboard is breaking again and the keyboard is breaking again and will likely need two more replacements before the warranty expires, at which point I will just toss it for the garbage it is.

My plan is to next time buy the cheapest laptop I can stomach and assume the thing will pretty much only last a year and then move resource intensive stuff to a desktop.

Also I'm not ever buying HP again, they make overpriced garbage.

I used to make fun of desktop computer owners but wow! They're cheaper, the manufactures aren't pathologically trying to screw you over, and the ability to expand them is real!

At this point I'm pretty happy with cheap small laptops and ssh into my larger ryzen desktop in my workshop.

Nothing beats 32 cores with a 32 inch 4K IPS monitor, and a proper mechanical keyboard. Also, wired internet, not subject to radio interference. The very pinnacle of computing experience.

In the past several years, I began using my desktop less and less. All my work happens on a MacBook Pro... a 2015 model and now finally the 2019 16”.

I was actually shocked to see on my iPhone that I’m spending several hours a day on the device. I remember five years ago, my main activity when laying in bed was thinking about things going on in my life or sleeping. Now I spend hours in bed reading on my phone — and honestly, it’s not the most productive or uplifting content. It doesn’t necessarily better me in any way.

I agree that newer devices aren’t necessarily improving in the right ways. The MagSafe charger on my 2015 MacBook was a fairly innovative and user friendly design choice. It no longer exists, presumably to make a thinner laptop, but honestly — the weight of my older machine was never a problem. Apple solved a problem I never had, and I carried that MacBook to and from work everyday for the past 5 years.

It basically feels like a rat race where companies, to show value and drive earnings for their shareholders, are making pointless design choices with no real vision. Even the larger track pad on the new machine doesn’t really solve a problem I previously had. If anything, I just needed a more performant machine, preferably with a larger screen. I honestly would have preferred a better front facing camera, but instead, I have a thinner machine, different keyboard, and larger trackpad. We’re in a period of cheap money with cut throat capitalism — in my mind, the federal government have made all this possible and massively inflated asset prices. Apple’s stock continues to go up up and up because of this.

I’m singling out Apple for examples sake. They’re not alone in this.

I'm kind of flabbergasted anyone from the desktop era stopped using desktop computers. Trying to do serious work on a laptop is either not doing serious work or laughably insane. Big monitors, big IO (laptop motherboards mostly throttle IO), big memory chips, many hardware threads, actually fast and low latency internets; even the keyboard and mouse experience is vastly better than using the proverbial toilet paper tube of a laptop. I mean, maybe most people don't need this: I do. Pretty much every aspect of my desktop makes me more productive. The only downside is it's more difficult to transport my 60lb threadripper than my thinkpad, but even that can be done, and is totally worth the trouble when there is serious work to be done.

Laptops have mostly regressed into consumer appliances; my 2011 thinkpad is significantly faster and has more memory than a 2017 macbook pro. The monitor (and I guess speakers if I'm using it as a TV) is better in the macbook; that's it!

I got an Asus PN50 today... nice little PC