Everest Computers Blog About Computers and Web Design

Recently there has been a story in the news that the sales of the laptop computers have overtaken the desktop computer sales. There are many good reasons to this trend, which, I’m sure, is going to be observed in the near future thus reducing the number of desktops in households around the world.

The reasons for the laptop dominance lie:

(1) in their prices, which have been falling for many years now;

(2) in the way people use their computers these days.

It is possible now to buy a good performance laptop with the latest software on it for twice or three times less than 5 years ago. There may be performance issues with these laptops if a user decides to install resource-hungry games or a huge graphic editor on the system but for the day-to-day tasks these computers are absolutely fine.

This leads me to the changes in user preferences when it comes to computers. These days Internet is everything and everywhere and working with the computer for some people mostly mean browsing the Internet, which includes emailing, social networking, instant messaging and other similar virtual “timespendings”. Occasionally these people may look at the pictures, write documents or play music too. But they won’t play games on their computer - they have a game console for that - and won’t use their computer for programming and graphics or music editing. That’s absolutely fine, so do they need a big pc, a monitor for it and a special table for it in the corner of the room to do just that? No, they don’t, they will be happy with the ordinary laptop.

Couple of years ago I was concerned that buying a laptop essentially leads to impossibility of upgrades. Don’t get me wrong, the upgrades are technically possible but they will cost dearly because the cost of laptop components usually goes through the roof in turn because they are only produced by the original manufacturer. This concern is no longer there because as laptop gets older it can now easily be thrown away and a new one bought instead due to the current low laptop prices. This would require some file transfer work but it’s a one-off job and - you’ll agree with me - can and will be easily undertaken for the sake of the technical progress.

There are even cheaper laptops, which are now produced almost exclusively for the Internet users, called netbooks. These are small laptops, which can allow their users to browse the Internet but virtually incapable of doing anything else. This “anything else” may not even be needed by a user, who edits his or her documents online and keeps all of his or her photos online too. As the cloud computing (an Internet-based development and use of computer technology) extends and more and more people get involved, the role of the Internet will increase and maybe one day every personal computer in the world will resemble some sort of a netbook.

But is it all so bleak and hopeless? For me as a programmer and web designer the death of a desktop as we know it will most definitely be a tragedy. This is why I hope that desktops will not disappear and will be used in one form or another.

People whose job is computer-related will have desktops at work because laptops cannot be physically secured and simply there is no need for them in the stationary work place.

The programmers, designers and developers will have powerful machines with big screens at home and at work because the complicated computer development simply cannot be done on a laptop.

The dedicated gamers will always have high-end desktop personal computers to play their favourite games on them. And there will always be the games, which are not suitable for game consoles like various tycoons or simulators.

I also wouldn’t underestimate the powers of a computer upgrade. Instead of buying a new desktop pc because the old one has been gradually slowing down, it is sometimes enough to upgrade it in order to increase its speed and to improve its response time. Computer enthusiasts always strive to improve the performance of their computers and so do many ordinary users.

The world will always need big powerful servers for computer centres, web hosting companies and many other big and small businesses around the world in order to provide various services to people. The cloud computing requests, which I mentioned before, are processed on these sort of computers and there are thousands of them scattered around the world.

In conclusion, I would say buy a laptop with Windows XP or Windows 7 in the near future if you want to be mobile and don’t work with any resource-hungry professional stuff on it. Buy a desktop pc if you’re a graphics designer or an obsessed (in a good sense of this word) computer game enthusiast. Buy a desktop pc if you want to have a control over the hardware and build and re-build a pc as you wish it to be and according to your own taste and knowledge.