Why Desktop Computers Matter as Laptops Speed Up
I just got a new MacBook Pro of my very own which is undoubtedly the fastest computer I’ve ever owned. I hear a lot of people saying things like "I don’t think I’ll ever get another desktop computer again." But to me there is one very good reason to own and use a desktop computer: Desktop computers can provide greater bandwidth connections between your brain and the net than laptop computers can. I’ll explain what this means.
We’re quickly approaching a world where we’re always connected to the net in some manner or another. As we all know, the bandwidth with which we can communicate with the net varies tremendously between locations and situations. It might be
as slow as AT&T’s EDGE network, or as fast as a dedicated office
line with many Gbps of throughput. But when we’re in the office, the speed of our pipe to the net isn’t the limiting factor. Usually it’s the servers on the other end which limit how fast we can get things done. Even when I’m on my DSL line at home, Gmail is so slow that my pipe isn’t the limiting factor. Effective bandwidth is limited by the smallest pipe in the series from your brain to the information service.
Sometimes the smallest pipe isn’t a network layer at all. If you’re using your iPhone on the office’s WiFi network, the network will all run super fast. But your effective speed will be the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and there are many small devices which are way harder to use than the iPhone. There are multiple places the communications pipeline can get clogged:
- The physical Human-Computer Interface of your device
- The UI of the software on the device
- The local processing power of your device
- The direct connection from your device to the series of high-speed routers and fiber known as "the net"
- The processing power of the servers running the information service you’re using
Laptops have totally caught up with desktops in terms of #2 and #3, but not #1. The reason to use a desktop machine is that you can trick out its Human-Computer Interface to be super high bandwidth. You can get yourself a really nice ergonomic keyboard, multiple high-resolution monitors, and a real mouse. A friend of mine even built himself a foot-mouse. Pretty soon your desktop will start to look like Lain’s Navi. (Pictured above for those not familiar with it — go watch it. It’s rad.)
You can do some of this with a laptop docking station if
available, or by manually plugging and unplugging things. Many laptops
support 2 monitors, but generally one of them needs to be the internal
monitor, which won’t match the second one. A USB port multiplier can
handle all your input devices which is nice. So if you’re happy with
just two displays, a laptop can probably get enough HCI bandwidth today.
Looking further down the line, someday Apple will extend the iPhone’s multi-touch UI to iMacs and give us the Minority Report interface. This will offer far more Human-Computer bandwidth than we’ve ever seen before. This trend will continue towards direct Computer-Brain Interfaces at which point the line between our biological brains and our "exocortex" will get very blurry indeed. I can hardly wait.
"Just two displays"? Your world is a bit farther into the future than mine. What do you use the second display for, and why not just get a bigger single display?
I have a docking station for my Laptop (Latitude D610) which has a DVI and VGA out. These can be used simultaneously, and I have 24" and 20" monitors attached to them. That's definitely as much screen space as I can handle.
The advantage of desktops is that they still are much faster than their laptop counterparts. Sure, your Macbook Pro is the fastest thing you've ever owned, but for the same price you can get a Quad-Core Mac Pro which will have much higher performance.
Mars — Two displays are useful for all sorts of tasks…
Homework: assignment on left, essay on left.
Complex docs: Word on left, Excel on right.
Anytime you're building new content from existing content (i.e. research) it's great to have them in separate places.
When writing code, 3 displays are great for:
1. Code
2. Reference material
3. Running app / logs
and if the app is complex enough, #3 might want even 2 displays.
I've heard of financial traders running normally with 6 screens.
With multiple displays, context switching is as fast as moving your eyes — tens of milliseconds. Swapping windows to fit on available screens is much slower — often several seconds, and never better than a quarter second or so.
Multiple screens gives me exactly what I want — a physical location map of ideas and instant context switching.
Toby — it's true that there are markedly faster computers out there for reasonable prices. But my main point is that I very rarely wait for my local CPU to do anything. Loading Excel and running unit tests each take about 5 seconds, which is about as long as I wait for anything. Most everything I do with a computer is limited by other factors.
Leo – back @ HMC I used to joke that certain classmates went back to their rooms and "plugged in" a human I/O (pinky finger) – joking that they had better relationships w/their PCs than w/their classmates. Now that you've outlined the Human I/O as the bandwidth limiter, when do you expect we conquer this interface challenge? Direct brain/computer I/O??
riding on your grandfather's coat tails won't hide the fact that you are second rate thinker
If you think this demonstrates second rate thinking, you should read the drivel I write when I'm waxing philosphical instead of talking about technology!
I can stick a cassette tape in my desktop and turn it into an mp3 file. Some odd devices like that just haven't gone USB yet.
Desktop units are much faster and laptops and they are long lasting too.
Multiple LCD screens with matrix screensavers, bunch of old cheap clustered boxes stacked unceremoniously with side panels removed (don’t need central heating anymore), cables everywhere, status indicators blinking on various peripheral devices, decent sound system, bash, apache, ssh, gcc, bowl of skittles etc… maybe you just have to be a geek to truly appreciate the aesthetic appeal of desktop computers :)