Chris' technology problems (as described in the "I like watching news as it happens" post) actually led me to an interesting question: will the average person of our generation ever choose to buy a desktop again?
As far as I can determine desktops offer no significant advantage to the vast majority of what I'll call our generation (loosely defining "our generation" to mean anyone who remembers the Internet explosion but who is too young to remember the introduction of Atari). Competitive hard drives, video cards, optical disc drives, memory sticks, and ethernet connections already exist for laptops. And as solid-state drives (a.k.a. big flash drives) become more competitive the price of hard-disk drives should fall even further than it has already.
Granted there exists a small, and possibly growing (?), population of users interested in high-end functionality (e.g. memory-intensive gaming, video editing, audio recording, etc.). These people will always desire the newest technology (as a technological difference in something like video editing capabilities can create wildly different end products), which is usually pretty bulky and cannot be fit immediately into a laptop, so they will usually require a desktop. Basically those in industries that pioneer the usage of new technologies will be chained to desktops, but I cannot imagine a situation in which a laptop with a docking station (including a full-size keyboard, mouse, and monitor) would be insufficient for a typical young computer user.
To take this argument one step further: I imagine that over time cheap, streamlined laptops (e.g. netbooks) with only a handful of features (e.g. web-browsing and text editing) will gain a huge foothold in the US market for computers (I don't have enough experience or knowledge to speculate outside my home country).
In my efforts to prove that I will someday be correct I ended up checking out Amazon's "most popular items in Laptop Computers." When I checked the list (updated hourly) thirteen of the top twenty-five most popular items were netbooks. The top four items are netbooks, and only one laptop was able to crack the top ten. Apparently netbooks, "[...] now account for 7 percent of all portable PCs [...]," a proportion much higher than I thought it would be.
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Interesting post - embarrassingly, I had never even heard of netbooks. Seems like a good idea for a lot of people - travelers, the elderly (we recently bought my grandmother a laptop for the sole purpose of email), those without a lot of money to burn.
ReplyDeleteI just found out last night that one of my roommates doesn't own a computer. He keeps TV and computer out of his bedroom to force himself to read and "be productive"(?). Not sure how well it works out, given that most of the time I see him glued to his blackberry, but I still sort of respect his willpower. I love the full internet (not the blackberry version) too much.