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Comment by alekq | Hacker News Reader

Besides power, the arguments for the desktops are also price, simple(r) upgrades and repairs.

It also seems that once you festoon the laptop with replacements for its components - monitor, keyboard, mouse, disk drives, camera, mike, etc., what have you got? An expensive desktop that performs poorly.

> repairs

I've replaced a couple screens on laptops. It's a fair amount of work, and in the meantime your laptop is dead while you await the arrival of the new screen. I keep a spare monitor around, and when a monitor dies, I just switch to the spare, and order a new spare. The same for many components, like keyboards, etc. I can't afford my machine to be out of action for days.

When I buy a new desktop, I really just buy a new mobo, CPU, and graphics card. The rest I re-use from the old desktop. It makes such upgrades pretty cheap.

> I really just buy a new mobo, CPU, and graphics card

I think that would be CPU, motherboard and RAM. Graphics cards can be upgraded independently thanks to PCIe, which I often choose to do as they are in a price league of their own.

I'm sad CPU sockets change that often, I would like to stretch expenses a bit more, like using DDR3 for a little while before switching to DDR4. Unfortunately, when upgrading to the next generation, you pretty much have to upgrade those three at once. And Intel is way, way worse with that.

I hear that motherboard manufacturers lobby for new sockets...

It's all a matter of use cases, sounds like you need a desktop. As for me, I have a ninth GEN Intel laptop that weighs less than 6 pounds connected to a docking station that easily let me use my audio interface, all my peripherals, external hard drive's and dual monitor set up.

I often have to take the laptop with me to do work in other locations which completely rules out how cumbersome it would be to do this with a desktop. It takes me less than five minutes to pop it off the dock and throw it in my backpack.

Not to mention how much of a pain in the ass it would be if I had both a desktop and a laptop, constantly having to synchronize the data between the two, and having to have multiple installations of the same software which may be difficult depending on EULA/licensing.

Performance is in the eye of the beholder. The system I have performs more than adequately for all the tasks that I require, I rarely have to wait on compiles for any significant amount of time, video renderings can take a while but that just gives me an opportunity to stretch my legs and take a break from the computer.

The only thing you really need to move between laptop and desktop is an external USB disk drive. You can use it directly, or sync the files. I wrote a program a long time ago to sync file systems.

Commuting to work with just a disk drive worked fine for me when I worked in an office.

I'm just not attracted to the idea of having everything on my laptop, because of the significant risk of having it lost or stolen. When I use a laptop, I just put on it what I'll need, never any personal things.

I'm intimately familiar with syncing, but many of the programs I use have more than just the external assets, they also have internal cache files that represent the states of various projects at any given time. It would be very difficult for me to synchronize these in a safe way especially considering that they're scattered across various hardcoded relative folder structures. And honestly it'll be more of a pain to have to worry about. I've never felt like my laptop was under significant risk of being stolen, even when I'm traveling overseas. But I'm very careful with it and I keep track of it at all times - putting all of your personal data on a single external hard drive just means that that's the thing that is at risk of being stolen instead. I also use a combination of automated encrypted back ups via crash plan and bit locker on my laptop. Even in the extremely unlikely event that my laptop was stolen, it's highly unlikely they be able to get access to my actual data. Having a single laptop lends itself well toward my nomadic lifestyle. It's easily powerful enough even with a mobile CPU and of course there is less heat and power usage associated as well. And I'm pretty sure that I am immeasurably more of a power user than 99% of the general populace (virtual machines, 3D modeling, music recording, video rendering, backend dev work, VR, hell even the occasional triple A game). So if the processor/gpu meet my needs I'm pretty sure that everyone else will be fine too. It just seems like in this instance our use cases are very different, which is fine.

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