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For businesses, there are two other considerations:

1. Cost: you get more computing bang for the buck with desktops.

2. Anti-theft: Laptops are easy to conceal and walk out of a building with. I've heard about laptop thefts at places I've worked, but I never heard of a desktop PC theft.

I bought a Macbook vertical dock so that I close my laptop and connect it to two monitors, a keyboard, and a tablet and effectively use it like a desktop.

That basically solves 1, 2, 4.

3 doesn't bother me because I have my headphones on most of the time. If I'm at my workstation, I use my speakers.

5 is subjective. I've been able to get around for the last year as an on-the-go freelancer without much problem with the size or weight.

This allows me the huge advantage of mobility (for working at difference offices, cafes, houses, travelling to other cities, or even different rooms in my apartment) and space savings (I can have my vertical laptop on my desk which takes up the same amount of space as a small lamp) to be coupled with the advantages of having a full-fledge desktop setup.

FWIW, I spend most of my time using graphics programs.

Which one did you get that allows you to hook it up to two external monitors? The hengedock only does one as far as I can tell. I would love to have two external monitors and not have to plug everything in every time I get back from work.

The new macbooks with thunderbolt potentially solve this because you can hook up more than one monitor there. Only on the 15" macbook though.

> 2) I need two external screens. A Laptop Screen + an external Screen is again not ergonomical, pains my eyes to look from a decent 24" into the Macbook Display with its insane pixel density. I like same pixel density on both screens, and same size

Have you taken a look at USB2 DisplayLink devices? I bought one for $75 2 years ago and it's been holding up like a champ for a dual-22" monitor setup at work (similar @home)... I don't even use my laptop screen (which could give me a 3rd screen)... all of this running on a USB hub with keyboard, mouse, etc with no hiccups.

It does fine unless you try HD video on it or playing games - it does great for coding, browsing and writing.

Yeah i have, but these are limited by USB2 and therefor its too laggy for me. Will also stress the CPU even more because of constant image compression going on. Also i work with 3D apps, so i need the real deal. But i have high hopes for Thunderbolt to solve this or the recently announced Thunderbolt viDock that is basically a Desktop-grade GPU in an external box connected through thunderbolt.

Have you looked at any of the ThinkPads? It's pretty easy to get one with a matte screen (in fact, I'm typing on one right now!), and from my experience they're fairly quiet. Not the most beautiful machines, though.

yeah they are very nice of course. But i am doing GPU intensive stuff and thinkpads (any laptop) will get noisy with that kind of stuff.

15" and 17" MBPs have matte screen options. Or you could spend no more than $10 and buy the screen protector (it's more like $2 if you buy it online though).

I second the noise point. If you do "GPU-intensive tasks" (i.e., gaming...) and you actually have a laptop with sufficiently powerful graphics card do run them, dissipating that power will mean running the tiny fans at full speed, and that's loud. To quietly get rid of that power, you need large-area flow, and that means a desktop.

That, and the cost-efficiency of a powerful desktop, is what prevents me from going all-mobile.

2) displayport/thunderbolt and daisy-chaining should help out with this in the future.