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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

Desktop PCs will always outperform portable devices. I think future docking stations will include both a big display and a big processor. When you dock your phone, your phone's apps will be running on the dock's fast processor while accessing your personal data off the phone. When you undock your phone, your running apps will seamlessly migrate to the phone's processor(s).

This will be extremely asymmetric multiprocessing.

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"Desktop PCs will always outperform portable devices"

That doesn't mean portable devices won't replace them. Laptops began to replace desktops a few years ago, the same way PCs replaced mainframes.

That's right: once a certain threshhold of compute performance is reached, the excess is only useful for specialists and gamers.

The other element is that mobile devices are optimised for power consumption / battery life and also for heat output. Desktop devices generally have neither of these concerns, unless they strive to be 'green' or fanless products.

In the era of dark silicon, it might make sense to have those extra processors in the phone itself but only turn them on when you have an external source of power and a good physical connection for dissipating excess heat.

That's too complicated a solution. Linux has had excellent boot time detection of hardware for years now- dock your phone in the desktop chassis, hit reboot, the OS gets loaded from the phone's storage and runs on the tower's CPU and GPU.

Why even reboot? Treat the dock as a hot-pluggable processor: dock your device and the OS can migrate processes to the dock's faster processor.

Mostly because it's simpler- hot pluggable processors offer more and more varied ways of shotgunning your feet.

You might be right that desktops will always outperform portable devices (even though the gap is certainly narrowing), but mobile phones used this way are so convenient that the tradeoff is worth it.

The way things are going desktops are getting TOO powerful.

That's kinda the same as saying Mini-Computers will always outperform Desktop PC's.

The general trend of hardware is that it gets smaller, faster, and more efficient simultaneously. It is highly likely within 10 years you'll be walking around with a smartphone more than 10 times as powerful than the fastest 16-core desktop PC you can buy today, and possibly desktop PC's won't even be sold by then because there won't be any need for them.

If that's a bet, I'll take it. You'll still be able to buy desktop computers in 10 years. They might not be common, cheap or easy to find, but you'll be able to buy them. IBM still makes lots of money selling mainframes, and HP still makes and sells OpenVMS minicomputers.

Workstations at offices, gaming machines, animation and image manipulation will all probably stay on desktops and that will keep them around for years.

The scale of a desktop fits and works. Like how we could make a TV the size of a watch, but we don't because the large 60 inch plazma format, while immobile, has benefits worth the tradeoff.

Full featured mouse / keyboard, larger screens, surround sound are all perks of stationary desktops (I guess you could attach all these peripherals to a laptop, but then you are partially defeating the point of being mobile.

You really think desktop computers in an ATX case, with a full ATX-motherboard, and 5" hard drives are going to be around in 10 years? Seriously? They're becoming rare even today.

After reading that I looked down at the desktop I'm writing this from.

I laughed.

Desktops are by no means "rare". Cell phones have just become ubiquitous, theres a difference. (Laptops too for that matter.)

One of my problems with current generation laptops and netbooks (Besides costing almost twice as much for the same performance.) is that despite being "mobile" computers I end up having to set it down on a flat surface every time I want to use it. Walking around and using your laptop at the same time? Not going to happen. (Unless you buy one of those chest-strap things I saw in the first splinter cell...) The OLPC solved this pretty elegantly with the handle on the back, which is made just perfectly so that you can actually hold the computer with one hand and operate it with the other. (This mainly works because the OLPC is more netbook than laptop.)

And then you get two more problems I have with the laptop form factor: Trackpad vs Mouse, "Keyboard" vs Keyboard.

Trackpads, even when you have a responsive one, are awful. They're like touch screens, but not as cool. If you have anything on your hands, it gets on the trackpad when you use it. Trackpads are too slow if they're set at a speed where your mouse can actually point, and uncontrollable if the speed is turned up.

The "Keyboard"s that comes with most laptops barely qualify for the word. Traditional desktop keyboards can have keys with a height greater than five millimeters. (I'm exaggerating obviously, but laptop keyboards are very flat.) and I much prefer this to keyboards that feel like I'm tapping on a piece of plastic cardboard. I'd almost rather forgo the keyboard entirely and just push down on the little gelatinous circles underneath directly. And don't get me started on replacing one of those keys if they break. (Which they often do.)

And no, touch screens aren't the answer. On laptop screens, touchscreen == dirty display. I already have a rant here about touch screens on mobile devices. On displays bigger than a laptop, you better not have been planning to sit more than an arm's length away from your monitor. Oh right, the future doesn't have big screens in it.

Desktops might not even be common in a decade, but they'll be there. If for nothing else because theres people like me who still like to sit down to a (awesome) computer setup.

You can use whatever keyboard you like, whatever input device you like, but there is no inherent reason why your computer has to be an ATX desktop form factor and anchored to the wall. If you could accomplish everything you currently do on your computer right now, with your phone and plugging your phone into a base station, then there would literally be no reason to have a desktop at all. We are only about 1-2 years away from this reality.

Well. I'd say it's more like five years away from any sort of mainstream acceptance. Not that I'm some anti-hipster, but I don't think it will become mainstream right away BECAUSE:

1) People without smart phones exist. I'm one of them.

2) Nobody is going to be satisfied with phone hardware to control both their phone and their sit-down setup. At least not for a few more generations of Moore's law, and Moore's laws current method for increasing power, stacking cores, is a battery vampire. People who want their phones to actually run for a non-trivial length of time will end up under-utilizing their hardware while on the go. (Hardware that they still payed money for.)

3) So lets say we still have the sit-down setup in the form of the base station. This brings up it's own set of questions:

[A] Where is data stored? What if someone steals your phone? What if you don't have one?

[B] Where does the computing power come from, is this just a shell for the phone or does it have some power on board?

Now we can wrangle over these questions for a while, but I'm quite confident the answers are "The base has an internal HD" and "The base has computer parts inside." at which point I have to ask; how is this that different from what we have now?

I mean, sure my desktop is a little heavier to move than a "base" might be. But unless this base is going to be like the old 90's laptop bases (Huge flat thing with peripherals that plugs into a smaller top.) I can't really see myself moving it. If it has a full fledged keyboard, monitor, and mouse, I can't see myself moving it. If it doesn't, then it's a laptop. With all the problems laptops entail. (Which can only be fixed by "desktopifying" it.)

Of course, marketing conquers all. That is what everyones always going after right, true marketing? Or was that true love? I think it was the marketing...

If you're working with a keyboard and mouse, and looking at a big screen, and you have a rich multi-tasking environment that does what you need it to do, does it matter if it's running on a smartphone that's connected via bluetooth to a keyboard/mouse and via DLNA to a screen? Why the need to have a big box containing your CPU, if a little one will do?

Desktop PC's will always find a niche, but they're already a niche today. Laptops by far outsell desktops, and smartphones+tablets by far outsell laptops. Right now you have to be a geek to buy a desktop, because regular people don't buy those anymore. I don't know anyone "normal" who bought a desktop in the last two years. The idea to buy anything other than a laptop simply doesn't arise. This happened in 5 years. Why couldn't a smartphone-centric transition happen in 5 years as well?

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