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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see what the industry-wide numbers look like, but I wouldn't be surprised to see PCs skew even higher in favour of laptops.

Desktops are increasingly only relevant for specialised workloads like gaming or high-end content creation. Assuming that Apple still holds on to the lion's share of the content creation market, and that content creation as a whole is more common than high-end gaming, Apple would then have a larger share of their sales go to desktops than the industry average.

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I think the percentage of desktops would be higher for PCs just due to the number of offices outfitted with computers

What offices have desktops? I think it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one at a desk.

Any front desks, if they have a computer it will be a desktop.

Any cubicle farms, like call centres.

University labs, Hospitals.

Similar to hospitals, I have seen SFF and AIO PCs all over outpatient medical offices.

Manufacturing plants, gas stations, mechanic shops, every single retail store, restaurants, movie theaters, bars, call centers, farms, police stations, prisons, libraries, etc. Basically everywhere my guy. The world isn't just dev shops.

Most of those aren't offices. And many of the computers at places like that either are POS terminals or other specialty hardware. And even at most of the places you listed, I bet you'll find most of the actual office work is still done on laptops. The accountants back at the office for the movie theatre and gas station companies almost certainly have laptops

I would expect any call centre type operation would have desktops.

The employees would never work from home (outside of a pandemic) and work set hours.

So if desktops costs less, they will of course be used here since there is nothing to be gained from paying extra. Similarly, these users would not be using pricier Apple products.

> The employees would never work from home (outside of a pandemic) and work set hours.

This isn't quite true, the call center at my Co. is partially remote for call center staff, they use jabber and other VoIP connected to their PC's to work from home.

I do Windows application development and the company I work for is all desktop machines. Some of the static analysis tools need a lot of RAM and CPU (I have 128 GB and a pretty new Threadripper with a lot of cores). There aren’t good laptop options for this type of development machine, at least not ones I’d like to use (ie minimal fan noise).

I think since COVID I haven't seen an office that actively chooses those "SFF" PC's anymore, and those were as anaemic as laptops performance-wise... and weirdly: not much cheaper either.

Granted, I don't see a lot of offices, but everywhere that I have seen seems to be choosing docking stations or USB-C enabled displays (Dell has an excellent selection of those) and some kind of business laptop like a Precision or Elitebook.

Incidentally, those same screens are used for the staff who have Apple computers, and, largely, those are laptops too.

Desktops seem to be practically dead except for workstation-grade ones in the businesses I've been to.

Where the stationary work PC survives (I think): point of sale like desks that are half way between cash register (not personal at all) and notebook computer (each employee got their own). E.g. the computer feeding the screen at the hotel check-in counter. Not a big market relative to the number of systems existing because they aren't frequently replaced and when they are replaced, very cheaply, but the number existing is huge. And leaning to the PC side a lot, I think?

Workstation-grade, I'd say, is extremely limited and shrinking fast. Particularly outside of the tinkerer niche. Think "gamer", even if I suspect that actual gaming isn't half as big in that niche as marketing approaches would suggest. But in any case very much not-Apple.

A lot of that market is going to iPads, nowadays, too

Offices? Company ITs buy laptops with docks. If not, SoC minipcs attached to monitors.

What’s the point of using a laptop with a docking station? You still need an external keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. Is the main reason to save money? Or is it because laptops are now more powerful than desktop PCs?

For example, do MacBook Airs paired with external monitors perform better than traditional PCs? If not, are people opting for MacBook Pros with docks instead? And if so, is a top-tier MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard actually cheaper than a Mac Studio setup?

Equally as powerful as a standard full size PC for most tasks but you can take it with you to meeting rooms and you can take it home.

Yep this feels like an "and the pope is catholic" type of headline.

I really only know a handful of people with desktops and they are all gamers. My office is devoid of them aside a few specialist workstations.

I wouldn't underestimate the number of dedicated gaming PCs, but at the same time I don't have hard numbers to back that up.

FWIW re the article, I'm surprised that the share of desktop Macs is so high compared to Mac laptops. I've never seen one in the wild outside shops, but plenty of people using their Mac laptops as desktop (eg connect a keyboard and monitor)

Presumably workstations are not just wandering around outside. Unless you're breaking into peoples' homes and offices i wouldn't expect to see much.

> I've never seen one in the wild outside shops,

I think this is down to what I was saying: they're not general purpose machines anymore, they're mostly used for specialised workloads. If you don't spend any time in the sort of environment where those workloads are common, you won't see them. Similarly, many people will go all their lives without ever seeing a gaming PC, even though they're completely mundane in my (and, I assume, your) world.

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