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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Who buys desktops these days?

- people who use their hardware to the full extent of what it's capable of, namely professionals of any kind and some power users that do the same things pros do but maybe not for monetary gains

Apple is useful in some niches of that but not a lot of them.

- gamers

Apple has no idea about gaming, in spite of their mostly laughable recent attempts.

The rest of the users who don't need all the power / don't even use a computer a lot are better served by a portable device with a built in monitor.

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> namely professionals of any kind

I don't agree with this. Most professions are more than well served by any moderately specced computer, laptop or otherwise.

If you're not crunching big numbers, rendering, or need speciality hardware a laptop is more than enough.

> If you're not crunching big numbers, rendering

Yes, those are the professionals I was thinking of :)

> People that don’t like trackpads or find them hard to use.

On the wintelamd side, I see a lot of people taking out a laptop and a mouse out of their bag. No reason you can't do the same on apples...

For a while I had a Sweep [0] keyboard that I'd carry with me and use everywhere, even in trains when travelling. It was small enough to be placed on my laptop, one half to each side of the trackpad.

I use a ThinkPad with Linux for personal use and a MacBook Air for my job, I used the Sweep with both. While I prefer trackpad to mouse, I imagine mouse enjoyers would probably do something similar.

[0] https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep

I have several Macs and my daily is a MacBook Pro. We have a "house computer" that's in the living room. I recommend every family to have one. It's obviously an iMac - one of my favorite computers of all time.

Why do you recommend that?

A computer doesn't have to be just a laptop or a mobile device (phone, tablet, etc). It's nice to have a stationary PC that is accessible to anyone who happens to walk past. My son will sit down and start up a little game, or start GarageBand to play on the MIDI piano.

I'm also a fan of laptops but they are more personal, requiring a login and so on. And screens are usually smaller.

Why? A good enough new MacBook Air M1 is $699 with 8GB RAM from Walmart. Apple is still manufacturing them.

I meant specifically as a family computer in the living room. It's a nice concept - just sit there and do some light computing or play a game. Ours is connected to a MIDI keyboard and has Garageband.

It's a nice option and it's not the same as a small laptop that is constantly moving around.

I suspect a lot of professionals that need decent compute find desktop PCs to sit in something of a no-man’s-land these days.

Personally I find my MacBook Pro plenty powerful for most day to day activities, including testing out ideas. The kicker is that when I need real compute, a desktop that’s maybe 3-5x faster pales in comparison to jumping onto a hosted GPU cluster. It also ends up cheaper because I’m not paying for a chunky GPU that’s sitting idle on my desk half the time.

From limited conversation with people in other industries, their experience is similar.

If you need to run mostly Windows-only software, a MacBook probably isn’t a good choice.

You have to look at Windows laptops and it’s pretty grim. Plasticy machines with some combination of garbage keyboards, shitty displays, terrible trackpads, short battery life, and loud fans (my last 3 machines have been ThinkPads) that are worth almost nothing when you want to upgrade after a couple years.

Hahaha yeah won’t dispute that!

People that don’t like trackpads or find them hard to use.

You don’t have to use a trackpad with a laptop. For 95% of people, a modern laptop can do everything the desktop can, plus it has battery backup, plus it it is portable if you ever need it to be. And if you don’t like the trackpad or the keyboard, just spend a little money to connect the ones you do like.

And when an M4 Air costs $1k plus or minus a couple hundred, it’s almost a negligible price premium.

And it easily overheats when you put any pressure on it (except for Apple silicon, but many of us are not interested in that). Also zero configurability, upgradeability, repairability except for a couple of specialized devices like framework. Portability isn't important when you have no use for it — I used a laptop for about five years as my only computing device, and the total number of times it left my desk can be counted with one hand.

Personally, in my own bubble I know few people with laptops, most continue using desktops, especially IT professionals of any kind.

I don't play games newer than half-life 1.

Every x86 laptop has trade offs between heat, performance, weight, battery life and noise that is completely avoidable in 2025 with an M series Mac.

Anytime I am forced to use an x86 laptop, it seems like using a BlackBerry five years after the iPhone came out.

You can use a mouse with a laptop the exact same way as with a desktop. That's what I do, when I'm home, my laptop is essentially a desktop with all the peripherals, it just has the added benefit that I can unplug the screen and take the whole thing with me, whether to the couch or to the office.

- thrifty people who do iterative upgrades

You can have a win-win combination of high quality components, high performance components, and a low cost device by reuse and iterative upgrades.

- family members of such people

Since they may get the hand me down parts.

Also, it's nice not to have battery fatigue unnecessarily. I'm sure if I used a laptop as if it were a desktop I'd be replacing its battery at least once through its lifecycle.

Every single business you can think of. I don't know how you can be so out of touch with the real world.

Apple markets to businesses?

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