Death of the Desktop (in the home)

The death of the desktop computer has been predicted for years, and yeah. I can see why. At home, we have one desktop. I'm not counting the servers I run in headless mode for this, otherwise the count would be higher and I'm never on the keyboard for those anyway. The desktop gets used for a very few things:

• That's where the budget is kept
• PC Gaming
• The few applications for which a huge screen and a mouse are a real benefit.

We use it on average 1.5 times a month. Unless someone bought a new game at which usage will be fairly constant for about two weeks, at which point interest will be lost and we'll be back to 1.5x month. Our laptops do darned near everything we need, as fast as we needed, in a way that is comfortable. Plus, we can take them places.

At work I'm not giving one up because I consciously made the mobility/performance tradeoff in favor of performance. I've got over 36" of linear monitor, and I use it. I have quite a lot of memory in there, as well as a quad core CPU, that gets well used. As well as two hard-drives because I have needs. This is not a desktop it's a workstation.

While the desktop may be mostly dead in the home, the only serious niche keeping it going is PC gaming and even that's changing thanks to consoles, it's going strong in the workplace.