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Death of a Desktop?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

It is 25 years since the IBM personal computer was launched. And for all this

time it has occupied more and more desktops.Â

Now there is a challenger. Notebooks with their attractive price bands,

the status symbol tag, portability and mobility are threatening to displace the

desktop from the desk. The DQ Top 20 results this year show that desktops grew

at an impressive 21% over last year. But notebooks grew at an astounding 168%!

In the US, in the first quarter of 2006, desktop sales fell by 2.6%, while the

unit sales of notebooks grew by almost 30%, according the NPD group.

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So is the desktop on the way out?

Pitching for notebooks are new technologies that make them cost and weigh

less and deliver more. Add longer battery life and wireless connectivity, and

the cheerleading squad is complete. Also, notebooks score on the cool quotient.

Enterprises also believe that notebooks deliver higher productivity levels. A

notebook user puts in 7.7 hours of additional work, according to a 2004 survey

by Dell. Look around you, and you will probably come up with a comparable figure

for your company.

Notwithstanding the growth of notebooks, the power equation is in favor of

the desktops. Speed, storage and display options are much higher on desktops.

And power users are unlikely to shift over-notebooks simply do not have enough

juice for their hungry applications. Gamers, multimedia developers, high-end

graphics designers and music editors, architectural and other design

professionals would make up this lot. It is hard to visualize a gamer all cooped

up in front of a laptop to enjoy a good death-match online. And all said and

done, the small size keyboards and displays are not the most suitable for many

users. It is possible that the gamer could also be a software consultant

visiting various companies. Then he would have a laptop for his presentations,

while a high-end desktop or a PlayStation would cater to his gaming needs. We

all know of architects, programmers and graphics professionals who show you

their work on their laptops, but go back to their offices to work on a high-end

desktop. There are many more homes now with the desktop as their entertainment

center.

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The other segment that would prefer desktops is the 'up-graders'. These

are the people who really know the innards of their desktops. They like to

up-end the performance by replacing bits and pieces. A new monitor, more RAM, a

hard disk, a better graphics card, a FireWire port, and if all else fails, a new

motherboard. They like the freedom to change things the way they want. A

notebook does not allow that freedom. If the display is gone, or you want a

bigger screen, get a new computer. If you want a better processor, sorry, buy

again. If you want more storage, look for an external hard disk-but that takes

away the portability. PCMCIA cards allow for some addition of features, but they

are limited. So if you want the flexibility to chop and change your machine the

notebook is a big no.

Notebooks are cheaper-but not cheap enough. In developing countries, where

there is a huge need for increasing computer penetration and where e-Governance

projects mean installing computers by the hundreds, across the country, one

cannot imagine an onslaught of notebooks. Add to that the much higher cost of

repair-which include battery replacements, AMCs and, clearly, the notebook is

not a mass-market product. At least not yet.

Clearly it is not time to sound the death-knell for desktops. They will

continue to live on and even reign in areas where entertainment, high

performance and freedom to upgrade are important. Their market share will no

doubt shrink. Till finally we see a decent hybrid product that combines the

benefits of both forms.

The author is editor-in-chief of CyberMedia, the publisher of Dataquest. He

can be reached at shyamm@cybermedia.co.in

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