You make good points as usual. I may have jumped the gun on laptops. I forgot about the business world. They may be a bit slower to adopt. I think the ASUS Transformer, as you mentioned, once geared a bit towards the business end will provide a suitable opponent to the laptop. There is a huge market to be had with business tablets.

As for desktops, there is no death to them. They are everywhere, from point of sale type environments, to school labs, to community hotel desktops. Obviously the home and work environment as well.

I see tablets removing the laptop from the market, and desktops being more sync friendly with tablets. Probably via some sort of cloud/docking station.

Yeah, we've started to see this already in the engineering business. I know a couple of market chiefs who, in addition to their regular computers, now also own a tablet PC which they use for nothing other than keeping all of the manuals and wiring documentation for their facilities on. It's a convenient form-factor when you are working inside a rack.

A far more disturbing trend which I have noticed of late is that whereas it was quite easy 3 or 4 years ago to purchase an ultra-small, ultra-light laptop (10-12") which still had a "real" CPU and was architecturally unencumbered by artificial software licensing restrictions on things like memory size, the recent rise of the netbook-class machine has created a sort of rift, wherein manufacturers now seem to be dividing their efforts between creating ultra-powerful "desktop replacement" laptops primarily in the 13" and up range, while delivering only relatively crippled machines to the crowd desiring an 11" computer. This Dell E4200 which I am using right now was, quite literally, the only computer I could find in this size range last year which wasn't a horrible piece of crap, and even it has been discontinued and replaced with a physically larger (12.5") successor.



Ah, indeed. In considering the workplace, I was thinking mostly about the traditional office / laboratory environment where there exists a 1:1 ratio of users to computers. You're certainly correct about the continuing need for "fixed" installations in markets such as POS, public access, libraries and so on.

I would, perhaps, argue against the home environment. Outside of my own "geek" social group, and excluding gamers, I actually know of relatively few households which still have a traditional desktop PC in them. Increasingly, one laptop per family member seems to be the trend which I am seeing. Stop by Best Buy, for instance, and compare the number of desktop PCs offered to the number of laptops. A few years ago, the desktops outnumbered the laptops by perhaps 2:1, whereas today I suspect that ratio has roughly reversed. I do expect that tablet sales will soon do to laptops what laptops did to desktops in this arena.

Are you serious????

Regarding the parts list listed earlier: Don't do crossfire. Get the best single GPU you can afford.

Yes, I am completely serious. Dell no longer manufactures the Latitude E4200.

Funny, I switched back to a desktop after 9 years with a laptop. No laptop can quite match a good desktop workstation's capabilities.

Gotta disagree, Joe. My desktop is not going to be replaced by a laptop, either here at home or at work. Both are CAD workstations. The reason? Absolutely no need for portability. I do have a laptop, but that gets synced with the desktop, and is only used about 5% of the time or less.

Dollar for dollar, desktops still have better value than laptops (in high end systems). More horsepower for less money. If you don't need the portability, there's no reason to pay that premium.

For Rick:

Here is an awesome link: http://www.hardware-revolution.com/m...-january-2012/

Gaming rig builds from $800-$1500.

1. Use this guide.
2. Build awesome rig for cheap
3. ???
4. PWN NOOBS

PS The longer you wait to build the cheaper the hard drive will be. Hard drive prices are really high because of Thailand flooding. As production is resuming, prices will continue to fall back to more normal levels. I don't think it's worth waiting 3 months to save $40 on a hard drive though...

Being that I am a geek and work with a bunch of geeks, we argue the tablet vs laptop thing constantly. Tablets are cool and make great ebook readers but they are in no way replacements for a laptop. Too slow and the OS's suck for real use, ie anything besides fagbooking or twating

iPads have taken over my house, people love them. Sit in bed, read etc. Heaven forbid you need to do any real work though they are useless. I dont even know if you can ftp, photoshop or do an real coding on one. I guess if you could add a keyboard and mouse to an iPad you could get by.

Laptops are ok, I have had my fair share. I certainly prefer a desktop over all. I like to game and I need to be able to work on a decent machine too. Loading 200 images into photoshop is the ultimate test for me. lol

As for the alienware. I have built all my machines to date, since I was 14 years old in fact. That was many moons ago, some may claim 20 years ago (486 turbo...).. lol
Anyhow, its not so much that I dont want to build, I am thinking about simplicity. I like the idea that if the deal breaks I have someone I can call and cry to, hopefully they come and fix it.

The price. Yea, its retarded. I know. This current machine I am on when brand new was around $2200 and it still hauls ass. Enough ass that I dont need a new machine let alone a $4500 machine. Wanting is something different. I would love to spoil myself.

That being said, financing a $4500 rig is wrong. I know, i get that. I have been pricing stuff out on tigerdirect / canadacomputers and newegg. I could build a decent rig for far less, i think thats what I am going to do in a month or two.

I assume this thread is a joke?

We should do some BF3 action later tonight!

Alienware is over priced dell with neons and and a glowing logo. It's the ricer of the computer world. My last build I spent about $700 got an amd quad core, 4gd stick of ram, mobo with hdmi optical and usb 3.0, 1gb ddr3 gpu, and all the other essentials. Threw on a corsair liquid cooler overclocked from 3.2 to 4.1 stabley, ocerclocked the gpu and called it done.

Just say no. There is no reason for anyone to have a system with a $1,000 USD processor in it except for e-peen purposes. And you don't ever finance e-peen.

Money spent on computers needs to be disposable income unless it's for a business purpose and the business is financing it.

I have built all of my systems for the last 20 years excepting laptops. There's no need to spend more than $1,200 or so on system components.