If you said they all don’t or barely exist any more, then you would be right!
Wait I hear you all saying there are still plenty of desktop machines around, and you would be correct, so why am I saying that they’re gone? Well, like it or not, the numbers in the market don’t lie. Ever since the pandemic, and with the cost of components coming down over the past five years, you can get a pretty decent laptop with better than average hardware for around $600, and cheaper if you wait for a sale! Granted, you’re not going to be running the latest cutting edge games, rendering all sorts of video or folding proteins with it, but for general every day use, a pretty decent machine for the money!
(The below image is just for a reference, this is on sale June of 2024)
So then why am I saying that Desktops are dead?
Let’s face it, the pandemic really changed things. One of the biggest things was suddenly remote work and remote learning became viable almost completely overnight! Businesses and Schools learned to quickly adapt to users connecting from home and not only being effective, but in many cases thriving in this new environment. One of the biggest challenges was how to support all these now homebound employee’s and students without breaking the bank!
Well, thankfully people weren’t traveling much and were pretty much near an electrical outlet all the time, so power wasn’t that big of an issue at that time, but like all things, the pandemic would eventually ease, and people would need to travel back to the office. Companies and schools, not wanting their employee’s or students lugging heavy and clunky PCs around invested in low cost, light and portable laptops and even tablets to fill that niche.
Now we had an environment where people were used to smaller, lighter devices and having the ability to move them anywhere they wanted to work. A luxury that never truly existed before for most of them!
And they liked it!
Fast forward a couple of years and now not only do we have generations of users who like their laptops and portables but expect to remain with those very same lightweight and convenient types of devices.
Now we get to what Apple has done over the past three years. Now there’s nothing new about ARM chips, they’ve been in our cell phones for years, extending battery life, increasing performance and capabilities of ever smaller and smaller devices for years, but up until Apple created their M serries chip, there really wasn’t that big of a market for ARM based Windows machines.
Well, that’s all changed!
With Apple’s success of their powerful M1, 2, 3, and soon 4 chips, the likes of Intel and AMD have taken notice! Others have as well as Qualcomm, who used to manufacture some of those very same chips for Apple, have also thrown their hat into the ARM Processor market with soon to come out Snapdragon based laptops.
But why ARM and why now? Simply put? People love convenience. They get used to one way of working or doing things and it can be like pulling teeth to get them to do something differently. People like the ability to take a device, a laptop or tablet, work all day wherever they are, and not have to worry about having to plug their device in to recharge it until later or overnight. Apple gave users this with the Macbook and more. Windows is about to get the very same treatment!
And here’s where the new devices that are coming on the market, starting this June of 2024 and more later in the summer, are going to dramatically change how many, if not most of us, process our day-to-day work on our devices.
With ARM, you’re no longer tied to a power cord all day. The amount of wattage that your average ARM Processor and device consumes is a fraction of what the traditional x86 based device uses. Additionally, since ARM processors are what’s called a “System On a Chip”, this tight integration of components on a single chip makes them run much cooler as well as consuming less power, meaning that you don’t need an extensive number fans, fins and heat syncs to keep the device cool while providing lightning quick performance over the course of an entire day and beyond. As a matter of fact, ARM Processors are so power efficient, your typical ARM device doesn’t even require an actively spinning fan to keep it cool like an x86 based device does.
But what about the end of the desktop computer? For most average users, I’d say this is either your current or coming reality in say the next three to five years. Now there will always be those more fringe cases, hardcore gamers, photographers, video editors, animators, and more that will require more horsepower in specific area’s that a general release System On a Chip isn’t going to satisfy, and the x86/x64 architecture is going to be vastly more suited for, especially if you like to upgrade components as you need to, or as new hardware is released… The Desktop is king in this kind of scenario. But for the average user? An ARM Laptop (and they will be laptops only, none of the ARM producers to date plan on creating desktop processors utilizing the System On a Chip) is most likely going to be the future of your computing needs. The Desktop kind of invalidates the whole “System On a Chip” mentality as the graphics, RAM, disk controllers and more are all separate chips on the motherboard thereby defeating the whole point of a “System On a Chip”.
But, fear not, I’m sure whatever device you end up using in the future, the speed, performance and capabilities will be amazing compared to devices you saw just several years ago. One thing you can always count on, these things don’t get slower or less capable, they only get better and better with time.