Fronm DrigitalTrends, a great article on the future of desktops.

 

"Desktops sales have slowed because manufacturers have let their designs stagnate, but the need for a comfortable machine you can work on hasn’t gone away. Who will reinvent the PC and reap the rewards?Every other week, there seems to be story about the PC dying. This week, it was because Intel is planning on exiting the motherboard business. The screwy thing is, I think the exact opposite is about to happen. Not only is the desktop not dead, it’s about to go through a resurgence. We’re just waiting for that visionary vendor who realizes that bigger is still better, and this Lemming-like agreement that the desktop is dead is holding people back. Here’s why.How we got hereWe started off with desktop computers. The Apple II, Mac, IBM PCs, and even Commodore and Atari machines were all designed to mostly stay in one place. Our first portables were pretty ugly. My own first portable from Panasonic, called the Sr. Partner, weighed in around 35 pounds, and even had a built-in thermal printer and a plasma screen that displayed, wait for it, an amazing two colors. Both orange. These machines wouldn’t run on batteries, and were basically desktop computers with smaller, more limited screens, and handles for lugging them around.We then moved to laptops, and even early tablets, but the laptop form factor held. They had batteries, but two hours on battery was often a stretch. Best of that early lot was the IBM Butterfly laptop, which showcased both the promise and the problem. It was wonderfully portable, but slow as snot.Laptops didn’t become truly viable until the beginning of the last decade, and desktop computers have started to fall off in popularity since then. But laptops were still smaller, slower, and really just portable desktops. Tablets were basically expensive laptops with or without keyboards, and not very popular." 

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-pc-isnt-ready-to-die-its-ready-for-a-rebirth/#ixzz2JI8zhzeZ



Would you, as a consumer, be interested in a reinvented desktop machine, or do you feel it has truly jumped the shark?