“A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software” – was an early and, at the time, unbelievably ambitious goal for a small company from Albuquerque which later moved up to Bellevue, WA.
Things have moved on radically since Microsoft was founded nearly 50 years ago; now, everyone who needs a computer on a desk has one, and billions more have one on their lap or in their hand. SteveB talked recently, in a retrospective “Alumni Voices” interview, about the early days.
Thinking about PC usage (for Windows and Macs); laptops overtook desktops some years ago (notebooks outselling desktops 4:1). Laptop manufacturers evolve them more quickly, with better screens, longer battery life and now, ramming in AI features, often refreshing their ranges regularly.
But if you sit at a desk most of the time, and all your data is in the cloud anyway, shouldn’t your primary computer be a desktop? Maybe you could have a medium-spec laptop for when you need to be mobile, and a comparatively high-end desktop for the rest of the time?
If you’re using a laptop for work and spend much of your work/life in one place, at least make sure you get a proper monitor.
I found this image at the top when searching, “is it OK to sit on the ottoman of an Eames chair?” – the answer was captioned, “it is, if you’re Bill Gates”
Moore’s law
The oft-mis-quoted effect (that stuff gets faster/cheaper/bigger all the time) of Moore’s law could be applied to the growth in laptop usage; there’s more to be gained from miniaturization when you’re carrying a machine around, as well as advances in battery and display technology.
Desktops have tended to be left behind; there’s no built-in screen (unless they’re an all-in-1), they don’t run on batteries and they often sit out of sight, with the user interacting through a separate mouse, keyboard and looking at a desktop monitor. Old PCs were boring to look at, sometimes quite noisy and clearly fixed in position.
Now, many new home desktops are sold as gaming PCs with high end graphics and are often adorned with elaborate cooling, colourful lights and the like.
Acer Predator Orion 5000 (2024) review
The rise of the Mini
Around 20 years ago, capable desktop PCs started to shrink in size – it wasn’t uncommon to see demos being run from a “Shuttle Box”, which had way more storage and CPU horsepower than could be gotten from a laptop of the time, so it was possible to run servers in VMs on Virtual PC or similar.
Mac Mini and other small-form devices followed, but were often relegated to secondary use.
Julian Datta and Brett Johnson, posing in 2007 with a Shuttle which worked so hard it was literally smokin’
Desktops for today
If you’re running a laptop from a home office and sit at a desk 90% of your day, it’s worth looking at getting a modern, small form desktop. They’re quiet, can be much neater than a laptop with loads of cables or a docking station, and can be surprisingly cheap.
An Dell Inspiron with Intel i5 10-core CPU, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD can cost £650 (eg Dell Inspiron Desktop with the Latest Intel Processors). If you’re using an existing screen setup from an older laptop, you might need to buy a webcam too. A broadly comparable laptop might cost £100 or more extra, though it might last a good bit less time than a well-spec’ed desktop.
Desktops are generally more self-upgradeable and repairable than laptops, though that tends to change when you get into highly miniaturized machines. Framework, who build laptops that are sold as being fixable rather than disposable, recently unveiled their first desktop too…
Framework | Configure Framework Desktop DIY Edition (AMD Ryzen™ AI Max
Further reading
If you’re already (or still) using a desktop for everyday computing, feel free to comment for others to hear your thoughts. If you’re just desktop-curious, check out some recent reviews…
The ASUS NUC 15 Pro Is Built for Upgrades
I moved my workflow to a Windows 11 PC no bigger than a bagel | Windows Central
