(...) you should mention the downsides. The main one for Doug is that he asked for something he could tinker with. You can't upgrade anything in a laptop (ok, other than RAM and the hard drive).
I also don't think a laptop is a good value. The price/performance ratio is lower than a desktop, and if you're never/rarely going to take the laptop anywhere, you might as well just get a desktop and save some money, particularly if you already have a monitor you like (I don't know if that's the case with you, Doug).
My take is that the quality of desktop components at the 'cost efficient' end of the price spectrum has been massively squeezed by the relentless downward slope of average selling prices ( now somewhere under $600US ). There is just so little profit margin that the entire supply chain is highly pressured. I distrust the longevity and reliability of most of the available Wintel product, from any brand.
Seconded.
Other downsides to laptops:
- Laptops are easier to steal and fence. Someone breaking into your house would think twice about hauling away a full size desktop PC case, but a laptop is a no-brainer.
A Kensington type cable lock can be an effective deterrent, especially if it is attached to something substantial and hard to move.
It is also easy to stow a laptop in a secure location prior to departure for an extended duration/trip.
- No way to upgrade the video card in most laptops. Probably not an issue for Doug since he's not playing any of the really modern video games, so any laptop with a high-end video chip would meet Doug's needs. But that particular issue always gives me pause. Even though I personally am using a very old desktop computer that still uses an AGP slot for its graphics card, I was recently able to upgrade the card that was in that slot. (The card was still an old AGP card, but it was more powerful than its predecessor.) Can't do that with a laptop.
A high grade laptop does involve different perspectives. Expandability is mostly external, other than storage and ram memory.
USB 3.0 can be impressively fast, and Thunderbolt now offers external connectivity just as fast as internal card slots. Useful Thunderbolt docks and expanders are finally becoming available, pricing varies.- Many new laptops do not come with CD/DVD drives at all. An external CD/DVD drive is often an additional purchase. Need to install old software from CD-ROMs?
External USB DVD drives are quite inexpensive. For the tinkerer, I use a USB to SATA adapter. Plug any bare drive (DVD or hard disk) into the adapter, then into a USB port.- Newer laptops are becoming less and less compatible with legacy hardware. You won't find an RS-232 serial port on any laptops these days (ever want to do an Empeg drive upgrade again?), and even things like Ethernet ports or even FireWire ports are starting to get scarce. And the PS/2 keyboard port thing was already mentioned. Of course, all of those things can be worked around pretty easily, but they all involve buying additional hardware or a docking station.
USB adapters exist for all these scenarios, I think.- Overall, laptop makres are making all of their design choices based on portability, low weight, and low power consumption, and in many cases those design choices will compromise the speed and upgradeability/maintainability of the system. They've made great strides towards making laptops much more powerful and capable, and most people (Doug probably included) would find a new laptop to be lightning-fast and more than adequate for his needs. But it's something to keep in mind.
These trade offs have become much less constraining now that Intel makes decent CPUs without ridiculous power requirements. The Haswell chips are quite impressive on both computation and thermal parameters. Even built in laptop video chips are much less of a concern for most use cases.
With all of that said, I'm still seriously weighing whether or not I want my next personal PC purchase to be a laptop, possibly even an Apple one. I know the trade-offs, and Apple has made fantastic choices in those areas. I haven't been doing a lot of high-end gaming on my PC lately (Kerbal Space Program isn't really high-end), so the video card upgradeability isn't as much of an issue for me as it used to be. The ability to boot into Windows (or to run a Windows VM) on an Apple laptop would give me the best of both worlds. I'd need to jump through some hoops to get certain things working (such as the FireWire audio interface I recently bought), but once I did, I think I'd be pretty happy.
Previous Topic
Index
