Desktop Pcs Face Death Or A New Dawn

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday July 28, 2008

David Flynn

Some time in the first few months of this year, a milestone was reached. Twenty years after they first appeared on the scene, laptops overtook desktops as the most popular PC in Australia. It was a photo-finish - 50.3 per cent for notebooks versus 49.7 per cent for desktops.

This month, the laptop market received another boost with Intel's launch of its Centrino 2 notebook technology. Centrino 2 chips are smaller yet faster and, because they also use less energy, you get longer battery life (see www.centrino2room.com.au for more on these mobile superchips).

These days we're seeing laptops both little and large. The former are those wonderfully affordable go-anywhere mini-notes - lilliputian laptops with screens of 18-25 centimetres, jump-started by Asus's popular Eee PC. Mainstream players such as Acer, Dell and HP are now turning their attention to this area.

At the other end of the scale sit supersized machines with screens so large they need their own postcode.

Toshiba's new Qosmio G50 (see left) is 47 centimetres diagonally, while models from Dell and HP nudge 51 centimetres (that's 20 inches in the old currency). At that size they're less "portable" than "transportable".

So is there any life left for desktops? No one believes they'll vanish like dinosaurs. Desktops are typically cheaper than notebooks and for some heavy-duty tasks they've got the raw horsepower - plus the scope for improving storage and graphics performance - that notebooks lack.

But what about the rest of us? We've happily ditched bulky monitors for slim LCD screens but we certainly don't need those ugly towers that most PC manufacturers continue to churn out. This is one factor behind the success of Apple's iMac. It's an attractive all-in-one computer, one large lush screen with all the guts built in.

Disappointingly, few PC makers have followed suit, although some are making smaller desktop cases.

Acer, on the other hand, is milking its Eee PC brand with the announcement of a planned Eee monitor, which, despite the name, is an all-in-one PC using the same low-cost components as its notebook cousin.

Let's hope the boring and bulky desktop PC is facing an overdue overhaul and an exciting renaissance.