For as long as I've worked for PCMag.com and its previous incarnation PC Magazine, people have crowed that the desktop PC is dead or dying. These days, with the proliferation of "Post-PC" tablets and micro-sized laptops, it does seem like the old-fashioned desktop PC is on its last legs. And yet, walk into any brick-and-mortar store selling computers, or go to any computer manufacturer's site, and you'll see that these stalwarts of a bygone era are still there, still being updated, still evolving. There are plenty of well-established reasons to use a desktop, including expandability, gaming prowess, etc. These are the traditional arguments for using a tower desktop PC that have been done to death in other columns and opinion pieces. But perhaps the most valid reasons why people are still drawn to a desktop PC may not be the most obvious. Here are six that you may not have thought about.
1. Simple Ergonomics
Ever find you have pain in your shoulders from hunching over while working on a laptop or tablet? There you go. Using a tablet or laptop can be done comfortably with a reclining chair and a laptop stand, but just take a look around the next time you visit your local coffee shop. Chances are, the people blogging or updating their Facebook page have that elbows-in, head-tilted down posture from trying to use a laptop on a table meant for eating food on. Using a larger screen and a detached keyboard, as you would with a desktop, offers a more ergonomic body position for extended computing sessions.
2. Large Screens/HDTV
Speaking of larger screens, practical laptop screens top out at 17 inches with true 1080p resolution, but 21-, 24-, 27-, and 30-inch panels are the norm for desktop PCs. The 21- to 27-inch screens are common on all-in-one desktops, and the sky's the limit with external displays. You can even hook a desktop (or a laptop) up to a 65-inch HDTV for a truly immersive experience. Mo' screen, mo' better, in my opinion.
3. Storage, Storage, and Did I Mention Storage?
Tablets and SSD-equipped laptops commonly top out at 64GB of storage space, while laptops with traditional spinning drives top out at 1TB, and either of those options will cost you. You can buy a current desktop with space for at least two 1TB to 4TB drives for well under $500. While smaller drives help portability, your needs will outgrow 64GB, especially on your primary PC. A family of four will certainly have more than 20GB to 60GB of photos and home videos. Multiply the number of cameras by two for teenagers, and that extra space becomes paramount. That's before you factor in all those songs you'd ripped and downloaded from iTunes. Sure, you can store all this stuff on a shared hard drive on a NAS, but network storage can be intimidating to set up for a novice. You can store stuff on the Internet, but most online services charge subscription fees after the first couple of GB. Last, but not least, there's currently no storage that's faster than local internal hard drives, so you'll be waiting less time to become reacquainted with your memories.
4. Number Crunching
Wasting time is something you want to be doing actively (like surfing thechive.com), rather than inactively (waiting for a spreadsheet to finish calculating or for a flash Website to react). Just try to watch a 1080p video on You Tube on a single-processor nettop. There's a word for that: painful. As Flash videos and Websites become increasingly complex, you need the extra power that a quad-core processor affords you. Otherwise you'll be sitting there just waiting for the computer to recognize the mouse clicks and bring you to the next Flash-heavy page. Needless to say, people who deal with huge spreadsheets, multi GB graphic images, and videos will still want desktop PCs with multi-core processors and scads of system memory. Their livelihoods depend on it.
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