I have always had a home office because working from home I found I needed a place that was isolated from the rest of the house. I did not enter the office very much after work hours, and the same in reverse. Since I am no longer working out of my home, I have not entered the home office in the last month. Also meaning my desktops in there have not been booted since. These days the last thing I want to do is come home form work and sit at a desk for any longer, and if I need to use the computer I would much rather grab my laptop and sit on the couch to crank out some code. Now I am sure that my home office will see some use in the future, some late night coding sessions, but nothing like what I used to do.
Lately I have been toying with converting over to the Mac, which again has me wondering what do I do with all of those desktops? I am not going to completely convert over to the Mac, ever, but I would be very content with two laptops that I could dock into my monitors at my desk. This is a lot simpler setup then the two desktops and two laptops I used to have to run for my job.
Lately I have been wondering if the desktop is dead. Do you use a desktop at home, or do you just use a laptop? Granted that desktops are generally more powerful than desktops, but I am not sure I need that power at home anymore.
So let me know, what kind of setup are you running at home?
I switched from Windows desktops to a MacBook Pro about two and a half years ago, and it quickly took over. I had pretty much identical desktop PCs at the office and at home, and after about a month with the Mac I had dumped the office desktop and was only using the one at home to run my home music studio. And that was only because of the desktop hardware/Windows software I was heavily invested in.
Now, I can’t imagine using more than one machine. I have a 24″ cinema display and wireless kbd/mouse at the office, and when I’m slinging code at home, it’s usually on the couch. I love having the same development environment everywhere I go. No syncing files, upgrading apps on multiple machines, etc. IMO, Notebooks are powerful enough these days that you don’t need the extra horsepower of a desktop unless you’re doing something like hardcore rendering.
I’m with you Matt. It’s gotten to the point where laptops offer all the power and disk storage needed. We do have one PC desktop at home, but our two other desktops have now been replaced with Mac PowerBook Pros. The ability to work anywhere (and sorry — this is politically incorrect — but in front of the television) makes modern laptops hard to beat.
Meanwhile, at the office, I notice a similar trend toward more laptops. At SAS, more and more folks are beginning to use laptops as their primary systems.
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Quite honestly, I use my macbook although I am not a fan of its development tools. Generally, I either shell into my linux box or use the apple remote desktop client and remote into my windows machine which both reside at my office.
The major benefit of this technique I have found is if I am compiling a large c++ project, it doesn’t kill my local processor so I can minimize my terminal and surf uninterrupted until the process is done.
Seems we are going full circle from mainframes to individual stations, back to netbooks and remote access.
I have 4 years with laptops…i use the desktop only for play games…(the last game was COD 4).
i play games, so it’s desktop for me, and with remote desktops etc. i can connect to my work pc. as for power and upgrade path, i hate waiting for a window to open or a context menu to finally appear after lots of hard drive thrashing, the faster the better and currently a desktop is a lot faster than a laptop. if i did buy a laptop it would be for portability and battery life and the battery life of most laptops is pathetic, so why bother.