"With Mac sales being particularly laptop-heavy lately, it looks like location awareness is shaping up to be the must-have functionality of the coming year."
I thought everyone's sales were laptop-heavy these days, not just Apple, and have been for a while now.
Honestly, I disagree. The reason is that people aren't interested in desktops these days. Given the performance of laptops these days, why would you want a desktop?
Kelmon. Find me one laptop on the market today, no matter what the price that matches the performance of my self-built, $2,500 desktop, and I will retire from system building today.
You can go all the way up to a $5,000+ premium top of the line laptop, fully decked out with the highest specs available for them, and yet it would still get utterly destroyed by my $2,500 self-build.
8GB DDR3 GTX 295 in SLI Core i7 @ 3.6 GHz (OC'd) 256GB SSD and 1.5TB SATA
Once more, find me one laptop, anywhere in the world, that even comes CLOSE to matching that level of performance.
First of all, in multimedia benchmarks, my system would literally run anywhere from 2-20 times faster than any laptop on the market. Mostly around 6-7x faster than the fastest laptop configs due to the SLI GTX 295's.
In terms of general computing, my Core i7 @ 3.6 Ghz would also feature at least 50% more speed than any mobile solution on the market.
Combining those two, adding in the near 2TB of storage and the 8GB of RAM, I would like to see what laptop can afford me with that level of performance, price be damned.
You misunderstand me. What I said was "[g]iven the performance of laptops these days, why would you want a desktop?", not that desktops are not faster than a laptop. Heck, a supercomputer will whup your self-build but the important point is that you don't need the power of a supercomputer. I seriously doubt that you need the power of your current computer either, and neither does anyone else. In the past laptops were slow and you had to make compromises but these days you can buy them and they'll do pretty much everything that a desktop can, and this is coming from someone who was very anti-laptop up until about 6-years ago. These days just about any laptop will deliver enough power for the tasks you can throw at it, plus it comes in a portable and convenient package. The computing power delivered continues to advance at a pace in excess of the demands placed on it by the software.
Heck, I used to build my own PCs but these days, why bother?
For those looking for a device strictly for reading, the new Kobo is a nice little option. It's small enough to slip into a pocket, can do more with a PDF than the competition, and at $129, it's $10 cheaper than both the Nook and Kindle WiFi.
The most commented posts on Engadget over the past 24 hours.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
"With Mac sales being particularly laptop-heavy lately, it looks like location awareness is shaping up to be the must-have functionality of the coming year."
I thought everyone's sales were laptop-heavy these days, not just Apple, and have been for a while now.
yes, but noticeably in apple - the main reason is the company has not updated imacs/mac pros significantly in a long time
Honestly, I disagree. The reason is that people aren't interested in desktops these days. Given the performance of laptops these days, why would you want a desktop?
Kelmon.
Find me one laptop on the market today, no matter what the price that matches the performance of my self-built, $2,500 desktop, and I will retire from system building today.
You can go all the way up to a $5,000+ premium top of the line laptop, fully decked out with the highest specs available for them, and yet it would still get utterly destroyed by my $2,500 self-build.
8GB DDR3
GTX 295 in SLI
Core i7 @ 3.6 GHz (OC'd)
256GB SSD and 1.5TB SATA
Once more, find me one laptop, anywhere in the world, that even comes CLOSE to matching that level of performance.
First of all, in multimedia benchmarks, my system would literally run anywhere from 2-20 times faster than any laptop on the market. Mostly around 6-7x faster than the fastest laptop configs due to the SLI GTX 295's.
In terms of general computing, my Core i7 @ 3.6 Ghz would also feature at least 50% more speed than any mobile solution on the market.
Combining those two, adding in the near 2TB of storage and the 8GB of RAM, I would like to see what laptop can afford me with that level of performance, price be damned.
You misunderstand me. What I said was "[g]iven the performance of laptops these days, why would you want a desktop?", not that desktops are not faster than a laptop. Heck, a supercomputer will whup your self-build but the important point is that you don't need the power of a supercomputer. I seriously doubt that you need the power of your current computer either, and neither does anyone else. In the past laptops were slow and you had to make compromises but these days you can buy them and they'll do pretty much everything that a desktop can, and this is coming from someone who was very anti-laptop up until about 6-years ago. These days just about any laptop will deliver enough power for the tasks you can throw at it, plus it comes in a portable and convenient package. The computing power delivered continues to advance at a pace in excess of the demands placed on it by the software.
Heck, I used to build my own PCs but these days, why bother?
@Hamidxa: for your next trick, let's see you cram it into a $350 homemade book bag and take it to the library.