Iv been noticing the absence of PC's on shop shelves in recent times. They seem to be only selling laptops and other small devices?

Well i have a desktop iMac and Mac Book ProThe desktop is for the studio where as the laptop is for gigs.I think they both have there place but certainly laptops have become more popular as they have become more powerful and can replace a desktop in the studio if you wish.I guess now the screen size is only a factor but you can get around that by leaving your big screen in the studio and just hooking up your laptop when you go back in.

They look a bit small and fidly to me. A quite a few of the laptops appear to me to be old. Well if the latest Laptop is comparable to the PC then maybe they could put it in a more appropriate box. We still need the DVD drive and hopefully one that does not stick and we still need somewhere to connect our audio gear to that is not too cramped. Those Laptop monitors do look a bit small for me.

We have these iphones and tablet things now. Then there is the television that can be used as a computer monitor. I don't even have one of those set-top boxes yet anyway? If there is nothing on the shelf then it would be very silly for atleast someone not to put something there?

Of course, mobile devices are the most growing market. Afaik there are a lot more sales with laptops, smartphones and stuff.
Not all users are power-users needing desktop computers. This will become a niche in the future (IMO).

When Laptops become as powerful as Dual Xeon desktop computers that's when desktops may die out. I don't see this happening quite yet.

Only then desktops will be Quad Zulians.

@Mushy Mushy:

The market is driven by consumers, not audio pro's and semi pro's which only represent a small percentage of sales. So yes, it's obvious that the market going toward portability. Desktops are being rapidly replaced by laptops and laptops are getting replaced by tablets.

Desktops wont ever die. Screen size and expandability are a major factor, Tablets are a niche market - you just cant type at the speeds of proper fullsize keyboard on them. Laptops are a compromise. What the market wants you to buy and what is useful are 2 different things.

I can see tablets totally dominating the DAW market....

How much typing does one need to do when mixing down or composing? Next to none.

Tablets are ok but they dont work well for plugs, theres no plugin standard yet for Tablets. They certainly cant replace a DAW. That may change but they arent mature enough yet. Our market is a small one, theres still room for all devices. Screen size is still a factor, you can hook up a laptop to a bigger screen but a Tablet?
Last edited by UltraJv on Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

The reason I see most people getting laptops is for portability. Usually when you have a desktop you have to find a place to put it which is usually in the corner of the spare room. I think people like to be able to sit in front of the tv with their laptops or take it with them on weekends away.

Personally I could never use a laptop again for studio stuff...

PCs are the new Macs.

Perhaps but probably not anytime in the next couple of years.

Floating Point performance on tablets stinks. Your audio software requires many many floating point calculations. It will be several (many??) years before tablet processors come anywhere close to a desktop processors numbers and by then your desktop will have advanced.

The priority for tablet design is not FP power but battery life. ARM has a huge set of design wins because they can run these things on very low power and give these devices >10 hrs battery life. The genuine demand for CPU muscle - coming from people like us who want to run lots of plugins and people in video/graphics and science/engineering is nothing like the influence on the market of what consumers want and what marketing can sell them.

For decades we have had MS deliberately making slower and slower versions of Office for example so that you need a dual core CPU running at 2.x GHz to run a word processor which is responsive to keyboard input (!) - this is MS colluding with Intel and PC vendors to drive sales of new machines. Now, with Linux in all its variations there is more of a push to satisfy what customers want which is low power use in servers and long battery life in portable devices. ARM is looking like getting server design wins for their CPUs so Intel is going to be up against it trying to maintain market share if things go that way.