Desktops are dying, slain by laptops

In a recent blog post, I mentioned almost as an aside that "the desktop PC [was] well on its way to the grave," figuring this was common knowledge by now and nothing that would raise eyebrows. But I was surprised how this one little comment generated a ton of mail from curious readers looking for more details on the trend.

I'm happy to oblige.

What we have at work here is a trend that's been in the making for a solid decade. In the PC world, the market share owned by laptops has been rising dramatically and steadily, eating into the share owned by desktops. In the second half of 2008, those trend lines finally crossed, as laptops outsold desktops for the first time ever. In 2009, sales of laptops should comprise 55 percent of the PC market, and now many are beginning to wonder when the first major tech company will get out of the desktop market altogether, where profits are lower and equipment takes up much more space on the production floor.

The reasons for the shift are largely obvious. Earlier in the decade, you could rely on desktops to be more reliable, much easier to upgrade, far more powerful, and much, much cheaper than their laptop counterparts. But those advantages have vanished or shrunk dramatically in the last few years. Desktop PCs will probably always outperform laptops, but for general consumers outside the rarified air of high-end gaming PCs, laptop performance is good enough for just about any task, largely thanks to Intel developing low power versions of its CPUs and mobile graphics becoming more powerful, too. Laptop reliability has greatly improved, thanks to better construction quality and advances like accelerometers that automatically park hard drive heads when a fall is underway. And then there's price, where laptops have also found their way to competing against desktops, with capable models available for $500 to $800, about what you'd have to spend to get a decent desktop.

Really, desktop PCs should be in even worse shape than they are now, except the corporate market -- where the mobility of easily-stolen laptops is often a liability rather than a benefit -- has kept the business alive almost singlehandedly. But even that's likely to change in the near future. As Reuters reports, equipment manufacturers are now shifting production away from desktop-size components and towards parts for laptops and other gadgets. And you can't make a desktop PC without a case, a motherboard, and desktop-sized RAM.

Then again, I guess you could always make a desktop using laptop parts.

Lots more commentary in this Reuters story.