And just as importantly, phones are practically irreparable. Phone dropped and screen cracked? Good luck, unless it's an old Android (which don't prompt before allowing their storage to be mounted). Laptop dropped and snapped in half? Just take out the drive and put it in another computer.
Its a preference, but I have a number of friends who only will use a laptop or desktop if they are watching Netflix or doing work. Even if they have a laptop inches away they will still use their phone for YouTube, Facebook, and any other browsing.
I have one friend like this who had a mishap that resulted in a blowtorch in his trunk burning a hole right through his laptop. By some miracle the laptop works. It runs like shit and looks awful, but he refuses to replace it because he has no reason to. He rather use his smartphone for the majority of his computing needs.
desktop is cheaper. for the price of one top smartphone, I can have a top notch desktop that would serve me for 5 years, which cannot be said about smartphones
The proper comparison is a laptop. Phones inherently take more routine physical stress and accidental damage by virtue of how they're carried and used.
Also, phones are where this hardware update treadmill cancer started. I only stopped using my last phone because carriers unilaterally obsoleted the model and banned it from their networks.
On the other hand, although I love my phone's portability, there's no substituting a few hundred watts of processing power and a few terabytes of storage in a decent desktop.
More likely is that non-geeks use their phones instead of having proper desktops.
I consider using a phone as a computer screen to be the equivalent of key-hole surgery. There's just no comparison between a 43" 4K monitor and a phone's miserable little offering.
> You're still going to have to carry around a keyboard, mouse, cables, and probably a screen. It's going to be far, far easier to do that with a laptop/surface, or even a tablet, than with their setup.
Um, what? Why would you carry around all that stuff? I clearly described scenarios in which places would already have that setup for you. You just dock and go. Just like today you don't carry a router around with you or anything else.
> A desktop is going to have more power, a laptop is going to have a form factor that's much more convenient to carry around, and more battery.
"More power" doesn't mean anything without context. If you're just writing papers, code, even playing some types of games you likely have plenty of power for this already in your phone. If you want to play FarCry then obviously yes you're not going to do that from a phone.
A phone is more convenient to carry around than a laptop. If someone can supply you a laptop that your phone simply docks with you wouldn't need to carry it around which is precisely my point: the phone (or possibly another, smaller device) could be your personal computing platform and everything else around you simply visualizes the data contained within.
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