In Praise of Desktop Computers

An AMD K6-2 3D Now! running at 300 MHz that I overclocked to 333 MHz. More than two decades have passed, but I still remember the first PC processor I actively purchased, choosing it myself, after my parents had given me a Pentium 166 a few years earlier, letting me pick between it and a drum kit. I picked the computer, and with it I learned, discovered tons of music and video games, and ended up working as a music and gaming journalist. With my first newspaper paycheck, I got a credit card and bought the drum kit. Full circle, check.

On the other hand, with the income I've earned as a drummer I still haven't made enough for a pack of gum, so I couldn't have bought a PC either. Full circle done the right way, then, double check.

Now, just as I fondly remember the K6-2, I have no idea what processor is in any of the three laptops lying around the house. That isolated fact is enough to express my preference: I love the desktop computer far more than laptops, for personal reasons and general considerations, for memories and emotions but also for rationality. Especially for rationality: I understand there's a big element of stubbornness in this stance, but every time I try to dissolve it with arguments, I only end up making it bigger. Unlike the laptops I've had, which I could never make bigger.

And I say this to quickly address the elephant in the room or, for the purposes of this essay, the tower on the desk: the modularity of a desktop computer makes it exponentially superior to portable ones. And it's not just about the ability to add speakers and mechanical keyboards and three monitors in parallel to set up a small home theater and game while drenched in stimuli, but also about the power of a desktop computer as a real operations center.

A table + a chair + a PC = a command center. Notebooks or laptops or portables lack both the charisma and the ports to hold down the job with the same efficiency.

When I talk about modularity, I'm talking about getting your hands in there, not just when it's inevitable but on purpose. Removing the case of a desktop computer is like popping the hood on a combustion engine car -- how can you not be amazed by that small-scale engineering. PCs as living organisms and other metaphors.

But the point is the superb adaptability of a desktop compared to a laptop. Installing memory, adding another drive, swapping a graphics card, adding another fan, changing the thermal paste, replacing the power supply, blowing out the dust, soldering, cleaning. Bending the pins on a processor, but bending them yourself.

Then, as a contextual computing device, there's the Argentina factor, which is clearly not the friendliest country in the world for riding public transit with a laptop or for using one outdoors. Possibly not even for using them in enclosed public spaces.

Add to that all the problems you can think of when buying technology here: the markups, the lack of tech support and after-sales service, the limited variety of brands and models, the "parts priced in dollars" for repairs, the "spare parts stuck at customs," the whole old-bills-versus-new-bills dollar hassle, and so on. All the more reason to appreciate the gradual upgrade path that PCs offer, almost a dollar-cost averaging strategy for tech components.

Comfort and ergonomics in use are no small matter either. Everyone I see working on a laptop does it fully hunched over with their little arms pinned to their sides like a T-Rex drinking from a puddle, a consequence of the screen and keyboard sizes, which come from the laptops' own dimensions, which come from their obligation to be ever more portable and lightweight, which comes from a logic of planned obsolescence in saturated markets.

I accept, however, that the markets overlap. Pressing down on this confrontation -- as it does with most private matters today -- the real estate market barges in. If the only place you can live as a student or worker is your childhood bedroom or a studio apartment, maybe a desk with a gaming chair will eat up the little oxygen you have between those four walls before you lose your mind ahead of schedule. And the job market shows up too. If the only job you can get requires you to use your own computer, you're not going to haul your desk onto the bus either.

When they sell you portability as a solution for the times, ask yourself a solution for whom. I suppose at this point in history writing a piece about desktop computers versus laptops is something from decades ago, maybe from the last century, but in my view it's also a debate about the future. 

Let's exaggerate: laptop computers were the first arm we let them twist with an unfinished promise of connectivity and perpetual movement in the globalized world, in exchange for abandoning what we had achieved, which was a machine at home capable of helping us administratively, professionally, educationally, culturally, and socially, a device that could be an archive, an entertainment center, and heavy machinery for thought and creativity.

Eternal love to the kids in Argentine rap who started making music on the laptops from the Conectar Igualdad program, but you have to be seriously dedicated. Smaller devices invite you to consume, not to create. The thing is they sold us... wait, not me. THEY SOLD YOU the prosumer pitch. THEY SOLD YOU the story of the nomadic content creator who's their own boss. THEY SOLD YOU a computer and you were fine, then a laptop and then a phone, also a smart watch. And you lost the smart part, buddy.