Home PCs are not going through the best of times, but deservedly so. Their popularity has declined due to many technological factors and a complete rethinking of the very essence of home personal computers by society. Why are classic system units being bought less and less, and why are they unnecessary for the vast (almost all) majority of the population?
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20 years ago, the difference between a computer and a laptop was huge in terms of performance, which is not the case in today’s market. Flagship laptops are only slightly inferior to their bigger PC brothers, but they have many times higher performance per unit of energy consumption, and in addition, mobility and autonomy.
Even professionals are moving away from desktop computers in favor of thin laptops. The release of Apple Silicon processors has stirred up the market like never before, so now a kilogram ultrabook is productive enough to forget about classic PCs once and for all.
Programmers of various stripes, designers of everything and everyone, SMM managers, journalists, content managers — a mid-range laptop covers the needs of almost all professions. So do they need a classic computer at home? Hardly.
The situation is the same with gaming laptops — they have become too powerful to ignore. In the chart Steam mobile versions of Nvidia RTX 4000 video cards have sharply risen (overtaking desktop versions), and active community members ITC Community in the comments will confirm that there is nothing better than «buy a laptop for 100k».
Miniature computers were predicted to become extinct, but the opposite happened. This type of PC is gaining momentum, more and more manufacturers are interested in producing them, and consumers are increasingly paying attention to such compact solutions.
They take up almost no space, consume little power, and provide a high level of performance on par with modern laptops. Diversity is also important because buying small PC is available for any budget thanks to the active involvement of little-known Chinese companies in production.
The prices of budget nettops on a popular Chinese website are so attractive that you no longer want to assemble a PC yourself, knowing the huge number of advantages of the mini form factor. But what about when you need maximum performance that these «boxes» cannot provide?
Flagship nettops can replace the most powerful workstations with x86 processors. Of course, Apple Mac Studio costs a lot, but the memory bandwidth of up to 800 GB/s, the world’s most powerful integrated graphics, a powerful yet economical processor at the level of top x86 solutions from Intel and AMD take their toll.
It’s not unusual to see a computer the size of an Xbox Series S and running at 20–100 watts of power running video processing faster than the most powerful PCs of today. The small computer market has every chance to displace classic system units from the «office» market, although it is too early to talk about dominance in the home PC sector.
With Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft consoles, it’s clear — they’re the best video game solution you can imagine. They are economical, quiet, compact, and most importantly, easy to use. The system interface is clear, simple, and can be understood by a pensioner or a 5-year-old child.
And what about PCs? Just remember the chaos of game launchers and everything becomes clear: Steam, Galaxy of Games, Microsoft Xbox, EA APP, Ubisoft Connect, Blizzard Battle Net, 2K Games, Rock Star Games, Riot Games, and others. You will have to create a new game profile for each of these great launchers!
The desire to play turns into a real quest, and the computer becomes clogged with gigabytes of unnecessary launchers that are automatically loaded when the system starts. Players do not want this, they just want to play an interesting game, nothing more.
Obviously, the problems described above apply to laptops as well. To a lesser extent because a laptop, while not limiting the owner to the place of play, does not save them from the madness of game launchers and software nuances. That owners of Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch never encounter.
Portable consoles further distance gamers from desktop PCs and break the stereotype that gaming must be done in a chair in front of a monitor. Naturally, Nintendo Switch, Valve Steam Deck, Asus Rog Ally, MSI Claw, Lenovo Legion Go and their analogs are gaining popularity, displacing their big «PC brothers».
Despite not mighty hardware, minimal graphics settings in games, and mediocre battery life, video game enthusiasts choose them because the first thing they want is ease of use.
Lying on the couch in your preferred position and playing your favorite game with not the best graphics. It turns out to be more enjoyable than staring at pixels on a 27-inch 4K monitor and looking for visual improvements from the ray tracing enabled by ultra-ultra graphics.
Top tablets are not just productive, but faster than the best computers of today, at least in single-core tests. For example, the Apple iPad Pro 11 2024 with the M4 processor ranks first in the Geekbench Single Core rating among all processors of all time.
With such a CPU, you can easily process 4K video and work with any browser applications, not slower, but often faster than on a full-fledged PC. Of course, only creative people do this, a small part of them, and for the majority, the tablet is still a device for consuming content.
And in this regard, a tablet PC easily beats classic home PCs. For 150-200 dollars, you can buy a tablet with a good screen, excellent battery life, and very fast hardware. Most importantly, you can take it with you to the couch or to bed to watch a movie on YouHub before going to bed.
Just like laptops, tablets are portable, but they still have a more casual audience, aimed mostly at entertainment rather than work. Indeed, it is a good device for almost everything, losing out to smartphones only because of the inability to slip it into your pocket, although many people prefer 9-13 inch screens in their hands at home.
It’s easy to switch from a classic PC to a tablet, but this rule only works one way. After a hard day’s work, you just want to lie down on the couch and relax, but an x86 system unit won’t allow you to do that, and it doesn’t have applications for popular social networks or video services.
For example, the YouTube mobile app allows you to stretch a video to fit the screen by zooming it with your fingers. It is impossible to do the same in a browser on a computer, and you have to put up with black borders. For owners of 21:9 monitors, watching a 16:9 video with a 21:9 frame (a rectangle in the center with borders on all sides) is a real pain.
The perfect choice for those who value ergonomics, convenience, and perfect cable management Monoblocks are in demand mainly among commercial consumers, i.e. they are purchased for offices, but they can be a good option at home.
Monoblocks that can be used as a monitor by connecting a game console, for example, are especially convenient. With a wireless keyboard + mouse set, you get a perfectionist’s workstation, where only one power cable runs from the computer.
It is ergonomics that sells all-in-one computers because in terms of technical characteristics, they often lose out to laptops, not to mention classic home PCs. Owners of tidy, cozy, perfectly clean one-room apartments will definitely choose a monoblock rather than a large system unit if they have to choose between the two.
Modern mobile phones replace a camera, navigator, TV, modem, computer, game console, and anything else. The performance of the flagships is so high that it brings half of the PCs to their knees, and in Single Core tests, most computers cannot reach the level of the Apple iPhone 15 Pro.
Android smartphones are also strong, especially on the newly announced chip Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. This allows you to run web applications faster than on modern computers, and mobile platforms have a whole lot of advantages in addition to performance:
People have become addicted to smartphones for a reason. First of all, they have a low entry threshold, convenient applications (which are not available on a PC). Young people today type faster on a touchscreen keyboard that automatically corrects mistakes and puts a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence, so there’s no question of ease of use.
No wonder users are willing to pay 10-20 or 30 thousand hryvnias for a new phone, while a computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo is gathering dust in the attic or has been disposed of long ago. Smartphones sold billions, computers by the millions and thousands, and some of their types can be «counted on the fingers» counted.
People use their smartphones to lead a virtual life on social media, play video games, watch movies, take pictures, and just kill time lying on the couch or lying in bed until 12:00. It’s simply more convenient than getting up and sitting in front of a monitor, trying not to ruin your posture.
In addition, some manufacturers offer desktop modes for their smartphones, which literally replaces a desktop computer with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. We talked more about this in the article about Samsung DeX.
In the early 2000s, computers were rapidly gaining popularity due to their clear advantage over TVs. PCs allow users to choose what content to consume, what and when to watch, pause, etc., but times have changed and TVs have been taking revenge for more than 10 years now, and successfully.
Smart TV has completely redefined the multimedia future of classic computers. The interface of Windows, Mac OS, and Ubuntu operating systems is not optimized for controlling the remote control from the couch.
Only true x86 fetishists prefer a wireless keyboard and mouse and a PC connected via HDMI to the TV. Rather than a built-in TV Smart TV or a set-top box, such as Apple TV, with a convenient remote control, adapted interface, and voice input.
People choose what is more convenient, and time has put everything in its place. It turned out that people are no longer interested in desktop computers as multimedia devices, as TVs, smartphones, tablets, and laptops are better at their job.
The ergonomics of classic home computers are poor, if only because they force you to sit in front of the monitor in a chair as if you were at work. Those who work in an office for 8-10 hours a day won’t want to turn on a PC at home, but will be happy to watch TV or scroll through their smartphone on the couch.
The same applies to game consoles, laptops, and all portable equipment that can be made to adapt to your needs, not the other way around. People have become more demanding and more do not want to obey the rules of the PC. The vast majority of the population has long realized this, and is therefore reluctant to spend time at a classic computer workstation, especially at home.
Many owners of cool PCs still prefer the conditional Steam Deck or its analogues because it is simply convenient. The level of comfort is higher than the quality of graphics, the number of cores, and how many frames a PC draws on the screen per second. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, and consoles are winning over home computers in the fight for consumers.
A thin ultrabook or Steam Deck consumes 10-20 watts of power, a nettop 20-50 watts, a typical gaming laptop 150-175 watts, as does a powerful stationary game console, and some monoblocks run on 20-watt power banks. Tablets and smartphones are out of the question — they are champions of energy efficiency.
In contrast, we have classic computers that do not behave very efficiently in work scenarios (many times higher power consumption than ARM laptops), and top gaming PCs «consume» half a kilowatt of electricity per hour.
For example, the AMD Ryzen 9 7900 + AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX computer known to ITC readers, on which we test components, consumes 450-550 watts in games, 200 watts when processing a large number of photos, video rendering requires up to 350-400 watts, and normal surfing in a browser makes the system consume 100-130 watts.
With a top-of-the-line gaming laptop, you can divide these values by at least two, and with a game console + ARM laptop combination, energy efficiency will increase by 4-5 times. If you don’t play video games, the savings are several times greater.
It is classic computers based on x86 components that have the worst energy efficiency among all types of modern computing electronics. The difference between mobile chips and x86 is striking.
To perform the same work, large system units consume ten times more electrical energy. This parameter is primarily paid attention to buy users living in Europe and the United States, where the cost of electricity is very high and people are becoming more and more environmentally conscious.
The main advantage of home PCs is their modularity and ease of repair, as well as the ability to assemble a system from the necessary components on your own. But for whom is this an advantage? Perhaps for a small handful of enthusiasts who are not yet tired of their hobby and have plenty of free time.
As practice shows, people are reluctant to accept easy repair initiatives in smartphones (Nokia G22where you can replace the screen «with your hands and a fork» in 20 minutes) because they would rather buy a new device or let professionals do it. It seems like a good option, but few people need it.
The situation is even worse with computers. Too few users are interested in assembling an ATX kit. Recently, the following are gaining popularity ready-made PC assemblieswhich are sold at approximately the cost of the components, and sometimes cheaper.
At first, the enthusiast assembles everything himself, selecting components, laying cables, twisting everything with curiosity, then buys ready-made computers, and later switches to laptops, game consoles, or even smartphones/tablets exclusively.
People usually don’t want to assemble a computer themselves. They want to open the box, plug it in, and make it work, just like with a car. Few people want to crawl under a car to change the oil and filter themselves, even though you can save a few hundred hryvnias by getting your hands dirty with used oil and spilling it on the garage floor.
It may sound strange to a computer enthusiast, but the mass consumer sees a direct analogy between someone who spends a whole Saturday under the hood of Slavut’s car and someone who takes apart a computer by themselves. This is because they decided to better connect the cables, replace the thermal paste in an old video card, or remove a dead SSD drive they bought on Aliexpress.
З program settings everything is the same: change RAM latencies, reduce CPU voltage, overclock by bus or multiplier, adjust the fan curve, synchronize the backlight, set CPU power limits, enable re-bar for the video card, and much more.
Obviously, people who value their time, have a family, a job, hobbies, and enjoy outdoor activities and a healthy lifestyle are not interested in doing this. That’s why almost every user is ready to sacrifice the theoretical performance of the system by exchanging a PC for a console, nettop, or anything else where everything is ready for work/entertainment right out of the box.
Sometimes owners of desktop PCs are afraid to see what’s going on under their desk at the monitor because there are so many cables with a classic home computer. Let’s imagine that Yevdokim (a system administrator in a government agency) uses a gaming PC with two monitors and prefers only wired peripherals:
There’s a lot of work to be done here, and you’ll have to work hard to get everything right, and otherwise it will be absolute chaos, a real spider web that not only a beginner will get lost in. In contrast, let’s take a look at the workplace of Vladislav (a Middle class Front-End developer), who bought an Apple iMac 24 M3 2023:
And that’s it? Just one cable, a completely clean desktop, a wireless keyboard, a wireless mouse, and enjoy your workflow. With a monitor and a laptop or mini-PC, there will be a few more cables, but the place will still be tidy in any circumstances.
Despite the greatest versatility, classic computers have the worst ergonomics of any type of digital equipment. In an era of slowing technological progress (when a 5-6 year old processor is still relevant), users are increasingly paying attention to convenience, ergonomics, aesthetics, and ease of use, which is reflected in the success of x86 system units.
Offices are still using classic computers, although some companies are starting to switch their employees to laptops with monitors, nettops, monoblocks, etc. Firms still buy off-the-shelf computers from Apple, HP, Lenovo, and Dell in large quantities, and the market is booming. This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with home PCs?
Having worked hard at the workplace, a person will be reluctant to sit in front of a monitor at home, and this is a fact. It’s like working in a cafe kitchen and eating Kyiv cutlets every day for twenty years, and your mother-in-law cooked these very Kyiv cutlets for dinner at home. Enjoy!
The essence of the metaphor is clear and simple: everything is consumed, even digital technology. That’s why in 2024 it’s hard to find an office worker who would even consider buying a classic computer for home because not only do they not need it, but they literally get sick of computers.
Despite its many shortcomings, the PC is still the most versatile tool in the world. With the proper knowledge, they are easy to upgrade, repair, and maintain, and it is classic computers that give the highest productivity per hryvnia, although this does not save them from slow extinction.
It is difficult for old-school fans to accept the fact that the PC platform is in decline. As typewriter fans did not accept the advent of computers in their time, as film lovers did not recognize digital cameras, and as push-button phone owners did not accept the breakthrough iPhone in their time 2007.
The complete extinction of desktop computers is unlikely to happen in the next 10 years, if only because the platform still has a large fan base that would never trade a PC for something else.
However, we need to look for the positive in everything new that replaces the old because change is inevitable when it is driven by technological progress and the demands of a new generation that is so active, restless, and proactive.