It used to be that a laptop was a little flip-top box of sacrifices.
Power
As mentioned, laptops have almost always been less powerful than desktop computers.
The new MacBook Pro, with their M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs, takes it even further.
Apple
Theyre absurdly powerful, able to beat even Apples Mac Pro and iMac in many tasks.
You could fill them up with extra drives and graphics cards and plug in all kinds of peripherals.
Now, this, too, is solved.
TwelveSouth
And Thunderbolt solved expandability some years ago.
you could even buy a stand, like theBookArc from TwelveSouth, to keep it all tidy.
And thanks to the poor upgradeability of the iMac and Mac mini, youre no worse off anyway.
Try that with an iMac.
Desktop Pros
If it’s not clear, we’re talking aboutmostusers here.
But even then, the desktop still has a few advantages.
Storage, for one.
Because a desktop doesn’t move, you’re free to connect a lot of external SSDs.
With a laptop, you have to disconnect those drives whenever you undock.
Adding an extra 512 GB to double the base storage option costs another $200.
Upping it to 2GB total costs $600.
That’s enough to buy another Mac.
In fact, this brings up another advantage of a desktop machine.
It’s often cheaper than the equivalent laptop version.
And some people just plain prefer the little Mac mini or the elegant iMac.
This brings us to displays.
Why doesn’t Apple sell a cheaper display for regular users?
That’s a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved.
