I just got a new MacBook Pro of my very own which is undoubtedly the fastest computer I’ve ever owned. I hear a lot of people saying things like "I don’t think I’ll ever get another desktop computer again." But to me there is one very good reason to own and use a desktop computer: Desktop computers can provide greater bandwidth connections between your brain and the net than laptop computers can. I’ll explain what this means.
We’re quickly approaching a world where we’re always connected to the net in some manner or another. As we all know, the bandwidth with which we can communicate with the net varies tremendously between locations and situations. It might be
as slow as AT&T’s EDGE network, or as fast as a dedicated office
line with many Gbps of throughput. But when we’re in the office, the speed of our pipe to the net isn’t the limiting factor. Usually it’s the servers on the other end which limit how fast we can get things done. Even when I’m on my DSL line at home, Gmail is so slow that my pipe isn’t the limiting factor. Effective bandwidth is limited by the smallest pipe in the series from your brain to the information service.
Sometimes the smallest pipe isn’t a network layer at all. If you’re using your iPhone on the office’s WiFi network, the network will all run super fast. But your effective speed will be the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and there are many small devices which are way harder to use than the iPhone. There are multiple places the communications pipeline can get clogged:
- The physical Human-Computer Interface of your device
- The UI of the software on the device
- The local processing power of your device
- The direct connection from your device to the series of high-speed routers and fiber known as "the net"
- The processing power of the servers running the information service you’re using
Laptops have totally caught up with desktops in terms of #2 and #3, but not #1. The reason to use a desktop machine is that you can trick out its Human-Computer Interface to be super high bandwidth. You can get yourself a really nice ergonomic keyboard, multiple high-resolution monitors, and a real mouse. A friend of mine even built himself a foot-mouse. Pretty soon your desktop will start to look like Lain’s Navi. (Pictured above for those not familiar with it — go watch it. It’s rad.)
You can do some of this with a laptop docking station if
available, or by manually plugging and unplugging things. Many laptops
support 2 monitors, but generally one of them needs to be the internal
monitor, which won’t match the second one. A USB port multiplier can
handle all your input devices which is nice. So if you’re happy with
just two displays, a laptop can probably get enough HCI bandwidth today.
Looking further down the line, someday Apple will extend the iPhone’s multi-touch UI to iMacs and give us the Minority Report interface. This will offer far more Human-Computer bandwidth than we’ve ever seen before. This trend will continue towards direct Computer-Brain Interfaces at which point the line between our biological brains and our "exocortex" will get very blurry indeed. I can hardly wait.