In another thread I was reading about this, someone observed that IOS (and similar) developers are probably doing most of their actual coding work on laptops or workstations. True, many people don't need desktops, but one might as well ask whether trucks are dead because of the ubiquitous availability of small cars.
The author notes that although laptops can do a great deal these days, desktops are still the most flexible when it comes time to upgrade, are usually more powerful than laptops, and can generally be modified more easily. On the other hand, desktops take up a lot of space, more electricity than laptops, and aren't particularly portable.
Seems to me we're moving toward a computing experience in which the portable device and the desktop device will be one and the same; there will be no difference between a "portable" and a "desktop" machine.
Gamers need ig, high power (electrical as well as compute) systems.
Try running Revit on a even the latest laptops opening a project file 1 GB in size will kill any and every single laptop out there.
Desktops will certainly decline on the consumer end - but will continue in enterprise and business (towers cost less than laptops, are much more serviceable and take a wider range of commodity 3rd party parts that are easy to get)
There will always be a market for tower/desktops because of speed, capacity and latency requirements -- at least for the foreseeable future....
(We have tried to Revit to a VDI in the cloud - but still way too laggy)
