Working on a screen full of files, listening to music, yada, yada when I remember I should’ve started cooking half an hour previously, I’m reminded of one of the reasons I prefer laptops for things that aren’t rack mount friendly.
The big juicy monitor ™ provides a nice 32″ workspace, the thunderbolt docking station nets me my keyboard/mouse/etc and a gigabit link straight to my file server within two hops. Heck, I even like the speakers 😀.
Yet just the same, it’s rather convienant to be able to undock, grab my laptop and bring it downstairs. Since the speaker’s and battery life aren’t shit, it’s an easy matter to have my music continue in the background while I’m cooking, and then pick up where I left off for a bit while I’m waiting for the oven to finish it’s share of cooking duty.
Increasingly, I’m inclined to believe that owning a desktop will fade by the wade side. The big honking GPU is the key reason that I still own one, since the need for expansion cards and reconfigurable internal drives have become less necessary as more compact form factors have become more capable and external connectivity have become faster. Plus, despite my early interest in diskless virtualized workstations and remote desktops, nothing really beats a good client machine for doing client machine tasks just like nothing really beats a terminal for doing terminal oriented tasks.
Maybe I’m just getting old 😛