| I'd say you need to distinguish between "laptop" and "laptop with docking station" (or just lots of cables). I mostly work on my laptop wherever I am -- in office, at a client, at home, on the commute, at user groups, etc. I'm comfortable with using my laptop's keyboard although I do enjoy having additional external screens when they are available. But I know plenty of people (including non-developers at non-tech companies) who do most of their work at their desk with the laptop plugged into a docking station with external peripherals -- keyboard, mouse and screens -- and only use the laptop on its own for meetings or as part of a BYOD policy. Desktops are non-portable. Laptops are portable. Tablets are ultra-portable but 1) not powerful enough on their own (good luck relying on a remote desktop with a dodgy Internet connection) and 2) not as comfortable to use for many professions (due to size constraints, even if you have a physical keyboard -- less so if you just need a dumb device to click through PowerPoint presentations). Laptops are a compromise between a desktop and a tablet. Laptops with docking stations can replace most desktops (except for high performance scenarios -- but for reference my 15.4" laptop has 4 cores, 32 gigs of RAM and an nVidia graphics card; good enough for most things other than bleeding edge AAA gaming). The benefit of a laptop with docking station over a desktop is portability. Desktops are only really required if you need levels of performance you absolutely can not gain with a laptop or that would make the laptop insufficiently portable (e.g. due to battery life -- I can generally get away with a meagre three hours away from wall outlets but many would prefer a longer battery life over the raw performance). |