[TillE]

> given the power inside mobile devices

Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.

While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.

[memefrog]

Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript.

Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.

[vel0city]

> Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time.

Thinking of the people I know, about a third of them don't personally have any kind of real "PC" kind of computing device (laptop/desktop). Many get by with just their phone and a tablet, not even a laptop. They might have a work laptop, but that's usually only for work-related tasks; they don't have any permanent desk setup in mind for computing. This percentage of people is growing, not shrinking.

And to think, I've got that much exposure to people with that kind of computing lifestyle, and yet nearly half of my friends are people in PC gaming culture and go to things like massive LAN parties and watch game tournaments on Twitch.

I'd say people who have gaming PCs are an enthusiast of sorts. Step out of professional contexts and gaming PCs and a lot of people don't even bother with laptops these days. Having a dedicated space in your home for computing seems to be more and more rare these days.

[zozbot234]

> Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.

"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.

[p1necone]

You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.

[wffurr]

Asus makes a cooling attachment for their “gaming phones”: https://rog.asus.com/us/power-protection-gadgets/docks-dongl...

[fragmede]

> I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop

I hate to break it to you, but outside of tech, a lot of people have no desktop, no laptop, and just a smartphone these days.

[faeriechangling]

In most Areas HN is popular in, it’s still normal to have a laptop for school, work, or at least odd things like tax returns and document processing. You could use a tablet or phone but people tend to buy a laptop.

In areas where you do very much see phone and no laptop being common or the norm, the trend is towards increasing laptop ownership, not declining laptop ownership. It’s not a matter of phones displacing laptops so much as phones being more important and accessible.