[glogla]

While both laptop and desktop may have i5, the desktop i5 should be about 50 % faster on single threaded tasks, and almost three times faster on multi threaded tasks. Of course, you won't notice that when browsing or doing similar light tasks, but otherwise, three times difference is huge. It means waiting 20 minutes for video to transcode instead of hour, for example. When doing data crunching or building big software, desktops are really useful.