6 ms·

Just how big is the corporate desktop market? I haven't seen desktop computers at work in at least 7 years.

stingraycharles 8y ago
Still very big, I would say. You are correct about startups, but just go to any enterprise and you will find desktops everywhere. Enterprises generally don’t like the idea of company laptops with sensitive information being stolen, and - from what I can see - thin clients + datacenters is very popular there.
- joncrane 8y ago
  OK. For the record, I worked at a government agency, at a GSE (both as a contractor, my company and the client both provided laptops only), and at a Fortune 100 company in the timeframe I quoted. The sensitive information leakage thing is protected via full disk encryption in all those cases.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Still, some organizations are concerned enough with their data that they'll not risk having it outside the building regardless of how well encrypted it is when the machine is turned off.
  - bostik 8y ago
    Same for us, and we're just 100 heads. At least once a year I have to explain to the auditors that no, we do not clamp our desktop boxes down. Every system is set up with full-disk encryption. Auditor: "What happens if someone steals one of those boxes?" Me: "We lose perhaps 1k worth of kit. An annoyance. Someone has to spend time reinstalling their setup. But the data on the disk is illegible garbage. Useless." Auditor: "Have you documented that as an accepted risk?"
  - dbuder 8y ago
    Someone is going to get burnt by a rogue employee.
- dagw 8y ago
  I work at a fairly large civil engineering company (~12k employees) and we're going 100% laptop starting this year. Personally I and many of my colleagues think it's a bad decisions.
ksk 8y ago
I'd hazard a guess of several hundred million.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
It's just a bad headline: AMD is releasing both desktop and mobile Ryzen Pros.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Mobile chips make great power-efficient desktops. Not everyone (as in "almost nobody") has demands that stress any modern processor. I'm a developer and the small laptop I carry to hackathons is a Celeron-based Acer. Emacs runs fine on it and it's very unlikely I'll ever do more running Python web apps and a browser with one or two tabs open.
volkl48 8y ago
Quite large, especially if you're including "all in one" and SFF type desktops. Plenty of typical office workers have a fixed desk/workstation/cube and don't need a portable computer. If you don't need or want your employees to have a portable machine, it offers all the traditional benefits. Specifically: - Lower purchase price/higher performance for a given price. - Lower failure rate/easier to repair. They have to make far fewer design compromises. They don't have to worry about battery size/life, they have plenty of space for proper cooling and don't have to be pushing the limits thermally, and with all the space they can design for easy servicing. Open up a modern corporate desktop machine and it's probably not going to require any tools to swap out anything but the PSU or CPU/Motherboard. It's also not going to have much in proprietary parts hard to find or purchase for a reasonable price. - Upgradeable. No soldered on RAM or Flash/SSD, expansion slots, etc. Plenty of places don't have the budgets for "ideal" upgrade cycles and so that can become important to keep what they have tolerable for longer.
dingaling 8y ago
98 million desktop PCs were shipped in 2017 versus 161 million mobile PCs. To put that in context, one desktop PC was shipped for each 2.2 iPhones. That's pretty impressive.

Still very big, I would say. You are correct about startups, but just go to any enterprise and you will find desktops everywhere. Enterprises generally don’t like the idea of company laptops with sensitive information being stolen, and - from what I can see - thin clients + datacenters is very popular there.

joncrane 8y ago
OK. For the record, I worked at a government agency, at a GSE (both as a contractor, my company and the client both provided laptops only), and at a Fortune 100 company in the timeframe I quoted. The sensitive information leakage thing is protected via full disk encryption in all those cases.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Still, some organizations are concerned enough with their data that they'll not risk having it outside the building regardless of how well encrypted it is when the machine is turned off.
- bostik 8y ago
  Same for us, and we're just 100 heads. At least once a year I have to explain to the auditors that no, we do not clamp our desktop boxes down. Every system is set up with full-disk encryption. Auditor: "What happens if someone steals one of those boxes?" Me: "We lose perhaps 1k worth of kit. An annoyance. Someone has to spend time reinstalling their setup. But the data on the disk is illegible garbage. Useless." Auditor: "Have you documented that as an accepted risk?"
- dbuder 8y ago
  Someone is going to get burnt by a rogue employee.
dagw 8y ago
I work at a fairly large civil engineering company (~12k employees) and we're going 100% laptop starting this year. Personally I and many of my colleagues think it's a bad decisions.

ksk 8y ago

I'd hazard a guess of several hundred million.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

It's just a bad headline: AMD is releasing both desktop and mobile Ryzen Pros.

rbanffy 8y ago
Mobile chips make great power-efficient desktops. Not everyone (as in "almost nobody") has demands that stress any modern processor. I'm a developer and the small laptop I carry to hackathons is a Celeron-based Acer. Emacs runs fine on it and it's very unlikely I'll ever do more running Python web apps and a browser with one or two tabs open.

volkl48 8y ago

Quite large, especially if you're including "all in one" and SFF type desktops. Plenty of typical office workers have a fixed desk/workstation/cube and don't need a portable computer. If you don't need or want your employees to have a portable machine, it offers all the traditional benefits. Specifically: - Lower purchase price/higher performance for a given price. - Lower failure rate/easier to repair. They have to make far fewer design compromises. They don't have to worry about battery size/life, they have plenty of space for proper cooling and don't have to be pushing the limits thermally, and with all the space they can design for easy servicing. Open up a modern corporate desktop machine and it's probably not going to require any tools to swap out anything but the PSU or CPU/Motherboard. It's also not going to have much in proprietary parts hard to find or purchase for a reasonable price. - Upgradeable. No soldered on RAM or Flash/SSD, expansion slots, etc. Plenty of places don't have the budgets for "ideal" upgrade cycles and so that can become important to keep what they have tolerable for longer.

dingaling 8y ago

98 million desktop PCs were shipped in 2017 versus 161 million mobile PCs. To put that in context, one desktop PC was shipped for each 2.2 iPhones. That's pretty impressive.