Desktop computer have some advantages that the so-called i-devices lack even for tasks that are not computer-centric. The main one for me is the longevity of y

Desktop computer have some advantages that the so-called i-devices lack even for tasks that are not computer-centric. The main one for me is the longevity of your data. It is connected to the control over your data you have in a desktop OS. Good luck finding what you did five years ago in an app in some device and reproducing it now. You are at the mercy of some proprietary format the app creator chose, the availability of the app at a later stage, whether you saved your work in a cloud service, whether you kept your old device running, the operating system updates you installed, ..... With a desktop you can archive your work, whatever it might be, in sequences of bits that reside in your disk. Open source software and virtual machines go a long way for helping reproducibility. Not all tasks benefit from reproducibility and longevity but I'd argue they include a lot more than computer programming