The Blog of Burgher Jon

I’m apparently just a little too old fashioned for the modern world.  Forrester, yesterday, projected that desktop computer sales would fall to only 18% of the PC market by 2015.  Well this ancient just purchased his first desktop in nearly 10 years.

For the last several years I’ve owned two laptops, one for work and one for business.  This used to be a logical choice for me.  I was traveling 3 or 4 weeks a month (now only 1 or 2) and having two laptops allowed me to keep from mixing business and personal (call me old fashioned, but I’ve never really been comfortable with using company property for personal work).  When my personal laptop was stolen a few weeks ago, I did a lot of thinking and decided a new desktop was the best choice.  I wasn’t looking for your average desktop though, I was looking for something that would allow me to work in a way that the laptop currently limits me from.

I’m a multi-tasker.  I’m the guy with 20 piles of crap on my desk that’s working through all of them.  I’m fairly meticulous and by the end of the day I’ve generally cleared all those piles, but when I’m working I prefer to be able to spread out and jump from task to task and back again.  It’s with this in mind that I purchased 2 30″ screens from HP (they were actually cheaper from Amazon then they were through HPs website).  Each has 2560 x 1600 resolution, meaning together I can spread out all the crap on my desk over a 5120 x 1600 desktop.  At this moment I have open (and up in plain site) 5 applications that I’m jumping between.  I’m using Picasa in the upper right-hand corner of the left screen to crop the picture you will see with this post.  I’m using two Chrome windows, one with this post and one with my Google Reader.  I have Tweetdeck open and showing 3 columns.  Lastly, because I love torture, I’m watching the Pirates game in HD.  It’s enough to make this ADD kid giddy.

Now that I’ve got my nerd boasting out of the way, I can get to the point of the post.  I titled it “We’re So Mobile You Can Buy a Desktop Again” because I believe that’s the case.  More accurately, mobile technologies make the personal laptop irrelevant.  This frees me up to buy a home computer that actually maximizes the way I work at home.  For Example:

• The fact that all the files I modify on this computer automatically sync up with my work laptop via Dropbox makes it unnecessary to use the same computer at home that I use at work.
• The fact that I can check and easily reply to emails on the go with a mobile interface that’s miles further then my Blackberry was 2 years ago means that I don’t have to lug the work laptop around just in case I want to write more then a sentence in a work email.
• The fact that my mobile phone allows me to take/upload photos, check on Facebook, update Twitter, read blogs, post to this blog and more means I can go without touching a personal computer for a week or two without missing it.
• The fact that so many of the applications I use are web based (gmail, google chat, google docs, Mint, my MBA courseware, etc…) means that I don’t actually have to load software on my work laptop to use it for a few days while I’m in a hotel room.

The process of having my laptop stolen and buying a desktop replacement really has opened my eyes to how much personal computing has changed.