Ya know, I noticed the same thing when I got my powerbook. I thought I didn't want one, until I needed one for work. Then all of a sudden computing was different, I could work in the living room, bedroom, starbucks, on the train. It is quite a change. Also, now the the MacBook Pros are out, there is no reason for a desktop, except to hold your ginormous external monitor.
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One thing I have noticed at work, where ThinkPads are the norm because it allows people to easily take their work home with them or on the road, is the higher failure rate compared to desktops. (This is not to say that desktops are immune, I've had two hard disk failures in 5+ years.) It's gotten so bad that it's now common for people to *spend their own money* buying an external HD case to make a personal backup in addition to the corporate ones.
ThinkPads, really? I thought they had a general reputation for sturdiness. Hell, I thought anything in that ugly plastic and squared off design and badly placed extra keys HAD to be durable...though I gues the later models are slimmer and maybe more fragile.
Yeah, I've seen the same thing about TPs in general. I also don't have anything to compare it to because we're an IBM shop. 90% of the failures aren't mechanical, but stuff like hard drives, RAM, and general "it don't work no more". But you haul something around a couple of hours a day or more, and the failure rate goes up. Then the squeeze as much into as small a space as possible so you're talking cutting edge parts with no room to breath or error.
When editing on my laptop, I need my external hard drives attached, tying me to a desk. (unlike the competitor, Avid, I can't edit offline material, Final Cut won't even open the project if the drives are missing.) Of course my project has balloned up to an hour long, with titles, animations, and online footage (what we call uncompressed footage in the editing world, please no geeky discussions about mini dv being compressed to begin with) I was just thinking how nice it would be to edit on a G5 desktop, as I'm reaching speed and processor maximums editing on my laptop.