(04-27-2012, 06:03 AM)Starscream Wrote: I think that is the main concern. If you look back at some posts in this thread, you'll find more than a few stating that they feel like desktops have better specs and that is the reason they would not choose a laptop (and is the main reason behind the second poll answer).
You'll have to excuse me then. Given the current direction this thread has taken, the relative hardware merits of desktops and laptops seems to be anything but the heart of the issue here. Were it the main concern of this topic, we probably would have had more posts like SlickDragon's with NaturalViolence's rebuttals. Those were at least detailed thoughts about the abilities of each from a hardware perspective. Such thorough discussions would have gone a long way to countering the view that laptop hardware can't handle the same tasks desktops can.
Instead, we've ended up debating the overall merits of desktop and laptops themselves, bringing up issues such as price, the need for mobility, and a whole host of analogies and examples. The poll does nothing to help this. To me, it only reinforces that this is a conversation about what can or can't laptops do that desktop already do. Many of the limitations on laptops, as you have correctly noticed, are not hardware based, but rather issues with their given form factor.
For zurginator, some of it's not that laptop hardware itself is in some way inferior, just that the current form factor prohibits things such as RAID 0 SSD arrays, 14 USB slots, and in some cases multi-monitor displays. If you want this to be a thread regarding laptop and desktop hardware and specs and what each is capable of, then you've got to do something about the posts that are comparing laptops and desktops based on their form factors. It'd probably be less frustrating in the long run.