[SOLVED] Couple of questions about laptops

[littlebigman]

Hello

I was wondering two newbie things about laptops:

1. Why are they so silent without requiring the huge heatsink/fans that we use in desktops?

2. Are they powerful enough for developers, eg. to compile a big project like Linux, with similar performance to desktops?

I notice that the Apple product range offers almost no desktops these days, although most graphic designers prefer to work on Macs and that kind of application requires powerful CPUs. If they're fast enough for graphic design, why do developers on PC's still use desktops at all?

Thank you.

[izumi]

Hello!

1. First of all, a lot of laptops use CPU's and other components that dissipate less heat than "normal" desktop variations, but this comes at cost of perfomance. Secondly, laptops tend to overheat after some time of use, their fans start to whistle and so on. It happened with my Benq P52, Dell 1501 and MacBook Pro laptops for example.

2. You don't need powerful CPU/graphic card to run most of graphic design tools, but using small laptop screen for serious graphic work is a joke, you can't edit and encode hd videos comfortably with a laptop and so on. And not all people are designers, a lot of programs require decent processing power that laptops can't provide.

The most important Apple strategy is aggressive marketing. Their notebooks are not just notebooks anymore, they are some sorts of symbols. Both Apple laptops and Apple desktops are heavily overpriced. If you don't need Apple software, you don't need Apple computer. They have the same hardware inside as Windows computers, and you can get far more powerful Windows computer for the same money.

To sum it up, laptops are more expensive, less reliable, less powerful and not so comfortable as desktops.

[nzdcoy]

^^btw, on idle you can still hear my new mbp 15" fans running away in the background. not intrusive, but definitely audible. it idles at about 40 celcius with the fans (2) running at 2000rpm.

[HFat]

1. Why are they so silent without requiring the huge heatsink/fans that we use in desktops?

They're not so silent usually. And they tend to get louder with use. But maybe the newest models have made some progress.
It's easy to make a desktop (much) quieter than a laptop if they use the same parts.

Mobile parts consume less power so as to allow the batteries to last longer. This is a major selling point and it's not possible to use much more powerful batteries on portable devices because they're relatively heavy so manufacturers are driven to improve energy efficiency.
The downside is that mobile parts are less powerful and more expensive.

2. Are they powerful enough for developers, eg. to compile a big project like Linux, with similar performance to desktops?

As I said in the other thread, pretty much everything is going to be powerful enough if you're patient and you'd better better off compiling stuff like that on a server anyway.
If you really want to compile locally then, for the same price, you'll get a desktop that can compile a good bit faster than a laptop. But they will both do the job.
For many developers, compile time is not a big issue because what makes projets like Linux slow to compile is that they're huge team efforts. If you're compiling mostly your own code, compile time is often much, much shorter so the performance of the workstation is not a big issue. Some code is never compiled by the way.

why do developers on PC's still use desktops at all?

It's not all about performance and price.
Laptop displays are small and they're usually bad for instance. Sometimes, they're really bad.

[littlebigman]

Thanks everyone for the feedback.