Why do desktops generally offer better value than laptops at similar price range?
In: Technology
Size of components, heat mitigation, battery/power-supply usage.
It costs more to make the same performance of components into smaller forms. The smaller you go, the more difficult the engineering and manufacturing. So smaller components will cost you more, or for same price the components will be worse performance. A desktop can have much bigger components and that’s cheaper to make so at the same budget the components are better performance.
Heat! Heat is a major problem in computing. The more performance you push out, the more heat generated. For a big modern desktop this is less of an issue, it has 6+ fans, you may have liquid cooling, etc. lots of space inside the box for heatsinks, and lots of airflow to radiate that heat out and draw cool air in. So desktops can really push performance and control the heat. Laptops dont have a big open air interior, doesn’t have the same size or amount of fans, doesn’t have the liquid cooling, etc. laptops jam all their components together to save space, so they have to throttle some performance to avoid overheating and damaging components.
Power/battery. On pure battery, high performance items will drain it in minutes not hours, and plugged in you still deal with power output causing heat… so they really have to throttle performance to their design maximums.
So at any price point, the laptop will always have worse performance than a well built desktop, assuming all else equal. Laptops you pay a premium for the form factor and mobility, so if you keep the price the same, performance goes down. If you keep performance mostly the same, price of laptop goes up above the desktop comparison
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