Flexibility. And I wonder if remote work has altered that balance lately too. Many I suspect now have chiefly desktop computers, except they’re actually laptops plugged into screens. Because there are still some occasions in which you want to be able to take a working computer somewhere else.

But a laptop starts to look like a strangely optimised device for this. Too small to be a powerful desktop and sometimes (if you’ve gotten a beefy one) too big to be comfortably portable. However, a nice desktop machine coupled with a very portable tablet that can, in those few times its necessary, be a productive enough work machine, but also just be the nice portable media machine wherever you want, seems like an ideal pairing for many now. That the ipad absolutely cannot do some things you’d maybe, even just once a decade, need to do on the fly is a show stopper for this pairing.

And so many probably have a laptop used as a desktop most of the time and an ipad used as a kindle most of the time.