this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Technology
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Honestly I'm shocked desktop PCs have lasted this long.
That being said, PC gaming is a growing trend, not shrinking, so I suspect there will continue to be at least some availability in the future for those components?
Additionally, while Macs are really great at some workloads, they're still inferior in others to existing desktop machines with dedicated GPUs, and the closest competitor from Apple will still cost at least twice as much.
Wait until we see the 2026 stats for hardware sales. 📉
Though I think the supply issues will hurt consoles just as much.
I'm not sold that modular desktops are going away in general. SoCs have some benefits in terms of power usage, but those are most-substantial on phones and least-substantial on the desktop.
My understanding is that memory may move away from DIMMs to CAMM2 to permit for higher speeds, but that's still a modular system.
Yes. That Apple can do these things because their soc is their market deferential. It's not an over all market direction.
CAMM has been around for years now but I've never seen a single model using them. Even Framework passed on them with their new desktop.
You don't need to as long as you're getting sufficient speeds from non-soldered DIMMs, and desktops are generally still using non-soldered DIMMs.
Desktop PCs are so much more powerful and fast than laptops of the same spec. Not to mention cheaper.
High integration on laptops decreases space and cost by wildly increasing battery life for the same battery
This isn't about laptop/desktop but about modular vs. Integrated processors.
Integrated processors let laptops be faster without also using power. Strictly speaking it'd be cheaper to just use a faster CPU but battery life is more important than cost so lots of money is spent on integrating processors.
Desktops are still around because they're upgradable and faster than their laptop brothers.
...once again, not talking about laptops.
An AIO is effectively a laptop without a keyboard. They're functionally very similar (appealing to less power-hungry users). They're just less mobile.Presumably it's cheaper for apple to just put the integrated CPUs in everything because it'd be expensive to make another model.
I garuntee you this trade off only makes sense for Apple. Other AIOs don't always have the new laptop chips from Intel because it makes more sense to use the desktop one with all the space they have.
They put them in everything because they're smaller and more efficient (and thus quieter) and because they're competitive with PC desktops in performance. And economies of scale doesn't hurt either.
I get what you mean. Basically: what I'm trying to say is that desktop/non integrated CPUs are cheaper and this cost savings continues into a large form factor. Apple doesn't put a desktop chip in their iMacs because they don't make one. If they did it'd be 4x faster for the same price.
Again, it depends on the workload. There are endless comparisons between high end desktops and comparably-priced Mac desktops, and while the PC is often more powerful, that's not always the case , and the Mac does it while being much quieter, and not turning the room it's in into a sauna.
Yes as it turns out when your workload is 99999 idle applications, a larger number cores helps more than single core performance. SOCs don't change that. They just reduce power and space usage at the expense of cost. It makes no sense to point at the special-case computing company and say that their special case will suddenly override a 50 year pattern.
It's nothing to do with idle applications, you should really looke more into this because what you're saying is simply misinformed.
Can you give me an example? The video you linked has a timestamp to something about video encoding.
The Mac is comparable in photo and video editing a dominates in LLM generation.
Which again would be cheaper if they put the chips in separate enclosures. Just way bigger and more power usage.
Macs are good at video editing because they actually give a shit about hardware encoding. NVENC is the only competitor. Everything else is shit.