Desktop computer
Early computers, and later the general purpose high throughput "mainframes", took up the space of a whole room.
Minicomputers, on the contrary, generally fit into one or a few refrigerator-sized racks, or, for the few smaller ones, built into a fairly large desk, not put on top of it.
[7] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, desktop computers became the predominant type, the most popular being the IBM PC and its clones, followed by the Apple Macintosh,[8] with the third-placed Commodore Amiga having some success in the mid-1980s but declining by the early 1990s.
Early personal computers, like the original IBM Personal Computer, were enclosed in a "desktop case", horizontally oriented to have the display screen placed on top, thus saving space on the user's actual desk, although these cases had to be sturdy enough to support the weight of CRT displays that were widespread at the time.
Not only do these tower cases have more room for expansion, they have also freed up desk space for monitors which were becoming larger every year.
Desktop cases, particularly the compact form factors, remain popular for corporate computing environments and kiosks.
Influential games such as Doom and Quake during the 1990s had pushed gamers and enthusiasts to frequently upgrade to the latest CPUs and graphics cards (3dfx, ATI, and Nvidia) for their desktops (usually a tower case) in order to run these applications, though this has slowed since the late 2000s as the growing popularity of Intel integrated graphics forced game developers to scale back.
The change in sales of form factors is due to the desktop iMac moving from affordable G3 to upscale G4 model and subsequent releases are considered premium all-in-ones.
[19] The decades of development mean that most people already own desktop computers that meet their needs and have no need of buying a new one merely to keep pace with advancing technology.
[24] Among PC form factors, desktops remain a staple in the enterprise market but lost popularity among home buyers.
PC makers and electronics retailers responded by investing their engineering and marketing resources towards laptops (initially netbooks in the late 2000s, and then the higher-performance Ultrabooks from 2011 onwards), which manufacturers believed had more potential to revive the PC market[9] than desktops.
Towards the middle of the 2010s, media sources began to question the existence of the post-PC trend, at least as conventionally defined, stating that the so-called post-PC devices are just other portable forms of PCs joining traditional desktop PCs which still have their own operation areas and evolve.
They are typically small-sized, inexpensive, low-power computers designed for basic tasks such as web browsing, accessing web-based applications, document processing, and audio/video playback.
[44] Hardware specifications and processing power are usually reduced[45] and hence make them less appropriate for running complex or resource-intensive applications.
Cube Workstations have a cube case enclosure to house the motherboard, PCI-E expansion cards, GPU, CPU, DRAM DIMM slots, computer cooling equipment, chipsets, I/O ports, hard disk drives, and solid-state drives.
They come with high definition display, video graphics, surround sound and TV tuner systems to complement typical PC features.
[55] The main form-factor for this class is a Tower case, but most vendors produce compact or all-in-one low-end workstations.
Desktops have an advantage over laptops in that the spare parts and extensions tend to be standardized, resulting in lower prices and greater availability.
This means that a desktop computer configuration, usually a tower case, can be customized and upgraded to a greater extent than laptops.
Desktop computers also provide more space for cooling fans and vents to dissipate heat, allowing enthusiasts to overclock with less risk.
The laptop's all-in-one design provides a built-in keyboard and a pointing device (such as a touchpad) for its user and can draw on power supplied by a rechargeable battery.
