Laptops pack desktop-level computing power into a portable form factor, but that convenience comes with trade-offs in cost, upgradability, and security. Understanding these factors is essential for making informed hardware decisions in professional IT environments.
Laptops
As much as I like desktops, I really equip most of my employees with laptops instead, and the reason being is it just gives a lot more flexibility.
A laptop has a lot of the features and functionalities that a desktop has, but it just fits it in a much smaller package, and there are advantages and disadvantages to this. So what is a laptop? A laptop is a computer small enough to fit on your lap - simple as that. An example of this might be the Dell XPS, or HP ProBook, or MacBook Pro.
The purpose of this is the same thing as the desktop, so we can carry out a lot of the same functionality as a desktop would have. Same OS, so Windows, Linux, macOS can all be installed on these, and most of your apps are going to be able to be installed just as long as it's compatible with the operating system.
The big advantage to this is just the portability - that's the huge one. There are other advantages too, like you've got a battery on this laptop, so if the power goes out you're not going to lose all your information. It's going to stay up and running, and you'll have time to close it out.
They can be more expensive, because it's just taking all of these big components and making them much smaller, and there are some engineering problems with that. There's more limited capacity or availability of parts, and that increases the price to a certain extent.
There are concerns over expandability limitations. Some vendors, once you buy into a certain level, won't allow you to do upgrades. Macs have some aspects to them that you just can't upgrade.
You also have to be concerned about overheating. Even though it says laptop and you can put it on your lap, the thing is you wouldn't want to, because then you block the fans and that can cause overheating with those laptops. Don't put it on a pillow, don't put it on cloth, don't put it on your bed, don't operate it without that proper airflow on that device. It needs to be on hard surfaces to make sure that there's proper airflow.
The repair of these is more difficult, because you're talking about specialized pieces all fit really small in here, so it's more difficult to take apart and service these.
And of course they're also easier to grow legs and walk off, meaning somebody could steal it very easily - all they have to do is pick it up and walk out the door. I've had laptops that have walked out the door, or somebody has stolen them because they were sitting on my desk. Somebody put their laptops on my desk, somebody else walked by, grabbed them and just walked out the door. So there's a higher theft with laptops. But laptops are extremely handy and a nice way to be able to have this compute power.
Here's an example of a laptop. Of course we have our screen right here, we have our keyboard, there's a mouse - so this is a touchpad, but it's a mouse right here, with the mouse keyboards down here. There's also a mouse joystick that you can use, with buttons right here. So it's got all of the components; here's the start button right here. It's got all the components that a regular desktop would have, it's just in this smaller form factor.
What I'm going to do is pop this back off and look on the inside. On the insides we have a lot of the same components as well. One of them that we don't have on a desktop that we have on here is the battery, so this big black cube right here is the battery.
From a CPU or processing standpoint, that's right here under this - it looks like it's plastic, but there's a metal underneath here, and this is the heat sink coming off of this. So this is the CPU right here, and then it draws the heat away from it to this fan, and then this fan spins. This is why we wouldn't want to set this laptop on top of us, because it vents then through the little grates right here, and if we set it on our lap then it will clog those, and then there won't be a great airflow and this chip could overheat and cause damage. So there we have the CPU on here.
This is the RAM, so we've got our RAM storage right here. We've got two modules in there, or two sticks of RAM in there. We also have storage right over here, so this is what's storing data - this is an M.2 solid state drive right there.
We've got our wireless NIC over here, we've got a built-in NIC, and that's what we see right here. This is where this flips down, which allows the RJ45 to slip in there and give it an ethernet connection. And then we see several ports on here that we can slip like a card reader over here.
This looks like a battery right here, so I would imagine that there's a BIOS somewhere in this general facility next to the battery, so we've got BIOS there.
And then there are a couple of other things, I guess, that desktops don't have, like built-in speakers, so we see built-in speakers. There's an antenna for the wir that comes up into the screen right here, and then the screen connects right here - this is where all the data for the screen is, so it can know what to display on the screen. So it's pretty cool to be able to crack one of these open.
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