"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , Ken Blake
writes:
[]
I know that a lot of people are like J. P. Gilliver, and use a laptop
in place of a desktop at home. But I can never understand why.

I can only speak for myself, but it's the hassle of switching computers.

That has been - and still is - my main reason for a long time as well.

I used to own/use desktops/towers, but that changed when we started to
work from home (late 1990's). We got a (company) laptop which was used
in a docking station (with large monitor, keyboard and 'mouse') both at
home and at the office. With the laptop, all software and most data
moved from home to office and vice versa. Networks were too slow and too
expensive to do that. Only limited amounts of data needed to do the work
were sent over the network.

When I retired, I kept the laptop and have been using laptops ever
since.

At first I bought a netbook for travel, but later switched to
single-laptop-for-everything, because of "the hassle of switching
computers". We travel for extended periods - upto three months - and
having stuff at home, which we need/want during travel is just not an
option. (And no, 'the cloud' isn't an option because of the amount of
storage needed and the (un)availability of networking.)

I realize that our use case is/may_be uncommon, but it's what *we*
need/want, so it's great to have that choice.

And yes, we also have a tablet and smartphone, but there's very little
overlap in the use of laptop, tablet and smartphone.

P.S. It seems to me that some 'desktop-people' take the term 'laptop' to
literally. My laptop nearly never sits on my lap, but nearly always on
a table or so and nearly always on (mains) power.

I travel between homes, such as other people's that I'm staying with,
and like to have a computer there, of reasonable functionality. I don't
trust (either for trust reasons or reliability) the cloud, so syncing
isn't on for me, and I like to have all my files on the computer I'm
using.

+ very_large_number