Is buying/building a desktop still worth it?

[darkstar845]

Right now netbooks, tablets and smartphones are becoming more powerful having low power dual core CPUs and maybe quad cores in only a couple of months and other game developers are making games for them and there are also online streaming games like Onlive.com that will support smartphones and tablets in the future. And there is also the upcoming cloud computing which doesn't require the power of a desktop to run.

Will this make the desktop market shrink? Is buying/building a desktop still worth it?

I am planning on buying a laptop/netbook equipped with an AMD Llano but I also thought of saving the money to upgrade my current Core i7 920 if Ivy Bridge will deliver a great/good performance boost than sandy bridge.

 

[Leaps-from-Shadows]

Yes the market will shrink. Will it happen in five years? No. Ten? Maybe, but the desktop computer will be around for quite a while beyond that.

I still don't see what the big deal is about cloud computing. I don't like giving up local processing power and storage. What happens if the internet goes down? Or even just local access to it?

 

[christop]

There isn't a laptop netbook or anything that can compete with a killer desktop for power users.