Well, with the advent of miniaturized computes, like cell phones and tablets, and in the spirit of a full tower, I feel like my new design for a desktop computer would incorporate the best of both worlds. You would start with a case and a main board, the power supply could be separate and replaceable if more power was needed I suppose, just as it is today. You could replace / add modules, memory, graphics cards, sound cards, networking, etc. The only difference is that I picture this in a much smaller form factor. The only things keeping the entire system larger than a 3.5 inch external hard drive housing are storage and optical drives, but even storage has drastically come down in size with SSD's.
I imagine that most additional components could be added internally about as simply as inserting an SD card in the front of your computer or laptop, or a new stick of RAM into your mainboard. The expansion chips would essentially work the same way, and we'd have the same variety to choose from as our full size boards and accessories, just much smaller, maybe cheaper, and they'd run very cool to boot. Overally the miniaturized computer case would not be in such dire of a need for cooling because of the architecture and would likely run extraordinarily cool with even a single small fan and some ventilation ports if they even proved necessary.
Cell phones and tablets are only a wee bit behind PC's in terms of speed and from what I understand, that gap is closing fast as prices for the technology comes down. Whether Windows 8 is successful or not, I see the unification of Windows 8 on multiple platforms and architectures as a sign of things to come. We'll only see more of this in the future. I think this is a good thing. I don't really see this form factor for desktop computing to be that far off in the future as cell phone and tablet technology continues to advance.
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