Laptops and desktops are the personal computers (PCs) that people use at a desk. A laptop folds shut and runs on a battery. A desktop sits on or under the desk and runs from the wall socket. The company whose brand is on the machine is called the PC maker. A PC maker makes very few of the parts inside. It buys them, designs the machine around them, has it assembled and sells it.
What does a PC maker buy? The main chip is the processor, or CPU, which runs the operating system and the apps. A chip, also called an integrated circuit, is a small piece of silicon carrying millions or billions of transistors. A transistor is a microscopic electrical switch. The processor comes from a chip company. The memory, called RAM, holds the work in progress. An SSD, a drive built from NAND flash memory, keeps files when the power is off. The screen has its own display driver chip, and the touchpad, the Wi-Fi and the battery each have small chips of their own. The operating system, such as Windows, comes from a software company. When a chip company gets its chip chosen for a laptop model, this is called a design win: that chip goes into every unit of the model for as long as it is made.
What does the PC maker do itself? Its engineers design the motherboard, the main circuit board that connects all the chips. They design the case, the cooling fan and the battery. They also write the software that makes the parts work together. The firmware starts the machine before the operating system loads. The drivers are small programs that let the operating system use each part. This software is explained on PC firmware and device management. The PC makers do much of this design and software work in Bengaluru, Pune and Delhi. Assembly is often done by contract manufacturers, mostly in China and Vietnam, and a growing share in India.
There are two kinds of buyer. Families and students buy one machine at a time, in shops and online. Companies buy hundreds or thousands at once, with a repair contract and management software.
Take, for example, an IT services company in Kochi that is hiring 400 engineering graduates to join in July. In March, its IT team asks three PC makers to quote for 400 identical business laptops, each with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. The winning quote is about ₹62,000 a laptop, or about ₹2.5 crore in all, including three years of repair at the desk. The PC maker registers each laptop's serial number to the company before shipping. On joining day, each new engineer switches on the laptop and signs in with an office email address. The laptop then contacts the company's unified endpoint management (UEM) software, which installs the apps and the security rules. Nobody in IT has to set up the 400 laptops one by one.
After that, an agent for digital employee experience (DEX) reports each laptop's slow start-ups and crashing apps to IT. Some companies give certain staff only a basic machine, and run their desktop on a server instead, through virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Companies usually replace their laptops every three to five years, and these replacements make up much of the market. PC makers now hope that the AI PC, a laptop that runs AI models on the machine itself, will make companies replace their laptops sooner.