>Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore?

Apparently they are. Just read this effete technologist's comment:

  I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement 
  for “small and silent”. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing 
  in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I 
  travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is 
  simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I 
  think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the 
  magical 1kg limit). -- Linus Torvalds

Size and noise I am totally on board with. Just not the obsession with weight. And I am an ultra-light gram obsessed backpacker. I may just be an outlier or unusually strong. (Kidding on the last qualifier :))

The focus on weight baffles me. Most _bags_ are now heavier than laptops.

> I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat.

Any reasonably well built desktop PC does that. It's a matter of applying a modest amount of care when selecting and assembling components.

>Any reasonably well built desktop PC does that.

When it comes to off the shelve towers and laptops, you'd be surprised.

And if you mean it's easy if one personally "selects and assembles components." you'd be surprised again on how atypical this is for the average PC buyer.

So? I claimed neither.

Well, by writing "Any reasonably well built desktop PC does that" it seemed like you imply that most models available in the market do it as well.

No, most aren't well built, but that's nothing specific to PCs or even computers. Most stuff is designed to be assembled easily, quickly and cheaply by unqualified workers. That doesn't per se contradict that the result is well built, but usually means that compromises are made to accomodate the assembly process, which diminishes other qualities of the product.

E.g. you'll never find a high-end CPU cooler in a factory-assembled PCs, simply because they are too difficult and slow to mount. Compared to a simple push-pin or lever-mounted cooler these can have a dozen parts or more and require funneling screws through cutouts in the cooler itself etc. -- you just won't see that on an assembly line.

There are also other issues, more specific to PCs, e.g. the standard case form factor does a poor job supplying graphics cards with fresh air. Other case form factors solve this (e.g. Silverstone has some; the "trash can" Mac Pro follows a similar concept), but tend to incur other compromises (and price tags).