Well, it's not there to frighten anyone! Just to not get in the way of the recording process.
Anyway, yes I take your point about laptops and stuff, but in all things, don't believe the hype. To that end, here's a story -
One of my regulars was working here and I came in with the coffee or beers or whisky or whatever it was that they needed to continue and we got to talking about home recording. I said that no home recording has ever made it into the charts or done anything massive. I said that it was all just marketing hype.
No it is not, he said. What about (Name of Really Big Act) and their record (Name of fantastic and ground-breaking record).
Oh rubbish, I said. You can't tell me that they did that at home.
"Yes, I can!" he said - and we went off for a while in a "Yes, they did!" "No, they didn't!" kind of routine, rather like Abbot and Costello in 'Who's on First!'
After several 'yes they did' and 'no they did nots,' I had to ask him how he was so certain.
"That's easy!" he said. "I recorded them!" and he then described how FX Rental of London shipped out a huge SSL 'J-Series' desk, 48 IOs of HD3, racks and racks of outboard, monitors, cables, foldback, mics of every shape and size and vintage and turned one bedroom into a control room, complete with acoustic treatment, the living room into a drum recording area, another bedroom into a vocal booth, other rooms into backline recording booths and so on, and on and on and on . . .
A friend of mine runs a large mobile recording outfit and they sometimes have to go to people's houses to record. Not often (at $4,000 a day!) but it does happen, so don't believe all you read, that invariably starts with some
PR person looking for an angle to get some column inches in the fan mags!
But my 30 Cents is to not worry too much about the commercial viability of various options, but to go for what you know and are comfortable with. I say this, because the chances of getting people to pay for a budget operation are very slight - that end of the market is totally over-saturated.
But a lean, mean, mobile machine, well, that requires know-how and specialist kit (Specialist Kitt - Gadd, how I loved that woman!) and you might just be able to carve out a niche for yourself.
With abit of luck anyway!