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PC Sales Strong In Stores
An anonymous reader writes "Notebooks and Desktops are both staying strong in brick-and-mortar sales, according to C|Net. While laptops have mostly fueled the market these last few years, Desktops actually had a little bit of a comeback." From the article: "The first quarter is always a bit slower than the fourth, when holiday shoppers often drive PC and chip companies to their strongest results of the year. This year, the drop from fourth quarter to first was a little more pronounced, echoing Intel's warning in March that earnings would fall short of expectations. But when compared with the first quarter of last year, PC shipments were up 28 percent, versus growth of 19.4 percent recorded during last year's first quarter."
...and a slow comment day? Odd.
How meny of them are able to run vista?
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Change your name to Homer Junior! Your friends can call you Hoju
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Honestly, I don't think it'll have any impact at all. Why? Because hardly anyone cares about Vista.
Those who run corporate IT departments have no interest at all in a new OS, not while their various lockdown tools won't work on it. Consumers, by and large, don't give a damn because a) most don't understand what an operating system is and b) most haven't heard of Vista.
Microsoft has yet to start a real advertising blitz for Vista- though if they did, you'd probably see a decline in PC sales.
This whole article is really just a big nothing- people are still buying computers! The specs on these computers are better! The status quo has not changed very much!
Why? Yes, desktops are more upgradeable, cheaper, and more powerful, but have they actually increased their lead in any of these areas? I'd think that with USB and Firewire, laptops would actually be catching up in upgradability. The way companies seem to have been focusing on power consumption lately, they should be catching up in power. And the prices should only get better as volumes go up (aside from Moore's law, which doesn't count because it applies to desktops as well).
Why would people move back to desktops? Or is it that desktops have started getting cheap enough that people are switching from "family computer" to "cheap desktop for everyone"?
Tim
People still need to breathe to live. News at 11.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
With CPU speed not taking off drastically, there probably isnt as much desire to upgrade. Sure you can get a 64bit or dual or quad core CPU but that isnt the same. (note the # of comments is low because, well (1) its a holiday and (2) slashdot's database was getting tweaked or something, at least thats the message i got)
I've never bought a PC from a bricks-and-morter store. The selection and configurability availble online is incredibly more superior than what's available at a store. Additionally, you don't have to deal with salesmen who don't know quite what they're talking about trying to get you add on low-quality parts that have a high profit margin.
Sales are weaker than expected, but this is considered "strong"?
...well, I was going to imply that perhaps this is some sort of bullshit fluff slow-news-day piece, but on Slashdot? About PC sales? Nahhhhhhhhhh, couldn't be. Guess whoever made the predictions was just Positive Thinking.
Sorta like the MPAA's "weak" sales in reverse... or the very opposite of the plight of the poor, downtrodden Major League Baseball owner.
So were Intel/the PC makers (Zork is a little fuzzy on the specifics here - protip: Intel doesn't account for 100% of chipsets - but hey, this is slashdot after all) just super-duper hyper-rosy-optimistic in their predictions for Q1, or...
"Database maintenance is currently taking place. Some items such as comment posting and moderation are currently unavailable." was the message for most of the afternoon (PDT).
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It is ironic that the architectural faults in MS Windows may be good for the bottom line of computer manufacturers and of MS itself.
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And from toy boxes come music Jukeboxes, movie Jukeboxes, home backup systems, home webservers, automated homes, a touch screen LCD on every wall (once those prices come down)...
I, for one, welcome our new brick-and-mortar overlords.
"While laptops have mostly fueled the market these last few years, Desktops actually had a little bit of a comeback"
OK, "laptops" is not capitalized, but "desktops" is. Why? Is this a brand name I haven't heard of? I am really tired of the random capitalization degeneration I'm noticing more and more of. Anytime you're capitalizing a word, verify that it's either at the beginning of a sentence or the name of something, not just any old noun.
I know a lot of individuals are buying laptops, but in most companies, desktops in cubicles still outnumber laptops. On top of that, my research group (I'm a PhD student) just bought a small cluster of "desktop" machines. That seems to be comming more common. I wouldn't be surprised if that is a factor in the upturn in desktop sales. If you're buying headless boxes, you don't need monitors or fancy graphics cards. You can actually get a small cluster for a few thousand dollars. I know several other university groups (not just at my university) who are doing just that.
It makes sense that laptop sales are strong in brick and mortar stores. You need to lug it around so it's a good idea to get a good feel for it. Press the buttons; open and close it; check out the weight (knowing the weight and feeling the balance is very different from seeing the digits); see if it can take the abuse that you may dish out.
My family and I have bought nearly all the computers we've owned for the past 15 years by mail order or online, but when I went shopping for a new desktop a few weeks ago, I ended up buying from Circuit City.
Maybe it's because I'm older and I place a higher value on time spent and reliability now, but I didn't want to mess around with the beige-box vendors on pricescan. So I compared the more reputable online prices (everything from Dell to TigerDirect) to prices at CompUSA and Circuit City. I was surprised to find that for the first time in my life, I could get a better deal at Circuit City!
I got a nice fully stuffed Acer with 19" LCD and a surprisingly nice Epson multifunction printer for $660 after taxes and minus the $330 of rebates. So, basically, it seems that brick-and-mortar computer stores are really competing with online sales in terms of price. And that's great because I certainly don't mind the combination of more convenience and lower price. Hope it keeps up!
My bicyles
... paying to someone to clean all the spyware and/or reinstall the operating system and applications, according to The New York Times (y .html , http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24690 ).
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17sp
i have had numerous clients have laptops that have cooked themselves from the heat (dead drives etc) so its not suprising that people have gone back to desktops
laptops always need to be propped up and cannot be used in bed (due to ventilation)
desktops are just more reliable
Hard to comment on stuff like this. The only generalization that I can make is that people who find a reason to disparage Windows in this column are a bunch of idiots, and I'm pretty sure that's not just a matter of opinion. There are a lot of people who run out for the latest and greatest Macs as soon as they're out. Anyway, I can tell you why I bought a computer over the last month, but I can't speak for anyone else. I bought one because I wanted to do some experimentation, and my old server was reaching it's limit. My sandbox is for experimentation, and sometimes some pretty wild things get thrown at it. I actually looked into buying a used system, but found that a brand new one with Socket939 would cost me just a little more than the cheapest used system off craigslist or ebay... I spent less than the asking price for used, slower and older systems - it's cheaper to buy new than buy old used stuff.
I had grown weary of my main box, and looked around online and in local newspapers. I went with an HP package AMD dual core 4200, an doubled the base RAM to 2Gig. My last box was a self-built from graymarket vendors at a local computer fleamarket. At that time it seemed like the best bang for what I was prepared to spend, but started out with a MoBo that was running at its peak. The HP, with the extra memory, and when all of the rebates come back, will end up costing me a touch over $900. Look around, and price just CPU, memory sticks and board, even on sale, and remember, mine came with a 17' LCD monitor, a good Radeon video card with 256MB on it, 2 DVD dribves, one a writer, and pther niceties built. Whenever I get around to setting up a dual boot, it looks like AMD and HP are going to make that a cakewalk too. It's nice not sweating RAM usage. The other night I was updating some webpages realtime with my main web editor, checking out a new localized WAMP build, and tweaking some graphics with Photoshop all at the same time. I didn't even notice when the antivirus prog fired up and scanned in the background. I'm pretty much content with my new comp, the main downside for me is having to pick through the system and registry hives, to weed out the unwanted trialware which came preinstalled.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
Did you go for the64 bit CPU?
That what got me off of my butt, although I'd like to say it was the occassional memory paging faults that were getting thrown now and then at inopportune moments, the truth is that I'd put up with that, and figured out some of the issues by staring at debug output for a few months, it was the price cut of the AMD dual core 64s that got me moving.
With th eCPU and the 2 gigs of RAM, I am in multitasking heaven, even the bit of compiling I've done so far hasn't strained it.
With HP, i was already comfortable with their factory boxes. Over many years now, I've become the friend to call when the home PC starts acting up. The majority of time, the problems have been system file deletion or corruption, and i've found that HPs were the easiest to fix because of their recovery cds.
Now they throw the backup onto the machine and don't give full recovery discs. I'm thinking that this was an MS idea in an effort to keep the number of bootleg OSes down.
I also have a bit of negative energy directed towards HPs recent past, and the trialware bundle was lame; i would have been happier without some of it. I tried out the 60 day symantic security suite, it seems pretty hands off and trouble free, but after 30 days began to nag with a pop-up reminder of my need to purchase a subscription, and it irritated me this early into the trial.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron