Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the recent woes of Apple and Dell. One possible reason according to the article: 'imminent price wars'." From the article: "'There's a softness in the market that's building,' says Richard Shim, a senior research analyst at IDC. In the past two weeks, IDC cut its 2006 forecast for U.S. PC growth to 5.7%, from 6.8%. 'In '04 and '05 there was tremendous growth. In a market that's as mature as this industry is, there's no way you can maintain those levels.'"

Comments

Re:Old PCs Still Good

[Jasin Natael]

"Secret elements within the United States government seek to surveil us and control our lives."

Nice sig. However, shouldn't it be something closer to "Virtually all elements within the United States' government seek to surveil us and secretly control our lives."? The 'secret' part of that equation should be much further down in the heirarchy. :P

Re:Old PCs Still Good and Net same speed

[Danga]

What the hell are you going to connect your Digital Video camera to?... Try getting a consumer video camera user to set up their camera with that "USB streaming" shit, and see how quickly they become frustrated. It often just fails to work, or at minimum, needs a bunch of stupid drivers.

I mentioned that firewire was superior for DV in my post. Anyway having a camera's USB 2.0 interface not work correctly is the manufacturers fault, not the interfaces fault. I also have hooked up many video cameras using the USB interface and they ALL worked just by plugging them in. To the OS's I use it just appeared as another removable hard disk, it was FAR from painful to get it working.

And even if you can get it working, the performance sucks.
If by "sucks" you mean takes a minimal amount of time more to copy the video off then you are correct. However if it only takes a minute or two longer to transfer the video using USB 2.0 people WON'T CARE or NOTICE.

Also consider that USB is a shared interface - you don't want all your other USB gear interfering with high bandwidth tasks.

Ok, I would bet 99% of users only have one device saturating the USB 2.0 interface at a time, so because it is shared is not a big hinderance. Most people hook up their iPod and transfer music to it or hook up their camera and transfer the video off of it, but rarely do they do anything else that is bandwidth intensive at the same time. I don't think my mouse/keyboard/UPS/etc that share the USB connection will be affected, even if I was burning a CD/DVD I would be fine (I have done this many times).

Firewire is not bad, but it just does not have the market share that USB already has or the price advantage and that is why USB is the better choice and will win out in the end.