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PC Makers May Be Left On the Shelves
An anonymous reader writes "With the problems posed by a new Microsoft OS, exploding laptop batteries, and changing technology, PC makers may be feeling this pinch this holiday season. Many consumers who are considering purchasing PC hardware are going to be holding off for next year, according to research analysts." From the article: "According to market researcher IDC, PC shipment growth slowed to 7.9 percent in the third quarter, from double-digit percentage growth in the prior three years. The battery recalls may cut into fourth quarter growth, IDC said. Bank of America on October 31 cut its 2006 PC growth forecast to 9.4 percent from 10 percent. All this suggests that consumers looking for bargain gifts may opt for less-expensive gadgets such as cell phones, digital music players, video phones or noise-cancelling headphones."
A lot of gamers will opt for a Wii or a PS3 instead of a new PC this year as well. Not a good year to own Dell stock.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Even tough technology is still improving, just how often are computer manufacturers expecting consumers to purchase a brand new PC? It sounds to me that the slowing growth is more in part due to market saturation than anything else. Computer sales have enjoyed double digit growth through more difficult times than these (Windows ME fiasco, I.LOVE.YOU viruses, massive job loss in the bubble burst, terror attacks and wars, various US and foreign stock upsets, etc).
I am thinking the sources behind this article have stock in Dell and other afflicted manufaturers. Dell will probably see a short-term loss of laptop sales due to their bad press from the exploding batteries. What better way to hedge your losses than say the entire laptop market is slowing in growth, rather than Dell simply losing sales to a competitor? It'll take months for the actual sales numbers to come in, and by then everyone will have forgotten about these stories.
Be wary of any such article around crucial marketing periods like the winter holidays (just as you should be cautious of TV execs hyping up their shows during sweeps periods). Many brokers and firms can make-or-break a large profits during the next two months, all hinging on how well they predicted holiday sales figures from earlier in the year, and not everyone is a neutral party.
The Mac platform today is ground zero for the switcheur epidemic, which means more tourists and more expatriates moving in.
You can be a snob if you want, but I welcome every new Mac user. Better late than never.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The point remains, though, that barring some weird Finder-network behavior, Macs running OS X are faster and more responsive in perceived user feel than Windows Vista, Ubuntu, or Mandriva 2007--its primary competitors. Perceived feel goes a long way toward the average user's assessment of "speed." Obviously a Mac is no faster than a matching PC, objectively, and obvious a lightweight GUI in Linux is going to be snappy as well (but not a competitor with the others). I don't know what "claims of superior speed" you've been subjected to in order to produce your coin-sock, but there's an important one. Vista runs hot/cold--sometimes impressively quick, sometimes unbelievably slow. The "enriched" Linux UIs are generally less smooth and slow as well. Maybe part of that is an obsolescence by design thing, but likely it's just bloat (Windows) or bad drivers (Linux).
Because as an employee of a major computer chain, who's not on commission, and given that I don't have any plans to stay the industry all that much longer, it's great news. The less busy Boxing Day and Christmas is the better.
I agree. Everyone knows a computer should have an 80x24, text-only monochrome display. That's the way the human mind works! These wasteful ideas like high-resolution colour moving images do not support any rational understanding of the human cognitive process. Computers are designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and only elite programmers who have trained in the methods of the Great Masters from the 1950's should be permitted to use them. Any other use is an abomination.
I believe that more than 1 megabyte of memory is a waste. Indeed, I used to run a medical laboratory with 100 people in it on less memory than that! We didn't have fancy graphics or those ozone-polluting "laser" printers. We had to send people their test results using coded English on paper that didn't fit into any folder on the planet, and had lines on it. If patients need a graph to explain why they are sick then they simply should have stayed healthy!!
I believe that languages like Cocoa, Java and C# are abominations. Real programmers don't make mistakes. Real programmers don't write "garbage" that needs collection. If you make a mistake then you are, by definition, not a programmer. And you and the people you work for and all other people who don't even know who you are, should pay the price of your errors, indefinitely (yes, I do believe that Daniel Bernstein is the living Christ). I believe that all programming problems can be solved in assembly language, and that all other languages have no merit, except C, which can be used if you have urgent work to do.
I believe that we should return to teletypes and 110bps connections and 8 inch floppy disks, because these focussed the mind. I believe that if you can't keep everything that's important to you on a single disk then there is something wrong with you. I want to return the chemistry to photography and the "Super" to video. I want to wait 2 weeks to get my photos back from the drugstore -- only to have the police waiting for me when I pick them up.
I believe that only consumer computer system on the market which does not get regularly flattened by malware consists mostly of bloatware. I believe the design of the plastic that holds the computer is irrelevant, even if it means no protruding edges to break off and a single object to put on my desk. I believe that a computer that can go to sleep instantly is just lazy. I believe, contrary to all recent reviews, that Macs are more expensive than equivalent PCs. I believe that the actual value of the bloatware installed on a Mac, including all of the free applications, is zero.
I believe Vista contains no bloatware and that WINFS was, is and will be a great idea. I believe this because I believe in Market Share and the biggest Market Shareholder is Windows. For some reason I like to allude to market share and Linux in the same sentence, even though the two aren't related.
In short, like you, I am an ignorant, unthinking, luddite troll who makes baseless, disconnected assertions and appears to have lost my humanity. I console myself by knowing that I don't threaten people with violence because of a simple platform preference which is almost certainly based on a more rational analysis than yours.
PC technology is getting more mature so I'm not surprised to see sales flatten out. Home computers were already far more powerful than the average person ever needed almost ten years ago. Today they're over-powered to the point the average user can get by years longer before there's compelling reason to buy a new machine.
I would consider myself a power user, built all my own PC's. Some of them are going on five years old and there's no compelling reason to upgrade them. I can work, play games, watch TV or movies...why do I need a new computer? Okay, they're not the hottest and fastest boxes on the market. So what? They're fast enough for me. The weak link in the PC interface is sitting in the chair. No matter how fast a PC is, absolute speed is going to be limited at some point by the user. You can only type so fast and take in so much information. Any mid-range machine today can stay ahead of the user in terms of information flow.
Another trend impacting white box PC sales is the proliferation of specialty PC devices like game consoles, mp3 players and appliances like Blackberry. Those off-load what were traditional PC tasks. Where did PC makers think the growth was going to come from? If they think they have it bad now, just wait until the $100.00 laptops (now $175.00 I think) start flooding the market.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Interesting huh? OSX and Linux, the two alternative OS's are not as sucessful because they are too far on either side of the road. OSX has the best OEM integration of any OS, but people dislike it because that OEM charges so much. Linux has few OEMs, but even though it is cheaper, nobody wants to set it up themselves. True, Linux doesn't take much effort to set up anymore, but it still scares the consumer.
I do hope this lack of sales produces a price war. I want to buy a laptop soon.
The Gospel according to lolcat