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PC Sales Slump Over Economic Crisis

Posted by timothy on from the what've-you-bought-lately dept.

nandemoari writes "The damage isn't just limited to the United States. Shipments of PCs in Europe, the Mid-East, and Africa dipped to records posted around the turn of the century. It was even worse in Asia, which according to Gartner, posted its worst growth rate ever — just 1.8 per cent. Within the industry, desktops took the hardest hit, as was expected. Sales of non-portable computers were down about 16 per cent as consumers opted instead for the rising 'netbook' and similar hybrids. That fact alone is troubling for PC makers, given that $300-$500 netbooks offer a far lower profit margin than more expensive and more powerful laptops and desktops."

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It is all my fault by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Informative

    "$200 for a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM. It is the only way I can keep up a 25% turn-over rate and stay under budget."

    Alternatively, about $250 plus an hour to assemble it and install Linux will get you a dual-core Atom with 2GB of RAM and a 100+GB-ish hard drive; you'll probably save the difference in reduced power usage over the next couple of years, given how power-hungry P4s were.

  2. Impact of Corporate PC Virtualization Projects by Lokatana · · Score: 4, Informative
    Many corporations are taking a serious look at PC virtualization, which eliminates the need to purchase PCs.

    Instead, toss a bunch of blade racks together, virtualize your userbase, simplify your desktop management, address many of your network security issues, keep all your data "safe" in the data center, allow better user experience for remote users... lots and lots of benefits (if you can get it to work).

    In my company (a large bank), we are due to refresh 10's of thousands of PCs, yet instead, we may refresh NONE of them, go with virtualization (and the saved costs of keeping older PCs will fund the new infrastructure). With PCs bought in the last 3-4 years, acting as thin-clients, we can keep them until they break, and replace them with some cheap thintops.

    If many companies are going down this route, then it would be no surprise, coupled with the economy, that PC sales in the corporate world would be dropping!

    Lokatana

  3. Re:Make the Egg so we can get the chicken. by horli · · Score: 5, Informative
    Two fundamental points are missing:

    4. There are computing-jobs that are inherently not parallel.

    5. Parallel programming is hard not because of bad programming languages but because of the logical problems that come with shared state and parallelism.

    http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-23.html#%25_idx_3598

    Therefore multicores do not bring a substantial performance benefit. Futhermore because the problems are fundamental logical ones, there is no big hope.