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PC Sales Are Flat-Lining
DavidGilbert99 writes "Gartner has released figures showing that PC shipments globally declined 0.1 percent in the last three months, making it the seventh consecutive month of little-to-no growth in the PC market. This was despite the launch a number of new Ultrabooks, the much-vaunted slim-and-light platform promoted by Intel. The decline has been put down to the poor economic situation around the globe, increased spending on tablets and smartphones instead of PCs as well as the imminent launch of Windows 8, making people hold out on updating their PCs."
I don't think that word means what you think it means, Timothy.
(What a shocking thought...)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We've already all got computers?
US Car sales are down. House sales are down. Employment is flat. Why should PC sales be different?
Heck, I've got a 6 year old Core2 and I don't see a reason to upgrade. I'm not a heavy gamer, so I don't require a fast machine, and everything seems to be running fine.
PC speed improvements just aren't that noticeable these days. They are also much more reliable than they were 15-20 years ago.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I think people probably found out that you don't need a super computer to watch porn.
They are obviously not buying Dells then.
I got here through a series of tubes
Honestly though, I bought an I7 desktop almost two years ago with 12Gb of memory and a pretty good graphics card. I haven't found any reason why that PC isn't still fast enough for about for of anything I use it for today. This compares to ten years ago when a two year old desktop simply cried with the lowest settings of the newest computer games.
Exactly.
With many PC games in recent years targeting DirectX 9 for easier Xbox 360 portability, any halfway decent hardware can run the latest games.
It'll be interesting to see if the next generation of consoles causes a ripple into the PC game market as well, bumping up the minimum specs new games.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Part of that can be blamed on a lengthy console generation. Most games have to sell on the PS3/360, consoles that are now around six years old. Developers aren't going to spend extra millions making a game that can really push modern PC hardware, because that gives them no edge on the more lucrative console market.
When the next generation of consoles comes out, I expect PC games to immediately jump in hardware demands.
It's not entirely based on this, though. Display resolution's another thing - we're getting close to "as good as a game can look in 1920x1080, 60Hz". If 2160p displays suddenly become universal, you'll see the rest of the computer having to work harder to keep up.
Instead of buying computers built to last a year so you'll buy them over and over again, people are buying computers that actually have durability.
Hence, less buys.
More that computers simply *are* lasting longer.... unless your OS is festooned with viruses or you want to play the latest and greatest games on the market, there is absolutely no reason you can't do everything most users do with computers on a 8-year old hardware. And the first of those issues can be addressed by either reinstalling the OS or simply fixing it (or paying somebody to do so).
Couple that with a more "savvy" user who's more likely to be aware that viruses exist and Windows offering people free antivirus, and it means that the majority of PC users simply have no impetus to buy a new computer: their old one is good enough for angry birds and facebook.
They'll just stop going up much. New computer technologies don't seem to kill off older ones, just make new markets. I mean it turns out that we have more mainframes today than when we had only mainframes, however that still isn't very many and there isn't any growth in the market. But it isn't dying.
Same deal with PCs likely. We'll reach saturation and they won't really drop, they just won't grow.
The results are hardly surprising. Ultrabooks cost more and weigh more than a Macbook Air. They're noisier, hotter, less durable, and don't look as good. If PC makers want to compete with Apple then they need to do so with a product that improves on the Air in some way. All they can offer is faster performance, which is NOT what this market segment is looking for. I want a good ultrabook very badly. I own no Apple computers and have no plans to get one, but neither am I eager to buy a PC which is so markedly inferior to what Apple offers.
To the average person the only recent perceptible level of improve comes from SSD, and most computers don't come with SSD. So most people don't buy new machines every 2 or 3 years like they use to. I remember back in the mid '90s to early 2000s, I would be building a new machine every 18 months because the level of performance increase could be seen (Rendition and 3dfx :( RIP) or felt Celeron 300A (oc to 464Mhz). Now, I'm hard press to see real improvement between my old Core 2 Duo and Sandy Bridge computers under daily operations.
Computers are now just appliances, if it ain't broke they're not going to be replaced.
I'm pretty sure that the lack of growth in PC sales has to do mostly with the fact that nobody has any freaking money. Seriously, it boggles my mind that finance pundits argue over the slow consumer economy when consumers are broke.
I just read an article about how a huge percentage of consumers in the UK have the equivalent of about $25/week to spend on anything besides necessities. That doesn't leave a lot of room for upgrading the household technology.
And still, the "serious" people all think the solution is more austerity, because having more broke people is somehow going to stimulate the economy.
You are welcome on my lawn.