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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."
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.
Nah, he used it in the modern corporate sense. If sales aren't going up, Up, UP every quarter then they might as well be dead. Smaller players will begin to pull out, big players will see their share prices tank, etc. Tech companies are structured on the basis of ever growing sales and profits so the idea of a nice stable market would be death to them and they probably won't have time to restructure.
Longer term, sales will probably go down. For a long time millions and millions of people who had no business buying a PC were buying them because of the Windows monopoly, to get access to basic things like email, word processing and basic web/media consumption. Those users are going to finally go away and stop demanding that the PC be turned into what they wanted all along, a simple device without confusing options, flexibility or programability.
But people who always needed the power of a PC will continue needing one so they aren't going to go away.
Democrat delenda est
I don't think they're buying either. My wife had a laptop just to keep her from using my desktop. Once that became outdated, I got her an iPad, and she loves it. Email, websurfing, and a few games, and she's happy. Just no need for a PC. We can't be the only ones that replaced one of the full-featured PCs in the house with an iPad, or something similar.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
"Gimme a Laptop Air that runs Windows or hell, Linux, and I'll buy it in a heartbeat..."
It's called a Macintosh and any of them run Windows or Linux if you really want to downgrade to that. I'll stick to MacOSX.
As to sales, Apple is increasing market share while the others are flatlining. Why? Quality. I buy a Mac and it lasts a decade or more. We have 1999 Macs in our family that are still running fine. We just pass them down the line.
I don't know of anyone that's holding out on updating their computers because of Windows 8. Heck, I hardly know anyone that cares at all about Windows 8.
I do know several people who, over the last year or so, decided to buy an iPad to replace their aging computer rather than buy a new computer.
As others have noted, there are a lot of people that own computers but really have no need of one.
#DeleteChrome
And "Desktop" systems seem to be receeding back into the niches that need them... business, developers, gamers, power-users. Casual users will basically abandon them (and already largely have) for laptops, tablets, and portables.
Desktops aren't receding at all. Casual users aren't abandoning them. Didn't you read TFA? (I know, I know).
Sales have stopped growing. They've shrunk by 0.1%, but then we are in the middle of the longest and deepest global economic crash since the Second World War, so don't read too deeply into that. Tablet sales have sky-rocketed, but desktop sales haven't been touched.
PCs have had colossal growth over the last decade- that's partly because there were literally billions of potential users who didn't have one yet. Now that boom has finished, we're into a "steady market" phase- where people already have computers, and only buy replacements as needed. And even that is cooling off, as computers don't improve as drastically year-on-year any more- it used to be that a computer was obsolete 2 years after you bought it, now there are machines from 2007 which are still perfectly useful and usable.
That's going to hurt the forecasts of the Dells and HPs of this world- but it's not a judgement on the desktop/laptop form factor itself. That's here to stay.