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PC Sales Are Flat-Lining

Posted by timothy on from the more-like-personal-computer-is-changing-its-meaning dept.

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."

3 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. Time to trade in my PCs? by Drethon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Flat-Line by jmorris42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Admittedly anecdotal by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    #DeleteChrome