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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!
If they would make pc's that I would actually buy, this wouldn't happen. "Ultra-books" are not sleek looking, nor thin (in most cases). They don't hold a candle to the Macbook Air despite a lot of windows users wanting something that does. The PC Market is flat-lining because there really isn't much innovation happening on the pc hardware front-end... I still have a brick of a desktop, a brick of a laptop, and no one seems to care that Apple is killing PC makers with their sleek looking macbook pro's and their fresh hardware... Gimme a Laptop Air that runs Windows or hell, Linux, and I'll buy it in a heartbeat...
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.
We've already all got computers?
US Car sales are down. House sales are down. Employment is flat. Why should PC sales be different?
Yes, on a graph it will be a flat-line. But "flat-lining" is when someone's heart is no longer beating.
Many consumers thinking of upgrading will no doubt be holding out until October when Windows 8 is launched, before upgrading their PCs. This obviously means that the Q3 results are likely to be similarly flat, though Ultrabooks, the second generation Ivy Bridge versions of which are being launched at the moment, could have more of an impact by then.
Read more: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/362375/20120712/pc-shipments-fall-ultrabook-flat-hp-lenovo.htm#ixzz20RKdxqyA
WOW I thing it's better to buy windows 7 now.
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
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.
FTFA: Apple sales up 4.3%
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.
you buy it and expect it to last for years no matter how cheap it is
for most of us the value is in smart phones and tablets which are much better at most tasks than PC's. i use my MBP to hold some photos and that's about it. between my wife and I most computer use at home is on iphones and ipad
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
1 - is the economy
2 - people have finally figured out that they don't really need to participate in the upgrade treadmill.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's the latter.
1998, 2002, 2007, 2011. Some upgrades - 1998 was 400MHz CPU and 64M RAM with a 12M Voodoo 2. 2011 was 6-core Phenom 2, 8G RAM and 1G 6870. All built as gaming rigs in their time. But if you build it right, it lasts a while. They're not impulse purchases. Once every 4-5 years, just replace everything. Can't be arsed trying to do partial upgrades and squeeze another few fps out of a system that's just not up to it.
And if you just want to read your email, a smartphone will do in a pinch, but a tablet will do fine. Practically anything on the market will do it - doesn't need to be a top-of-the-range iPad. So only gamers are buying PCs. Businesses aren't - we have 5 year old machines in the office that still run XP and Office just fine. We don't need multi-core setups and uber-gfx cards to do Powerpoint and Excel. We have no upgrade plans for at least 3 years and we'll probably completely leapfrog Win7 when we do. PCs got 'good enough' a while back - no wonder the market's flattened out.
I agree, I only just recently replaced a 10 year laptop. I'd updated the OS on it once and maxed out the memory, but otherwise it still did 80% of what I needed it to do. I only replaced because the hinges on the lid broke and it would no longer stay up, that and it took 15 minutes to start the Android emulator. My wife works fine on her 6 year old laptop as well.
Computers are cheap enough now that people in the developed and near-developed world already own them. So you just get baseline replacement sales. Developing countries people can't really afford a PC and a tablet/smartphone but they "need" a phone so they just buy the one device and use if for everything. I realize I'm overly generalizing but I'm a physicist +- an order of magnitude and I'm happy :)
FTFA: Apple sales up 4.3%
Rigghht... when has Gartner ever been wrong?
Apple's Mac sales fell (IDC) or grew (Gartner) last quarter
After years and years of using a laptop as my main machine, a year ago I built myself a no-compromise workstation.
The logic was simple: I realized that when I was out and about with the laptop, I never did much heavy lifting. When I got on the Android bandwagon, the need to use a laptop as a browsing/ssh/mail device just went away.
Now, when I anticipate being a loser and writing code at Starbucks for a change of scene, I grab one of the cheap netbooks we have lying around, VNC into my desktop, and off I go. Bonus: if it gets stolen, there's nothing of value on it. Double bonus: disapproving glances from Apple users due to the anti-apple stickers on the lid.
We have a tablet for the coffee table, and it mostly gets used for recipes, Facebook, and controlling XBMC. That's it.
It's just horses for courses. No one wants a general purpose PC for round-the-house drudgery, people with smartphones don't need laptops to communicate.
It all seems to come down to two questions. "Do you need a keyboard?" and "Do you need actual CPU power?" For many folks, it seems the answer to both is mostly no.
I wonder if my kid will ever build a PC.
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.
It has an actual etymology: "PC" is a relic of the original "IBM PC" in 1981. The "IBM" got dropped when the first clones appeared about a year later. It was already just "PC" when the first Mac was sold in 1984. It became "PC" and "Mac" to differentiate.
I don't recall anyone referring to the (pre-Mac) Apples, Ataris or Commodore machines as PCs. Some might have, but it was IBM's box that popularized the acronym, and it has stuck ever since. "PC" means a computer descended from the original IBM standard.
The street (society) determines what terms mean. See the lost hacker/cracker war for another example.
The desktop computer is less disposable than it used to be. Average software resource requirements are not increasing so quickly relative to hardware capabilities as compared to 1995-2005. A computer purchased today with a modern (non-budget) processor, 6+GB of RAM, a $25 low-power discrete video card, and a Blu-ray drive will carry you for multiple years now.
Just like refrigerators, desktop computers are approaching "appliance" lifespan. This is a good thing for consumers and a secure thing for bearish investors.
The Gartner data shows US sales of 16 million units in the latest quarter. That is 64 million per year. There are 117 million households in the US, and 139 million employed people. So that comes to replacing a computer every 4 years for every home and job in the country. That does not sound like a dire situation, that sounds like a saturated market.
My computers last about 5 years on average, and monitors twice that.
I bought my last PC last year, and there's no reason to replace a perfectly fine 6 core 64GB 2TBHDD Win7 machine just to line somebody's pocket. This go round I even bought a new monitor, so until the 3D monitors drop to around $100 for 32 inch sets, ain't gonna be no money spent on a PC.
And my iPad2 works fine, thanks. I'll buy the iPad4 when it ships, or maybe get an iPhone5 to sync to my Win PC, but not sooner.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Yes, a lot of casual users are going to conclude (or already have) that a full-fledged PC is more than they need or can safely handle, and that a tablet makes a better computing platform. For Grandma who only surfs the web and checks her family's Facebook pages, a tablet is a better choice: more intuitive, good enough for the tasks at hand, less likely to catch a worm or virus. It's for more complicated tasks that a PC is required. (My mother, for example, does most of her web-related stuff on the iPad, but she still needs to use a PC to get photos off the camera, edit them, and post listings on eBay – the iPad apps are grossly insufficient for this task.)
But one thing a lot of people are forgetting in their haste to announce a "post-PC era" is the HUGE installed base of existing systems. Up until about 2006, the PC market was still evolving fast enough that users had to upgrade on a fairly regular basis. An average 2001 PC would be pretty bad at running 2006-vintage applications. But for most home and office users, PCs from the Core 2 Duo era onward have been good enough. They can do all the usual stuff (surfing, email, videos, Office, WoW and other simple games) without too much trouble, and multitask reasonably well since they are multi-core. Given that economic times haven't been that great recently, why would home or business users want to switch out perfectly good hardware that still does what they need? This in no way means that the PCs are going away, just that their upgrade cycle has substantially slowed.
I do think that the utter low-end of the PC market – the $300 shitboxes formerly epitomized by such stellar brands as Packard Bell and eMachines – is going to go away. And good riddance. Those users will mostly be better off with tablets. But high-end desktops, gaming PCs, and workstations are here to stay.
It's worth remembering that most of what people here on Slashdot usually actually buy is already niche hardware to some extent. Full ATX motherboards are a niche product. Intel K-series CPUs are a niche product. Discrete graphics cards are a niche product. But despite their low-volume status, we can still get this stuff at fairly reasonable prices. The only exception is the top-end flagships, which are substantially overpriced to lure people with more money than common sense.
subject sez it all.
You are correct that there is literally no way to avoid buying from all abusive companies. But it is possible to avoid buying from the most egregiously abusive one or two companies. That's what I'm doing.
Not for a reasonable price. I can get a faster processor, more ram, more HDD, and better everything else than my current laptop for $600. Everything else, except a better screen. I can get a better screen if I buy Apple, but not at a reasonable price.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!