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Why PC Sales Are Declining
First time accepted submitter Benedick writes "I have a four year old desktop and a three year old notebook. Why haven't I upgraded to a new machine? Because they still work great. PC sales aren't declining because of Windows 8. They are declining because our PCs are so good, they last a lot longer. Will Oremus of Slate explains it better than I can."
I have always built my own desktop PCs. They always last longer than 5 years. I build a new one after 5 years because I want to not because I have to. In fact I often hand down my old PC and it stays in service for many more years. You might lose a PSU or a HDD but the computer itself should last long after obsolescence.
PC sales are down for the same reason all sales are down. The middle class has been robbed of buying power. Poor wages, lay-offs, outsourcing, tax burden, or whatever other reason you can come up with. There are more people than we have work to do. When people struggle they often won't buy nice things like computers. They may not be happy with the old one but they can't afford to replace it. I'm sure new car sales are down as people keep the old ones longer.
The middle class = the American economy. When the people suffer there is a "trickle up suffering" *
*("Trickle up suffering" is a registered trademark of SampleFish)
just like apple did in the late 90's
oh your 2 year old mac is doing fine? OK heres os 9.22, everyone will be using it, except for you cause we told our installer to specificly ignore anything less than our brand new shiny G3, pay up or fuck off
or in the mid 2000's
oh you just bought a G5 OK we switched to intel, pay up or fuck off
Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages, but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
Actually? And as much as I HATE THAT STUPID DUMBED DOWN WIN 8 %$&%$^$...I gotta be honest and...TFA is pretty much right on the money. hell my AMD netbook is 3 years old, runs great, I was the guy that HAD to build a PC every year for gaming, but I'm up to a 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space, what more do I need here? Games are just now starting to really use duals and triples, most games won't even stress a triple so half my cores are sitting idle or doing other stuff, so why do i need more?
This really hit me over the head about 2 years ago which is why I'm doing more HTPCs and security cams now, and that was when the Phenom II quads first got REALLY cheap. You see my dad is the perfect "test case" if you will for your "bog standard PC user" because he is as MOR as you can get, he surfs, watches movies, uses chat and webmail, runs his little office software, its about as bog standard of a use case as one can get. So I start seeing the new quads below $100 and I think "Hmmm, its been awhile since i built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to build a new system" so I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find?
45%. No shit, we are talking a 2.2GHz first gen Phenom I quad and he ONLY was able to get to 45% usage and looking closer at what was going on it looks like a browser hang caused that spike, if I remove that? he's barely hitting 30% and that is when he is going full bore. I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble. I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3 and now we are seeing laptops going 5-6 years and desktops that can easily go 8 or 9, I mean that Phenom I quad my dad has is circa 07 so its already at 6 years and its not being stressed.
It all comes down to both AMD and Intel building chips that are just so insanely powerful that folks can't come up with enough useful work for them to do, certainly not enough to max 'em out. Of course Windows 8 being Satan spawn certainly isn't helping matters any but there are still plenty of places selling win 7 systems right now but if your system is already a multicore seriously what more do you need?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Of course, nothing wrong with learning something new, the problem comes when it is something new for no reason. If someone changed all the Berkeley networking API names to yiddish verbs I would be annoyed as well. Technically it would be new but not in a good way.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."