Slashdot Mirror
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."
back in the day, not everybody had a PC. Gamers and engineers and other hardcore users comprised a larger % of the PC market. These users tend to upgrade often to run the latest Doom at max 640x480 resolution with all options on.
Nowadays everybody, i mean EVERYBODY has a pc, even the village idiot and 98 year old grandmas. All they do is check facebook, google maps, and send some email. These users do fine with 5 year old pcs. The hardcore users are a tiny percentage of the market now.
btw TFS is not quite right, the old machines weren't of lesser quality... my old 486 ran great for 10 years and it was still working when I threw it out.
from the article:
"Meanwhile, the rise of the cloud has reduced the need for extra memory."
Really? "The Cloud" acts as RAM?
I don't know if it's just me but my computers pretty much never die. I've been building them myself since the mid 90's. I stopped upgrading when Core 2 Duo came out because the PC I built still runs everything great today. I wouldn't use the Athlon XP 2000+ system I have that still runs because it doesn't run everything great but it does still work. I really don't see it being a problem with computers lasting so much longer but I could be an odd case since I don't buy stuff from Dell, HP, etc.
I went to a few computer shops in the last month, and not only did my old computer seem good as the demo models, it seemed better. When I looked at them, I felt the pain of having to learn something new. They gave the impression of unnecessary and non-useful crapware. Touching the screen is kind of lame, and Windows 8 is confusing until you get the hang of it.
So yeah, not only is the current computer good enough, but there are actual disincentives to upgrade. They could at least put a racing stripe on it, make it prettier.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Windows 8.
It may be fun and easy to bash Windows 8, but I don't think that is the reason. It's fine. When I see the metro desktop after logging in, it just looks like the menu was automatically opened on Win 7. That's not such a big deal. Once you have organized your app icons, though, it is really no different than clicking on one in the taskbar or the desktop. I find it inconsequential from that perspective, but you also get the live tiles and new apps, some of which are useful. Windows 8 is not the fiasco that Vista was, with its required hunt for drivers. On a multi-monitor setup, I can have the metro UI pop-up on any monitor, which is useful at times. Most of the time I am in the desktop. but I really don't notice switching between metro and the desktop. I run Windows 7 in a VM as an attempt to isolate the email, Flash, etc, and browsing risks. I am impressed with the performance if Hyper-V, but not happy that you can't mount USB drives or burn CDs from the VM. Hopefully that will be fixed in the future.
If I think of my own hardware purchases, it's easy to understand why PC sales are declining - tablets and phones. I by a new PC or motherboard about once every 7 years. I just bought a new PC after upgrading my mb about 7 years ago. I put it in a case that is 10 years old now. Since buying that last mb, I bought:
I am going to sell the iMac and Windows laptop soon. I'm interested in a Chromebook and some sort of Win 8 laptop. I am sure all of the above will be replaced by the time I upgrade my PC again, part of which is due to how its speed is now more than sufficient for almost everything I do. Eventually I expect my hardware mix to be a powerful desktop, a cloud-centric tablet/laptop, and a phone, with the latter two being replaced much more frequently than the desktop. Note also that it is easier to upgrade desktop hardware, so the replacement cycle is longer for PCs. Tablet and phone hardware improves much more noticeably with each new model at the moment. The same isn't true for PCs. That is what is slowing PC sales, not Windows 8, IMHO.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
I've been saying this for years. Sometime shortly after the 1Ghz "barrier" got broken, almost all computers became "good enough" for almost everyone.
I just recently put a built-from parts (and virtually silent) circa 2003 machine with a 1.8 Ghz AMD Barton, back into service with a modern 80+ power supply, 1.5 gigs or ram and a new(ish) drive. It may not be quite as snappy as my current main system (which is 5 years old) or my htpc (which is 7) but it's really a perfectly usable machine with a fresh install of pretty much any modern OS.
The primary reason to run current-gen hardware these days is lower power consumption, and to a certain extent modern graphics hardware (capable of hardware HD x264 decoding). If all you need is a web browser and office suite, anything that uses reasonably fast RAM from 10+ years ago will more than fit the bill.
Lots of people end up replacing perfectly good hardware just because "windows gets slow" which (sadly) few people seem to know that a reinstall will fix. That might take a few hours, and to hire a tech to do that might cost $75 or so... but that's still cheaper than a new machine.
We used to replace our desktop PC once every 5 years or so, and our laptop once every 3 years or so, on average
What I get from my friends (and the companies they work for) is that nowadays, companies are keeping their office desktop PC for a longer period --- many Pentium 4 machines running Win XP are still being used --- mainly because of budget constraint and that they are not that satisfied with the latest offerings from M$
I can't say that Win 8 is the main culprit of people not upgrading their machine, but it *IS* a contributing factor
On another comment that I've posted on another Slashdot thread I already told you guys that my company is not purchasing any laptop for our sales force this year --- while in the past we bought, on average, 1,500 to 2,500 laptops every year --- and the reason for my company's not buying this year is because we couldn't find any laptop vendor supplying 3rd generation i7 powered laptop that runs Windows 7
We decide that it will be best none of our system run Windows 8
Only the laptops of my company run Windows --- our office computers are all running Linux --- and the reason the laptops that we purchase for our sales force run Windows is because of the software they use
Or else we would standardize everything in Linux
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Windows 8's desktop mode also happens to be butt-ugly compared to Aero Glass. It's like Microsoft took everything they learned about putting a 3D graphics card to good use for desktop window acceleration and eye candy, then flushed it all down the toilet right around the time they finally started to get it right.
Fuck MetroModern. Unless Microsoft gives us back what we have now with Windows 7, Windows 7 will be the last Windows I ever run natively as my real operating system, and future versions will be in a VM under Linux. And if they ever take away my ability to reinstall Windows 7 and refuse to let me buy new copies, I'll be walking away from Windows entirely. When the day comes a few months from now that I'm ready to go buy a 3.8GHz+ i7 with 4-8 cores and pair it with 16 gigs and a 27" monitor flanked by a pair of ~20" monitors rotated into portrait mode, I'll be *damned* if I'm going to step backwards and settle for a new version of Windows that looks like someone ported Bob to Windows 3.1...