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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."
Windows 8.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Obviously. I don't know anything that can kill a computer better than a few feline-induced keystrokes.
Why have computers not stopped after I built my AM5x86? It still functions today and can still surf the web. It's on its second AT PSU though.
Still, crappy logic, especially when OEM computers are designed to have a short lifespan to spur sales of newer models.
It used to be that the average user would replace their desktops every few years for something newer. The aforementioned "longer lasting system" trend - my husband's laptop is well over five years old and shows little signs of age - combines with the fact that PC enthusiasts build their systems, lovingly hand picking components or starting with a kit and slapping whatever OS they have lying around on it. (I have at least two OEM Windows 7 licenses kicking around from various systems.
There are still people who will pay oodles of money for a pre-built machine, but most of those folks have migrated over to the Mac platform by now.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'll say, most of my company's employees are using 10 year old Gateway SFF Pentium 4 boxes running Windows XP. What is really scarey is that they are connecting to Novell servers (NOVELL!!!) that are even older than their desktops for file storage. I want to cry every morning when I go to work in the IT department for the shame of it.
It's not just about faster. Smaller, more efficient, easier to transport are all good reasons to upgrade if you have the means. Beside, the grim reaper of hardware is always clawing at your door. Nice box you have there, I'd hate for something like a busted water pipe or lightning strike to carry it to the other side.
The last laptop I bought, was for my mother for Christmas. I bought an additional 500GB drive for it, swapped the drives and installed Ubuntu. Machine fine. Mother fine. Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
No question; I'm reasonably tech-savvy but not a "gamer" -- I use Autocadd, Adobe products, M-Soft Office products, A/B PLC programming software, and various other engineering-related utilities. When M-Soft came out with Office 2003, it was apparent right then and there that in my lifetime, I'd never have any compelling reason to upgrade, and sure enough I've not seen one yet; same holds true for PC's -- they got fast enough about 5 years ago, that I just can't fathom ever spending big money for upgrades, given the very marginal improvements. I don't appreciate the way M-Soft forces obsolescence by ceasing support, but from a practical standpoint, the only "support" required is to fight against virus attacks that exploit flaws in the original O/S, for which I presumably already paid for. It would make sense for the government to mandate that operations like M-Soft MUST PROVIDE perhaps 20 years of support; just like they require car makes to provide (I think) 15 years of spare parts availability.
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."
I'm currently playing through Crysis 2 on my old gaming computer, and it is running perfectly. No lag, shiny graphics, everything. Why spend money to replace it? It does everything I want it to do!
Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
8GB DDR2 800
Two 9800GTX cards in SLI
two 500GB Hard Drives RAID 0
Windows 7 64-bit
2560*1440 monitor
"High" settings, Crysis 2. Runs fantastically. I don't see the point in replacing it (at least, until I move into a place where I have to pay the power bill...)
I'm looking forward to seeing how well this computer handles Bioshock Infinite.
Since non-linear video editing became more common there haven't been any new "must-have" functionality that bogged down the system to the point where people feel like they need a faster system. (Yes, gaming can be the exception to this, but most "normal" people aren't high-end gamers.)
The last computing device I bought was a firesale HP Touchpad that now dual-boots Android. Before that I spent under $450 on a Dell laptop that I'm still using today. It works fine for surfing the web, doing email, playing videos (even high def), etc. While it would be fun to upgrade, I don't *need* to.
Heck, my in-laws are still running Vista.
The last two times I got myself a new laptop, I did because the previous one was breaking expensively (screen going bad in both cases), not because it was actually getting too slow or anything like it. That's not to say I don't enjoy the higher speed and capability of my latest one â" an SSD and enough RAM not to need swap is nice â" but nowadays such performance bumps are firmly in the "nice to have" category, not "pressing need" for me.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If you want to see how an industry keeps people on an upgrade treadmill, look no further than the cell phone market.
Once upon a time, the subsidy scheme was required to get people to play in the market given the genuinely high cost of the devices. Nowadays, 'unlocked' prices are hyper-inflated to lend a sense of legitimacy to carrier subsidies. Every two years, the average consumer might as well buy a new phone because it's 'just such a deal that would go to waste' even if their last device still works fine for their needs.
It's the same way so many people buy cars so frequently that they always have car payments. They get accustomed to the payment and suddenly *not* having a car payment is 'weird' and means they better get a new car.
Meanwhile, consumer PCs never really embraced some scheme to get people to have some low, forgettable monthly payment (cloud computing being an exception). They see the expense in a straightforward manner and thus don't feel the same compulsion to upgrade. Therefore, the bulk of the market goes to buying a new one when it breaks.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
... sometime.
The breakneck pace of innovation we saw for the last 30 years is slowing down. The reality is as hardware power increased software cost (like games) increased in time and money to develop. Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_-slr7wL8KE#t=85s
Then on top of that add ghz and heat break wall that was hit around the time of the pentium 4. If you all remember right the P4 was to scale towards 10Ghz eventually it never got even close and the industry went a bit nuts because not all software can be parralelized. Just many trends have converged is all that makes PC's last a lot longer.
It used to be you could buy a new computer, and use it. Now to do that, you have to find an operating system, figure out how to get it to work with the new (unsupported on older OSs) hardware. Why bother? I'm dreading the task when this laptop finally dies.
I bought a Windows 8 machine on Black Friday, it lasted 4 hours before I gave up and returned it.
Windows 8 sucks so much, it can lift matter back past the event horizon of a black hole.
Single cores in new equipment aren't getting significantly faster, and while the number of cores in CPUs is slowly increasing, most apps are still sequential in their processing. This makes new machinery not really worth buying because it wouldn't speed your apps up by much. It's a poor investment to buy a whole new PC for a small incremental upgrade in performance.
Even in those cases where apps could potentially harness multiple cores because some of their internal tasks are naturally concurrent, they don't do so because they're written in sequential languages that cannot easily multiprocess. Developers have been really slow to embrace the new raft of concurrent languages like Erlang or Go which make multiprocessing so easy. I'm not sure why that is, but a good bet is familiarity with the old and aversion to the new.
'Just another theory to add to TFA. Any others?
I'd hate to be typing equations in TeX formatting on a tablet keyboard... Touch screens are inefficient and need to die eventually, we simply haven't found the right solution to the problem according to most people. In my opinion it comes under the form of the keyboard but oh well. And tablets will never be useful for professional activities, for starters they lack the processing power to go through a few gigabytes of data quickly and the quick and easy to use interface. And that's becoming a common requirement these days.
Windows 8 is a factor. It's not the largest one, but it is a factor. People don't like it, and people also feel that they don't *need* a PC like they used to. That means when faced with a Windows version you don't want vs the iPad (or whatever other tablet) that you do, the tablet is going to win an awful lot. That wasn't the case in the past, because the technology simply wasn't up to par. Today it is - a typical consumption only web user can get by just fine on a tablet and only occasionally needs a PC. Fundamentally, Metro on the desktop sucks. Microsoft could have avoided the whole problem if they'd just put a button in Control Panel labelled "make this OS work like Windows 7", in which case you'd have a faster version of Windows 7 that can also run Metro apps. That would be more popular. (You can do that yourself with start menu replacements and neat tools like ModernMix, but telling users they can download third party tools to fix it just points out that Microsoft botched the release.)
That makes the implications obvious: households that used to have 2 or 3 PCs now only need one. Many households won't need a PC at all.
For people who do still need or want one, existing PCs last a lot longer than they used to. XP machines are still kicking, and do what people want. 3 year old PCs aren't significantly worse than brand new ones if they're properly maintained. Fundamentally, the product used to improve by leaps and bounds. It now improves in tiny increments, and tiny increments aren't enough to promote replacement. It's now like a stereo: you replace it when it dies.
Multicore is part of the problem here, as well. Intel and AMD can cram as many cores in as they want, most of the stuff I run only uses one of them. It's hugely frustrating to have a CPU sitting at 25% usage while I'm waiting on calculations because most of the software out there still doesn't use multiple cores very well. Unless they're trying to sell me something with significant single thread performance boosts, why would I care how many more cores they can shove in?
The PC market had a great run, but it's over. The market is going to contract to a new normal: systems being used years longer than in the past, and fewer people needing them. It won't go away for a very long time, simply because phones and tablets aren't nearly as good a replacement for many tasks that we're doing... yet. But stagnation and decline are the new norm.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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)
My computer is 6 years old and I'm a developer that needs the latest and the greatest. Why haven't I? Well, I don't have the money. Between education for the kids and the ever increasing bullshit fees that my city, corporations, insurance, etc that keep increasing at an incredible rate despite the general population's lowering of available funds.
Food and other essentials are increasing at an insanely fast rate. People are cutting back spending which makes corporations and governments increase their rates in order to keep increasing their budgets. So people cut back more, so they keep increasing the prices.
Fuck. This. Shit. The whole system is going to collapse.
It's not that existing PCs are too good but that they haven't improved much in the past few years, in particular processing speed. The days of huge computing jumps with a new processor generation appear to be behind us, at least for x86.
Lets face it, the average user and business PC are serviced well enough by Windows 7, or even XP. So who is left to chase the gains brought by Moores Law?
The PC gaming enthusiasts, thats who. And why are those guys for the most part sticking with the same PCs?
Because most PC games are locked to the performance of a game console - Xbox, et all - and those are a little long in the tooth themselves.
Until the next generation of Consoles pushes the envelope of hardware, and the game developers follow suit... PCs will have no reason to follow...
computers have continued to advance at a very similar rate for the past 15 years..
I really hope we get a couple more doublings in clockspeed before the end. I don't know if we will, but it'd be nice to have a few extra cycles on non-threaded algorithms.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At one time, in three years the performance difference between an old PC and a new PC was so great that it was easier to justify spending the money for an upgrade. Now, the increase in transistor density seems to have lead us to a point where we still have great increases in computing power but we've had to branch out into multi-core architectures. An 8 core PC at 3 Ghz is obviously more powerful than a 4 core PC at 2.8Ghz but for most people, it's not worth the expense to upgrade.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Virtually every company has stretched their update cycles on PCs in the past few years. It started with the economic downturn but like many new "efficiencies", they have discovered they can live with a 5, 6, even 7 year life cycle vs their old 3-4 year cycles.
At the same time home users are not seeing a reason to upgrade. Most people are not doing much more than surfing the web and maybe using some form of an office suite. With fast multicore CPUs, cheap RAM, and SSDs, even power users are not replacing as much continually upgrading. I used to go through laptops in 18 months tops. Now, I'm over two years on my i7, 16GB, 256GB SSD equipped laptop and I see zero reason to upgrade anytime in the near future. It's just not being taxed, even with some of the crazy analytic workloads I throw at it. My home PC is going on 2 years old. I've upgraded. Added a new video card to replace my old 8800 GT, I added an SSD boot drive, new monitor. But replacing the whole box, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The industry needs to face it, PCs are the new TVs.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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
PC enthusiast market is dying. Intel plans on having motherboard manufactures solder the CPU directly to the PCB. High end CPU to high end motherboard. Low end CPU to low end motherboard. About the only system you can come close to building on your own in the future will have to be workstation/server class hardware. That means expensive Xeons. God knows what AMD will do. And then there's the whole Windows OS being abandoned as we know it in favor of a tablet OS (Win8).
Serious question. Where does that leave nVidia? The market has been shifting toward mobile low-powered devices for a long time. That, and Intel's integrated video sub-system is butter smooth in 2d, and good enough for 3d. Commodity video hardware is dead. Thank Intel for that. Their high-end will still be niche enterprise market though.
As for the future of gaming? Phones, Tablets, Consoles including newer generations of Apple TV (Pippin reincarnated) , and mini-itx platforms would be my guess.
Life is not for the lazy.
Computers lasting longer, Win8 not the problem?
Just like looking at a toddler with a pee soaked diaper thinking the kid can make this diaper last a bit longer because it still works. While partly true, the kid is mainly hanging on to this one because the only new diaper comes pre-loaded with shit.
They're still doing that with intel hardware.
You won't find them in an Apple Retail Store or on Apple.com, but I'm told a lot of local Mac dealers sell Macs with Windows OEM already installed in Boot Camp.
I know I wont upgrade until the start button is back.
You could try Classic Shell to put the Start button back on the Windows 8 desktop.
It's not only that they last longer (supposed they do, which I can't confirm). The main reason to buy a new machine has always been mostly speed. First we had the GHz explosion of the late 1990s when CPU clockspeeds went through the roof (my first Wintel box was a 200MHz PII, my next one ran at 1700MHz), then memory greedy 64bit machines and now... nothing for a while. Everything concentrates at the mobile market. Fine. These thingies still leave a lot to improve, liberate, hack while the good, old PC mostly does what it is supposed to. (Even if you're gamer, because your machine's not really supposed to be complete ever, is it?)
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
They're basically equivalent to a small laptop...the only difference is that everything is crammed together more tightly, not that they're more complicated.
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.
What?! How'd you upgrade from HPUX 10? (Half serious - I actually own a HP A9000/715 in working condition. It's just a bit difficult to find software for it.)
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Sure, some machines might be lasting longer. And some people might be forcing their machines to last longer. But, even though there are people with mod points and Win 8 who will mod down anyone who suggests that they may have made a poor choice, I can assure you (at least until I'm silenced by being modded down as a "troll") that there are people like me who are not buying a machine because of Win 8. I'm definitely in the market for a new laptop. 0But you just can't get anything at a decent price new that doesn't include Win 8. And I don't want to pay new or higher prices for a refurb, when that system will likely have a compromised battery, a screen with stuck or dead pixels, or come pre-infested with malware and perhaps unable to make that "only-one-to-a-machine" set of backup disks that they used to send out with the machine but now require you to make for yourself. If I could find a comparable deal to some current Win 8 laptops on a similar New Win 7 system I would snap it up, but I didn't have the cash free before Win 8 came out and now it is too late. Can't even buy a Win 8 system and them pay again for Win 7 and install it, since Microsoft forced the manufacturers to make machines that you couldn't install other operating systems on!
So some Microsoft fan boy might have written a counter argument to what most of the industry is saying, but the real truth is Win 8 is awful and few people want it. Microsoft ad blitzes and modding people down who disagree will not change that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Its all broken. Its all wrong. Its all crap. Its all fix-it-in-the-field bullshit and people are not biting on the promise that it wont be broken this time. /boot where the kernel is. Which can be replaced. Really?
1., A printer with its own damn webserver in it but I still have to search the manufacturers website for the driver. FU
2. Each application has its own method of delivering updates? FU
3. I have to download a distro and then download the entire freaking thing again and again as updates? DangIt!
4. I install a 500 dollar application and then updates come. And come again. And a service pack comes. A and more updates come again!
5. I change hardware and Windows Media Players says FU to me, I changed my hardware and my digital rights are foobar. No fix. FU,.
6. I have a SSL security system that any two bit monarchy can make a key for any website on the planet? FUUUUUU.
7. I can encrypt my filesystem, except not
8. I go to the store and see computer cases that look 20 years old. Zero innovation. Really?
9. And finally we have a economic system that people dont believe in anymore and they are hoarding their money which is being devalued in their pockets. FE
Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.
I thought it looked descent. And decent too. The graphics are stylized with ultra-low poly count, but they get the point across of what is going on in front of the player.
Developers have been really slow to embrace the new raft of concurrent languages like Erlang or Go which make multiprocessing so easy. I'm not sure why that is
Blame instructors in the colleges and trade schools who aren't familiar with these languages either. Unless you work for a well-known company whose name begins with Er or Go, you're not likely to get exposed to them.
Unplanned non-obsolescence is the dumbest thing I've heard since breakfast, which puts it in with some stiff competition.
How about frantically, desperately deferred non-obsolescence? How about IE6, Exchange, and Office suite document non-portability as a modern-day Maginot Line, equally doomed?
But in the end, what could they do? We were clearly entering the end-game on the desktop PC as a rain-maker a full ten years ago.
Meanwhile we managed to gadgify consumption with pocket trinkets where the entire device costs about the same as any decent ISA expansion card back in the day. Because they are autonomous (and you can lose them under a sofa cushion) each gadget is separately counted. It's a bit like counting remote controls instead of televisions, but we'll ignore that.
And best of all, according to the true nature of innovation, we now have the cyanide-green Apple business model of land-fill express non-replaceable batteries. Microsoft and their OEM cabal are green with envy they can't sell a PC whose golden age is so effectively knackered. That was not their father's green. The times they are a changing.
Bullshit
sig: sauer
I know there is a lot of speculation into the PC Sales dip, but let's face it, it is the same old song and dance in PC land. If I buy a new PC it has Windows 8 it comes loaded with crapware and doesn't do very much of what most people want to do. Tonight I went to Staples to browse and most of the Windows 8 machines were stuck on "Your protection expired XX days ago. Would you like to purchase Norton." AND I STILL CAN'T CREATE AND EDIT A VIDEO OUT OF THE BOX. However MS-Paint, Calculator, and Notepad are still hanging in from 1987, but to be fair, MS-Paint did get a facelift.
Flash forward to the iPad. I can give grandma an iPad with iMovie within 15 minutes she has first amazing video trailer of the grandkids on YouTube. Yes, I know the PC has robust suites like Adobe, Roxio, and Vegas but they aren't simple. Grandma has to figure out the Camera, take the SDHC card out, import the video, setup a project (hmm.... does grandma want DV-NTSC Standard-48Khz or DV-NTSC-Widescreen-48Khz, or maybe AVCHD-1080i(50i) Anamorphic) , import the video segments into timelines and on and on until she gives up. It is far too painful, just opening the door to the SDHC card can be a 15 minute project.
The problem with the PC is it hasn't gotten simpler. It hasn't gotten less painful to use, and grandma still can't get her video onto YouTube. One a daily basis on I use Linux, Windows 7, iPad, and MacOS/X. To me they have just become tools to get different jobs done. The clear winner for ease of use, efficiency, and convenience is the iPad tablet where I can get my video onto YouTube without crapware popping up telling me I need to update or am unprotected.
Oh and one more reason. SSDs. I can put an SSD in an old box, and suddenly, it becomes a vibrant fast box, even with all the crapware.
And MS, if you are listening. Put some useful WOW factor, polished software into your OS. Make the consumer feel like they really got something high value for their dollar or just keep doing what your doing. And if you keep on the same path, make sure you knee-cap the next XBOX with always on Internet required for play. Also, if you decided to launch a phone, make sure you abandon all your early adopters and ensure that the phone has no polished apps. Does anyone at MS still know how to code beyond rearranging the UI? Just asking.
As much fun as it is to blame it on Windows 8. The simple reality is that PCs are no longer required outside of the office. Smartphones and to a lesser extent tablets are fulfilling the needs of the average person.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I have no idea why the massive defence of how wonderful [and overpowered] the desktop is, it is truly awful. I'm personally disappointed. Desktop computers are now tablets [because of Windows 8] come with *low* resolution screens, and are less portable. I look at the Chrome Pixel...and I'd love it, but not at that price, yet somehow Intel's average quarterly gross margin in the last five years is 59.97%, and Microsoft's is even higher at 78.31% even Dell's average gross profit margin at group level is 19.53 per cent and HP's is 22.32 per cent. So much for Apples Lie of race to the bottom they just rip their customers off more. How about those Netbooks...you can't buy them anywhere they where gimped by Microsoft/Intel. How about a 17" monitor on your laptop No! How about a high resolution touch screen computer with LED keyboard, no wires even to the monitor...and a real Desktop interface, at a competitive price. Not a chance.
I'm personally waiting for someone to reinvent the Desktop...After seeing the Google pixel I think it will be Google, and I'm not sure if I should celebrate that.
Just another Me Too.....
I have a decent i7 now with Win7 for DX10 games and a Q6600 i think it is for my other gaming rig.
This office computer is the older gaming rig with the fakey Dual Core in it that was replaced by the Q6600 years ago.
Others are still P4 space heaters with WinXP and Office 2003.
Only problem i had reusing these old ones was running out of DDR memory. They were bought during one of the memory price fixing deals i think and were very wimpy to begin with :( Too bad i never upgraded them while in their prime as i had intended....but they worked fine.
Short of hardcore games and a few special apps haven't needed anything past a P4 (HT required tho to run antivirus decently, so above 2.5GHz or so). We only bought those because non-HT ones wouldn't run the terminal emulator and AV good enough...which was a bit of a shocker to need 3GHz for a fricking dumb terminal emulator!
lol, RCT3 with my favorite park still brings the i7 to it's knees 3 computers later tho :) My eyes are bigger than my CPU it seems.
1. We have 7 laptop systems and one desktop system in our house. Plus, we have a couple of tablets and several smartphones. All are internet browser capable and run either Windows XP, Windows 7 or Linux Mint. The mobile devices run Android. Since 99% of the screen time in this household goes to the browsers anyway, those systems are perfectly capable and we're in no rush to replace.
2. Even if the XP running systems die, Linux Mint runs pretty darned well and can keep these systems browsing Caturday pictures well into the future. Hell for $250, I can run out and get a Chromebook in a pinch.
3. For the 1% of the time that we venture outside of the browser, we're finding we don't necessarily need a Windows system anymore. TurboTax and Quicken have long since been replaced by web apps, MS Office has been replaced by LibreOffice. My kids have used the latter for the past 2 years, saving their homework as Word doc or Powerpoint format and none of their teachers have noticed any difference. Finally, even for hardcore programming in Eclipse, I've found that the Linux version runs pretty well these days. So....that stretches the lifecycle of even the systems that aren't strictly browsers even longer.
4. Finally, I've used Windows 8 and it felt like roller skating on cobblestones. Really. Maybe Windows 9 will be better. Regardless, I don't want to buy a UEFI system that will preclude installing Linux easily either, so I'd like to wait until someone punches a hole through that as well.
So that's it for us.....and we used to be the family that bought new computer systems virtually every year or two.
As much fun as it is to blame it on Windows 8. The simple reality is that PCs are no longer required outside of the office. Smartphones and to a lesser extent tablets are fulfilling the needs of the average person.
Then why are Desktop computers not *competing* with them, and in the context of this article come with a tablet interface!? only in more expenive; lower PPI; Higher Power; Less Portable version. The reason everyone is blaming Windows 8 is not because its fun. Its becasue Windows 8 turned a normal computer into a tablet...and a poor one.
I just retired a 7-year-old XP system with a brand new top-of-the-line notebook with the best available processor and SSD for work reasons, and the difference is only incremental. Take professional software development out of the equation, and the desktop could have gone another year or two easily.
Whether subscribing to an online office suite, or using free options like Open Office / Thunderbird / Lightning, or an older version of Office, it's easy to tick along for years at a time. Keeping up with online games may require a graphics adapter upgrade, but the processing isn't that strenuous really. So, the bulk of the market that casual users comprise are going to trend toward lighter and lighter computing, which is satisfied nicely by tablets and smart phones.
My newest MBP is a 2007. It replaced a 2004. That replaced a 2002 iMac 1Ghz. If I need one faster than this, it'll probably be a VMWare image of OSX on a dirt-cheap Intel clone.
Oh, wait, already got one of them, and it XBenches 2.6X faster than the 2007MBP.
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
"PC sales aren't declining because of Windows 8. They are declining because our PCs are so good, they last a lot longer."
Can't it be both? :-)
In all seriousness -- part of what sells computers is that the new one looks better. It's not just that you need a new one, it's partly that you want one, and/or that it does some new and better things. (Same with cars.) But if the new computers suck out loud, it takes away the "want" half of the equation and you're stuck with upgrading only when you need to.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
But it is broke.
Nearly all new computers sold today are laptops. and nearly all of them have shitty displays, shitty keyboards, and shitty mouse pads. The key caps start falling off fairly soon. After a while, other keys just stop responding, or lose their debouncing so you get 40 'w's in a row. The wifi adapters fail just after warranty expiry, and they have miserable range and throughput. The bluetooth never worked properly to start with. The USB ports get loose and stop working. And as for the battery...
All bad. All really bad. But not the worst.
New PCs come pre-loaded with endless amounts of bloatware that slow them to a crawl. As soon as you log in your shiny new "productivity tool" for the first time, it insists on downloading updates to all of its update downloaders (thanks Randall), and demands that you reboot it sixty-one times. Or, worse, reboots without warning.
For non-technical users, using a consumer PC is like driving through a blizzard, even when it's new. You can do it, but it's no fun. Compare that to a tablet or a large (four or five inch) non-Windows smartphone, and there's no contest.
Why are computer sales down? New computers are broken, and consumers have cottoned on to that.
I don't think that most people care about what OS they use as long as the OS they are presented with can run the critical programs that the individual needs. For most people the critical program probably boils down to a browser and the ability to view various document types such as PDFs. Other "critical" programs would include Netflix, an office suite (and many people do demand MS Office as that is what they are familiar with) some software to deal with pictures from their camera (or the camera on their phone) beyond that you are starting to get pretty specific with things like Photoshop. Gamers and programmers are oddities and while driving the high end of the market don't make up that much of a percentage.
My mother uses Linux and probably could not tell the difference between it, Mac OS X, and any version of Windows. Nor does she care. She is also running it on an 8 year old machine. Now can anyone possibly tell me why she would need to either switch OS's or upgrade her machine? Keep in mind that the machine can run HD Youtube videos at full screen with no problems.
But hypothetically lets go down to staples with a $900 budget and buy her an off the shelf machine(laptop desktop doesn't matter) and do the minimum required to hook her up. I might as well keep the phone handy for when Norton or whatever bloated bit of AV pops up and tells her that her machine is in peril. Then she will click on some pay music crap and maybe game center. Then I will tell her to google things but she won't find them because her default browser will have been set to something stupid, not to mention the crap toobar that was probably running.
Then a few months later she will call me and ask why Office has stopped working. I will tell her that she never bought office and that she was running a trial version and that it will be a nice stack of cash to get it working again.
Or she can spend nothing and keep her present machine, which in her opinion would be better than something brand new.
Windows 8 barely enters the equation. Now switch to my brother. He has bought tiny laptops for years. Paid a fortune for each one. He travels and writes. He also wore them out fairly quickly (none lasted 2 years). But now his laptop is a bit bigger and only comes out when he is parked in his final destination. In between his large screen phone serves many of his portable device needs. He can email, review writing, and do research. I suspect his laptop will last him much longer this time around.
Then take my other brother. He runs a large multinational business with a cellphone and an iPad. He has an awesome dataplan on his 3G iPad and I suspect he may never buy another PC-Type computer again in his life.
Again little of this is about Windows 8. If anything I would say that the mistake of windows 8 was even making it. They should have just kept updating Windows 7. I never used it much but it seemed fine. I doubt that it would have been that much of a pain to add multi-touch and anything else that Windows 8 has.
Something beyond games, well beyond web browsing, something to soak up many GHz and GB.
Many households won't need a PC at all.
So in a PC-less household, what happens when Junior brings home programming homework from school? Programming is something that smartphones and tablets have historically been bad at, especially with the application approval model used by Apple iDevices.
It's now like a stereo: you replace it when it dies.
So with what should I replace my 10" laptop when it dies? They seem to have stopped making 10" laptops.
We talked about this years ago. It's the phenomenon of "good enough". Back when personal computers were relatively new, when we were on the steep end of the curve in relation to what most people wanted to use computers for, we were all slavering for the next incremental improvement.
But somewhere along the line the computer manufacturers got ahead of the curve (for most people). (There will always be users out in the ozone, and that's a good thing because it helps drive technology.) The people who needed to run an office suite and browse the web and maybe play a few non-cutting-edge games were increasingly satisfied with what they had. There was no real reason to upgrade. Maybe a new hard drive once in awhile, but other than that, it takes major breakage to consider replacing a computer. (Case in point, my current PC has a scarred up old case from the turn of the century, an early Intel Core 2 processor, and a relatively new motherboard, only because daughter's pet ferret dumped a glass of water on the previous one.)
What's interesting to me is that three years ago those of us who were saying two year old technology is good enough were challenged by slightly larger numbers of users who wanted the latest and greatest. And now, the "good enough" numbers appear to exceed the "latest and greatest" numbers.
Also interesting that this applies to PCs much more than to Macs. Apple has done a great job of continuing the "incremental update" mindset well past the point of, well, sanity. Sorry, did I say that out loud? I meant, um, beyond the point where any reasonable person would say "this is good enough". Sorry, replace "any reasonable person" with "many people".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, do you need a quad-core machine with 16GB RAM and an SSD to check your email, do some facebook, check the news or do general stuff?
The answer is NO!
People are doing that on iDevices or Androids already.
My main machine is a lowly underpowered Core2 Duo 2.1 with 3GB RAM (otherwise the tuner won't work, Thanks Hauppauge), running Win7 off an SSD. Video is a Radeon 6770, Except for newer games (fall of Cybertron, I'm looking at you you naughty bad console port), it runs everything I throw at it.
Heck, My old 2Ghz A64 3000+ is running my Media Center Machine, and it plays HD with x264 hardware acceleration (that thing is around 8 years old)
What's killing PC sales is they are now good enough for most stuff without upgrading every 2 years...
Sure they are some special needs, but for most people, a 300$ machine from Walmart will do the job.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
First it was PC sales are declining because PCs are so retro and only dinosuars buy them anymore.
Then it was PC sales are declining because Windows 8 sucks.
Now it is PC sales are declining cause everyones old shit still works.
You know what I think? Anyone who starts a sentance with "PC sales are declining because..." will end it by stating an opinion without any supporting evidence.
The only thing I know for sure is that windows 8 sucks.
The reason I haven't upgraded is windows 8. I took it for a test drive and it failed my litmus test: I couldn't figure it out without looking stuff up. And Win 8 is all the new computers comes with. I'll stick with my win 7 boxes until MS fixes their latest turd. The Steam Box has gotten my attention. I think I will be getting one of those.
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 !
Just look at screen resolution - laptops 4-5 years ago reached the peak resolution of what average machines were coming with. Low-end models were usually 1280x800 with many models offering 1440x900 resolution for a modest increase in price.
Now nearly every single laptop made offers only a 1366x768 screen, which is less vertical pixels than people were getting affordably 5 years ago. Those laptops that do offer higher resolution go straight up to 1920x1080, which many people find too small, and at a significant cost increase. And both of these are 16:9 screens, reducing even further the valuable vertical resolution that is additionally consumed by menu bars, system trays, and application launchers.
The simple fact is that there is only a single hardware manufacturer still making laptops with 16:10 screens, and it's Apple. Everyone else is producing small expensive portable televisions with computers attached.
Nobody I know wants to upgrade because it means sacrificing the graphical experience they want.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
How many small laptops come with gps receivers, vibrators, accelerometers, proximity sensors, noise-cancelling microphony, two cameras, wifi, bluetooth, andthe insanely complex firmware required for cellular radio? How would you rate the power management firmware of an average small laptop compared to that of a high-end cellphone?
There really can't be any doubt about which is the more complex product.
Or maybe, just *maybe* coders could start focusing on making fast software again instead of just waiting for faster processors? You know, like we did in the old days?
Shouldn't that be I baldy predict ...?
One reason people don't buy new computers as often as they used to is software activation
I dread buying a new computer because moving all of my stuff to the new computer has become a multi-day ordeal of trying to convince Indian call center operators that I am not running the software on more than one computer
If I could buy a new machine, clone my hard drive and go, I would upgrade about three times as often
The machines in front of me right now:
Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, Ubuntu 10.04, circa 2003
Gateway 400SD4 laptop, Ubuntu 8.04, circa 2003
Intel Dual-core Pentium desktop of unknown make, Ubuntu 8.04 circa 2006
They do what I need, and parts are crazy cheap.
Good quality desktop boards and a generous amount of memory will easily run server software these days. Intel makes an artificial barrier to keep server prices higher because it doesn't offer drivers for a server OS if the board is marketed as a desktop. Yes, you can install a server OS on them, but you spend an extra day trying to get chip-set drivers to install and looking for Ethernet card drivers.
So I see that since people can cut corners and save a few dollars, Intel will just solder the CPU on so you can't build high-end machines on the cheap.
I've actually grown to really like Intel chips over the last five - ten years. Crap like you are saying will make me stop buying them real quick.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
If you're buying professional versions of Windows, you should have downgrade rights. It might come with 8 on it, but you can just remove it and put 7 on provided driver support is there (and considering almost no enterprise is going to 8, there are business class laptops with full driver support in 7).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
we couldn't find any laptop vendor supplying 3rd generation i7 powered laptop that runs Windows 7
i'm not sure if i missundestood you, english is not my primary language, but srsly?!?!
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&~ck=mn#!facets=80770~0~16063830,226292~0~14720685&p=1
took me 60 seconds, first stop.
Back when loading a big spreadsheet took a full minute, cutting that in half to 30 seconds with a new PC really meant something. Now days that spreadsheet loads in 1/4 second. Who GAF if they can cut that to 1/8 second.
OTOH, my new 3.6 GHz quad core quad channel 64GB can easiily handle multiple VMs at the same time.
What you are doing with the PC matters. What MOST people are doing isn't much more than reading email from Aunt Sally, checking if their stocks are going up, and surfing for new recipes. Office computers are a little busier.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If I was any more retro, I'd use MS-DOS.
OK, I'm really in Chrome under OSX.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So, they want to create a new enthusiast market, where people with heat guns remove the BGA chips, put them on a PGA riser, and put a ZIF socket on where the BGA pads are.
I would be sorely tempted to do that myself in such a world.
I find it baffling that Dell would sell a 3rd gen i7 laptop with only 2 gigs of ram.
But it's Windows 8.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Indeed, there's little reason for anyone to buy a new PC anymore. I'm typing this up on a Core Duo 1.8Ghz with 3GB RAM. It's maybe not as snappy as my primary machine with an i7 and 8GB and awesome switchable VGAs, but it's still sufficiently capable for web dev and graphic design and certainly any office tasks. But I have a hard time believing that Windows 8 as no role in this ... it's a massive dose of WTF is this shit?
Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.
If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy, understated and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing, stop removing useful features, give us the form factor we actually want and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.
Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?
Innovation in the PC market is awful.
If it were up to companies like Samsung we'd all be running massive chunks of plastic garbage at a resolution of 800x600...
Not really.. using touch to me has been a compromise, usually made in exchange for the nice form factor of a tablet. If ASUS touchpads weren't so bad I would have used my Transformer without touching the screen. I am still quite a lot more accurate and swift using the keyboard and the mouse, and touch screen interfaces are has really not been optimal for doing real work.
> Where does that leave nVidia?
Very safe. Read the IDC report:
"Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market"
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413#.UWjGnFK29K3
This is the exact segment that NVidia doesn't have their product in.
Tablets are good if you want to play Angry Birds, but if you want to play Crysis 3 your going to have to get a PC.
Once upon a time, we had games that required the latest-bleeding-edge-state-of-the-art-nuclear-powered system that money could possibly buy to run at anything other than minimal settings. I remember the days when the games capability exceeded the hardware available at the time to run at the " best " settings.
:D
The gaming market is pretty much what drove the hardware. Workstations running content creation software was, and still is, a niche market by and far.
Once the console matured to the point where the graphics were pretty close to the PC experience ( sans the $2k price tag ) everyone switched to the consoles. Now, we really don't have much of anything that pushes the limits of modern era desktops in the gaming world. The average system will run damn near anything out there pretty well. A high end system today will likely run content for the next several YEARS at the pace the software is lagging behind.
Of course, even IF the games were pushing the envelope a bit more, the PC gaming market is becoming so annoying to stay in ( DRM, DLC, etc ) that fewer and fewer want to even bother with it. Easier to fire up a console. So, unless the hardware makers want to move into the console / tablet / phone markets, they need to convince the software folks to cool it with the bullshit. I won't even get into the debacle that is Windows 8.
Hmmm . . . . maybe Nvidia needs to spin off a gaming division to help keep their product necessary
I have seen it too many times... Somebody complains that their computer is worn out and getting slow. You look at their browser and its 19 toolbars and wonder how that was allowed to happen.
Since they're about to get a new computer, I offer to refresh the drive, and, frustrated, they agree. So I run the recovery position restore to factory defaults, run windows update, download chrome, install f-prot, let them marvel at it being just like new.....
I only do this for family, but I have a big family.
If anything, the reason why PC sales are down is because windows 7 is more secure and gets fewer viruses!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Touch screens are inefficient and need to die eventually, we simply haven't found the right solution to the problem according to most people. In my opinion it comes under the form of the keyboard but oh well. And tablets will never be useful for professional activities, for starters they lack the processing power to go through a few gigabytes of data quickly and the quick and easy to use interface. And that's becoming a common requirement these days.
I have a feeling you're gonna be disappointed in the future...
I hear you. I've migrated many of my personal services to remote VM's.
Where are you hosting your virtual machines, and what OS primarily do you use? Most recently I am using proxmox on a dedicated server @ OVH at their Montreal datacenter. I'm quote happy with it & them so far, for the price. My ping RTT is about 50ms from home, which is nice enough for UI's & replacing local accessed stuff.
BUT, I still like a really fast local machine. A tablet + smartphone would never cut it for me, for what I do. Though the main reason for my last upgrade was the retina display. I'd been waiting literally *years* excitedly for high res displays (other than the IBM T221 and like). The processor, RAM, and SSD are icing on the cake - my previous 17" MBP had a 512GB SSD (OWC) and 8GB RAM already, with a quad core process (can't recall which model - 2011 17" MBP.).
How do you use the remote VM's as a desktop replacement, are you using VNC or remote desktop? Or just as remote storage / processing?
Of course, that is always an option, but I would like a speed boost in addition to optimization. The more you can do in a single frame, the better, for example.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Oh... And apparently everyone is buying Macbooks.
Up 14% YoY.
No Apple are doing absolutely awful Mac's are down 22% Year On Year for 2013Q1 http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy13datasum.pdf
Windows 8 for $50 made it an easy call to keep my existing hardware. A LEAP sensor will help with the touchscreen issue. Other than that, my three year old PC beats most COTS PCs benchmarks below $2k... and I'm not going to spend that kind of money to maybe get a slightly better frame rate on my favorite game
He is correct PC's have always been upgraded because the old ones wern't as nice/cheap as the new ones.
The reasons he thinks new PC's aren't as nice as old ones are squarely the fault of the OEM's that think they can continue to sell the same shit they sold 5 years ago with tiny bumps for outrageous sums of money.
The netbook market took off, when you could buy netbooks for $200. But the PC manufactures got scared and promptly started trying to sell them for $400-600.
PC's were also places where the latest and greatest technology was available.
Now the only PC manufacture selling new technology is apple. Please show me a windows machine with a monitor similar to the macbook pro. Where is thunderbolt? Oh yah on the mac. Today I can buy a $400 tablet from google with a better screen than any PC. Heck just about any tablet being sold today that isn't running windows has a better screen.
Then there is windows8 of course...
Bottom line, the PC manufactures have gotten fat/greedy selling garbage and they wonder why their sales have fallen off now that there are other competitors.
I'll just order some pudget systems with no OS
People once told me 68K ram was all we needed,
PC enthusiast market is dying. Intel plans on having motherboard manufactures solder the CPU directly to the PCB.
This isn't a problem in the Intel world because the Intel users already surrendered. Intel changes the socket every 3 minutes or so... so why not solder the CPU on?
"His name was James Damore."
Everybody above has handled why it is that PCs are not selling, and for once I pretty much agree with almost everybody except the obvious trolls.
(TL:DR)
What: PC sales have tanked. Quite specifically for the past four quarters the worldwide unit sales of devices described as "PC" have been contracting against the year-ago comparable quarter at an ever-increasing rate to the point that last quarter they dropped 17% against the year prior quarter. Not diminishing growth - that happened years ago. Diminishing global units. This is a bigger drop than ever seen before in the history of the PC. More than the .bomb era, several recessions, the 2008 financial global meltdown (among several), the 9/11 terrorist attack, and (horrors) the releases of Windows ME, Windows Vista and Microsoft Bob. The trend spans long before the release of Windows 8, and is progressively increasing in intensity.
Why: good enough CPU / storage / video / network / OS / Apps from years ago, UEFI / DRM / coke-addled Hollywood moguls, Windows 8 sucks / irrational fear of how much Windows 8 sucks, Windows 8 upgrade was too much better than XP / Vista / pirated / no OS and was dirt cheap and could be "bare metal upgraded" instead of buying a PC, immense W8 returns, resistance to change, fear of losing everything in your PC, too much data to move, fear of incompatibilities with various legacy hardware / software, fear of crapware, the intersection of PC and mobile functionalities now mean that a growing fraction of people who used to buy PCs now have their needs met by mobile instead, the Norton / McAfee / malware ecoplex, the economy / unemployment / political situation, price relative to other solutions, Lithuanian / North Korean / Ukranian / Bolivian / Kentuckian hackers and furries. Maybe a few others.
To these I would add that at 2-5% operating margin PCs are not profitable enough for OEMs to fund proper stocks, incent retail, channel and VAR partners, be creative and adventurous in product design or configuration, to engage in proper marketing or do decent R&D, to offer decent service and warranty, or even sell a product at retail the end-user doesn't have to reconfigure the hardware, wipe, reinstall the OS and security software before they use it. This last ritual may in fact be pivotal, as you don't have to do that with the new mobile stuff.
Each of us might ascribe to each of these factors a percentage weight for the amount of responsibility for this change. Though there is no hope we will all agree on the ranking and share, I think that we can all agree that these are almost all good reasons and most of them bear on the issue. There is seldom one reason for a change of this magnitude, and we are unlikely to all agree on the weights to assign to each reason.
(/TL:DR)
Here's the thing: All of these causes have been growing for a while and are essentially permanent. None are one-off incidents we will get past. Almost all of them, in fact, are projected to continue to increase in intensity for the foreseeable future. This is not a storm. It is a climate change. That means that these growing decreases in unit sales are causing a death spiral for global OEMs that will drive an astonishing amount of consolidation in the industry and they will not stop doing so. Many-billion-dollar businesses will be wiped out. Some of them already have been wiped out but aren't yet required to report the fact but we will discover as they are required to report that the immense product returns and poor bets on unmovable inventory have driven several of them to a lack of cash flow that leaves them unable to maintain their debt. People will lose their jobs, their options, the investments they're funding their retirements with. And the survivors won't be much better off as the fire-sale inventory of the fail train is likely to cause a failure cascade in an industry that has been fed millet rations for many years.
So: now what?
The good news is that Apple device un
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When I build a PC, the first thing I look for is a motherboard with the features that I want and need. It's only after to I purchase a CPU based on the current market sweet spot. That of course changes over time. Having the ability to swap out processors also gives an upgrade path as my machine reaches its end of life. Maybe I want to double my cores and nothing else.
With fixed CPU/motherboard units, I can't do any of that. The market segment has now been clearly defined for me. I don't like that. At all.
Life is not for the lazy.
What happens when it rains?
Well, when it rains clouds get STRONGER. So if clouds follow metaphor, they should weaken and dissipate when everything's looking sunny.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"They are declining because our PCs are so good, they last a lot longer."
True, electronics are much more durable. Although I haven't had any computer hardware fail in the past decade, other than maybe a mouse.
But it also depends on what you use computers for. Browsing the web, updating facebook profiles, some word documents, a PC from 5 years ago does the job great. I also have some older computers, a 10 year old one drives my cnc router, and I have two Atom based servers that are a couple years old.
However my work desktop and laptop, used for compiling large chunks of code, photoshop and cad are upgraded every 12-18 months. Processors and graphics cards do get faster. If I were using a 5 year old computer, what compiles on the i7 with ssd in a minute, would probably take an hour. That's a lot of bang for the buck. For the desktop I just replace the motherboard/cpu/gpu, laptops are new purchases with the old ones going to craigslist.
Even the late 2000s. I just had to buy Snow Leopard for my g/f's MBP (older 15", Dual Core 2.4, 4GB RAM) so that she could play WoW. WoW ran just fine on all the previous versions, but for some reason the newest version needed a version higher than 10.6. Same thing for... Google Drive and newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. WoW I could kind of understand, not really, but fine, whatever. Simple web browsers? That was what upset me. From a hardware point of view, there is no reason that the laptop could not run the web browser. I have an older desktop with less impressive specs running Win7 and it runs Chrome and Firefox just fine. But not OSX, nope, no sir. Pay the Apple tax.
You touch on the point, and the article does too.. but just a touch so I'll extrapolate a bit.
Not very long ago many people purchased a PC just to get "on-line". This is where lots of companies made quick money, churning out cheap desktop PCs. People didn't play games on them, and most didn't even use an Office application. They used Web Browsers and Email. If you wanted to be "on-line", a PC was really the only option.
Fast forward a couple years to today, and people have "on-line" options. Their smart phone can get them to the web and read email. To top that off, they can make phone calls. (I'm not saying you could not do that on a PC, but rather it required more work and knowledge to do than the "average" computer owner had. There is simply no need for people to purchase a PC today just to browse the web, or send and receive emails.
So does the guy making minimum wage spend 400 bucks on a PC and 100 on a phone, or 200 on a smart phone and have both? IMHO, we are seeing the answer currently.
I think that other aspects (like what you mention, and the authors mention of Windows 8) have merit. I'm just not sure that those are as big of a factor as the smart phone when it comes to PC sales declining.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I have been building my own PCs since the early-1990s (first one I built was a 486 dx2/66 with 4MB of RAM. That's right, 4MB bitches!)
Last year I spent my bonus on a decent computer, i7 960 (3.2Ghz), Asus board, 12GB of RAM and an nVidia 560GTX. It is running Win7x64 Enterprise. I might toss in an SSD for the boot drive, but other than that do not have any plans to upgrade it. Maybe in a few years I will buy another video card, assuming that the cards are still using PCI-E.
Unless Microsoft pulls some seriously shady moves, Win7 should be good for at least five years, if not longer.
The only app that I run that taxes the processor at all is Handbrake. The games I play use 25-50% of it.
Well then I'm sorry but your company is retarded. The Pentium 4 was a power blowing space heating piece of shit, its the one system where I tell folks "That has GOT to go" and honestly today you'd have to be an idiot to keep one. You can get a mini based on the AMD E350 ready to go and that gives you the performance of a first gen Core2Duo at 1.7GHz while using less power than the fans in one of those P4s, in fact you could probably replace 5 of the P4s with E350s and you'd be using less juice than 1 of the P4s did under load while having better performance.
Now as far as the laptops and the abortion known as Windows 8 AKA "LOL appstores tablets touch"? On those 2 points I agree completely, I have several customers using 3 and 4 year old laptops and they are just fine, they do the job quite well. Hell I have a 3 year old E350 netbook and for the kinds of jobs I have when I'm on a service call, as well as my personal websurfing and video watching? Works wonderfully, hell it even still gets 4 hours on the original battery.
So while I agree on the laptops and avoiding the Win 8 STD keeping P4s is just fucking retarded, if they were first gen core or even older Athlons? yeah I could see it, but there really is a reason why nothing Intel makes uses netburst and that is because it was simply a shitty power pig and the sooner those things are recycled the better.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Even my uncle, who graduated from electrical engineering before anyone could buy a transistor, had a lot to say about the Pentium 4 being a piece of shit at the time it came out.
dual athlon mp's with mongo heat sinks.. 2gb ram .. used to have a raid card but got tired of the rebuilds. Upgraded the video card once and replaced one of four disk drives. It was expensive when I built it, largely because of the two 20" led monitors which provided reliable colors for photo and video editing. Win XP. Yes, its long in the tooth now but it still runs (24/7 most of the year) and does most chores perfectly well. Pokey to boot b ut thats why we have coffee.
There's been low end AMD boards like that for a couple of years with reasonable onboard graphics as well (dual screens). They make good office computers for people that just do the same sort of stuff in MS Excel that they could have done in 1995.
ECC memory, multiway CPUs and cooling for 1U and so on drive the price up a bit. However whitebox servers have never been so cheap even if HP, Dell, IBM etc want to charge a lot more than an equivalent or better system on a SuperMicro board.
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
You don't even need a new PC to play games.
I know, I didn't believe it first time I heard it... But apparently somebody came up with a real-life version of Solitaire :)
People are buying tablets, phablets, phones etc instead.
Windows 8 sucks.
Peoples computers are working, they don't need upgrading.
And PC sales declining != PCs are declining, what moron did this math? IT just means everyone's got one already.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It's not that touch-screens are inefficient, because for many uses, they're fine. Look at microwave ovens. We've had them for what, about 30 years now, and nearly all of them are controlled by what amounts to a touch-screen (using a liberal definition).
For doing what many people use "computers" for, a touch-screen is fine... browsing the web, watching videos, typing short messages... essentially consuming media. When you're on a train or bus and want to consume your media and send some text messages, or even write brief emails, the touch-screen is pretty nice because you can hold it one hand and "type" with the other. Using a laptop in these situtuations is not ideal, especially if you have to stand.
Now for doing actual "work" you typically do need a decent physical keyboard. I have Octave on my Nexus 7, but that's more of a neato-thing... I don't like using it for real analysis. And things like TeX and any programming, where you're always using non "writing" characters, it's a pain to use a touch-keyboard (though, if you're on Andriod, I recommend "Hacker's Keyboard"). And it is lame to sit in a meeting and watch someone clumsily type an email or notes on their i-pad.
However, I am seeing decent end-user professional uses of tablets. They don't have to process GBs of data if you've set up the right back-end setups. There are nice visualization tools that work on a tablet and connect to backend systems where the processing is done. And in our case, the data is in TBs and PBs, so even powerful desktop systems aren't sufficient for analyzing and visualizing the data. In this use, the tablets are like terminals or x-terminals... they provide a window and access to the major system that's actually doing all the work and processing.
In my home, my Nexus tablet is one of my most physically used computers. But I also have a couple headless computers where I do "real processing", etc., and for my "real work", I have a nice decent laptop (i7) plugged into a 27" monitor and with a real keyboard.
It's really just a matter of the right tools for the job. For browsing the web, reading books, flipping through PowerPoint slides, monitoring emails, watching videos, and listening to audiobooks (actually my biggest use of my tablet), a tablet is a pretty good device for the job.
And for a lot of people a tablet is all they need. But obviously, for people like you and me, it's not the prime tool we need for our work.
> After 8 years, I finally bought a new PC. My prior one was a custom built Core 2, 2Ghz
> and 3G Ram. The new one is a Dell T3600 with a Quad Core Xeon, 3.6Ghz and 8G
> memory. Both machines run Windows 7. Overall I do not see that much of a
> performance difference for running basic browser and email. The new machine does
> have a better video card and that is noticeable in games and CAD software performance.
I'm finally getting around to replacing a 2007 Dell Core Duo. It still works, but it can't handle NHL GameCenterLive very well. I had to "rice" it up in Gentoo linux to get it to do the slowest stream (400 kbits/sec). The dual core CPU shows a load of 2.5 and higher, just handling that. My HTPC machine (an i3) can handle the 800 kbits, 1600 kbits, and 3000 kbits streams easily. Not quite HD, but still very good. My new machine is a Dell with i5 and 8 gigs of ram.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The problem is not that MS launched a new OS that underwhelmed. The problem is that we have a machine with a ridiculous amount of CPU and GPU power compared with the portable shit (tablets and phones), yet we can't seem to put this power to meaningful use. I mean, if you don't to scientific computing or video/photo editing or gaming, what's the point of a PC over an underpowered piece of junk or a console? Software developers should really start thinking hard (yes, MS too). But I guess it's far easier developing 2D games for a shiny new platform than doing real innovation.
And crappy Intel video.
Maybe it's because a whole lot of people don't want to screw around with a full-blown PC anymore & just get on with doing what they need to do instead of fighting with Windows Update & malware all the time.
Including our CEO, who does all his work on the road with...
a 10" iPad.
Sure today's PC are insanely powerful for watching video, for running a word processor or a spreadsheet program. However they are just about good enough for real time speech processing and we are a long way from the processing power required for fast-enough computer vision, for instance. This would literallybe a game changer on your PC or your smartphone. Everybody was awed at first by the MS Kinect, but the reality is that the SDK is not fast enough and not precise enough to be all that useful beyond simple things.
Stronger AI still requires massive amount of computer power for machine learning. A lot of work is being done in this area. Look up the program of recent machine learning or computer vision conferences, and be awed.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S. People often ask me why I don't purchase a newer one (like the S2, S3, or maybe S4).
The reason is simple: there is nothing new in those phones. They can all run the same software, and the hardware capabilities are not that important for a smartphone, it's not a production device.
I don't understand why people buy newer smartphones every year, but they do. People don't follow logic.
So for the same reason people might still buy new laptops or whatever.
According to everyone who manufactures tablets.
We totally don't need that fast upgradeable storage, or that high end graphics card that takes up 3 slots, or a proper keyboard, or a mouse, or that nice 23" desktop monitor. Nope. "We don't need them so you don't need them"".
I am thinking a tricked out HP i7 rig. Gone are the days where I will bother to build my machine from parts.
That said it should last for years, considering my current HP has been chugging along for over a decade and is showing no signs of dying. (Nor did its Dell P3 predecessor.) So... I guess I agree with the article somewhat. Market saturation, long lived machines, and competition from mobile devices all have formed a perfect storm.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You're reading skills are also just "fucking retarded." He didn't say that his company runs P4s. I agree that right now there is an interesting dynamic in corporate (and public government) america that is neglecting to see the bottom line advantages of "Green," but a P4 running at even 150W vs a stripped down 25W E350 at a system level saves you about $.40 per 24 hours. Assuming friction-less swap costs, your break even point is about 18 months at 13.5cents a KWh. I am a big fan of improving the efficiency of computers but few people do a good job of properly estimating the power draw of their computer. Motherboards, hard disks, network cards, and PSU inefficiencies all have a non-trivial amount of power consumption. When you drop the draw down to 18-20W, the 6W of your hard drive and every other component adds up to significant efficiency drops that greatly alter your return time frame.
Totally agree with the article. Two things go wrong: - HDDs and fans (moving parts). HDDs replace for SSD, if you can afford it. You won't need a new PC for a long time, perhaps may be a NAS to put large stuff there. - heatsink contact paste - change that and the oldie won't overhear anymore. I've done this on 10+ laptops for friends complaining their laptop overheats and shuts down. Usually works like a charm.
What cloud service is this, or is this just a stupid shill?
Our company uses the M$ cloud, and th online excel spreadsheet has such limited functionality as to be useless--practically speaking, no pivot tables, no lookup tables, for starters.
Add in that they deliberately ran an upgrade that remove file manipulation access from Windows XP computers, concurrent with announcing a one year "EOLife" on Windows XP...
And programming the thing is an elite-only event, I can say that M$ Cloud cannot be what you are talking about. So what I want to know is what cloud you ARE talking about.
Because I really am interested.
Working with microsoft is like trying to grow a vegetable garden in a junkyard.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
eventually, processor power is going to be powerful enough that you really don't need to improve any more for casual functions.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
>, you should have upgrade rights
FTFY
In the /. dialect, going to a lower version of Windows is called "upgrade".
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
They're declining because programmers are failing to write programs which can take advantage of the processing power and memory available. My machine is practically as fast as any machine anyone can get with less than US 5000 to spend and it has the practical maximum memory limit, given available MBs, of 32 G. It's not anywhere near fast enough and I run out of memory all the time.
What do I do that taxes my machine? Write code using the popular tools. Search is slow, points-to analysis and all it's kin, the various forms of dependency analysis, are slow and run my machine out of memory all the time.
The build is slow . Everything is slow and I am compromised everywhere.
I could (am now taking a break from ) writing tools to greatly improve my experience of writing code. I could apply those same techniques to a lot of things and it would all productively use- that is not get involved with NP hard computations- three times the memory and three times the computing power I have today, yielding for the user a truly different, better experience.
Programmers are wetting themselves over Android and Apple "apps" right now. That's where all the "innovation" is going right now- to the creation of apps that leverage some combination of geo / picto /friend graph analysis / rate-n-share all aimed at the 12-year old demographic and their intellectual and emotional peers .
At some point the "selling of collected personal data to market researchers as a business model" is going to be oversubscribed / over supplied and the apps and services living on those specific VC fumes will all come down and then this particular moment in programming substance-free app development will be seen for what it was - a lot of fluff with, yes, some stuff. Then programmers will once again start to write programs for categories other than "diversion-enhancement" , not that entertainment is going to go away or is itself necessarily all fluff even when it's surface appearance is quite fluffy .
... many Pentium 4 machines running Win XP are still being used ...
You're reading skills are also just "fucking retarded." He didn't say that his company runs P4s.
Pot, meet kettle.
.
Well, hardware improvements have slowed down --- when's the last time you heard anyone gushing about a new Intel CPU?
And with Windows 8, Microsoft has put Windows' progress in reverse.
If you want to find out why PC sales are slowing, don't ask columnists, ask PC customers.
Customers who, btw, are saying that Windows 8 sucks.
windows 8 is bad nobody likes or wants it. your prosser speed does not mean jack anymore even hi end games are still only needing first gen dual cores and 2gb ram because its all in the gpu the the need for a new pcs isn't there just get a new gpu maybe more ram. then people are opting for smart phones and tablets well because there low power mobile and pretty much any piece of software has been made for them. will the desktop die never you will still have the office sales and the hi end gamer sales but the tablets are filling in everything else.
If our current PC's are so great that we don't need new ones, then why are so many people buying iPads, which is a mobile PC? The reason is: to get a 300 gram system with 10 hour battery life or a $499 system with a Retina Display — systems that *are* much better than “our current PC's” for most users, most of the time. To get 300,000 touch PC apps with very fast, very easy workflows, plus another million iPhone apps — apps that are much better than our current apps, for most users, most of the time.
If Windows 8 systems were competitive with iPads then they would also be selling in huge numbers. But they are not. No amount of sugar-coating will make this turd palatable.
Imagine yourself arguing against the notebook in the late 90's or early 2000's because desktops are “just fine.” People are moving from notebooks to iPads today in the same way, because notebooks are not “just fine” today. We have pervasive Wi-Fi/3G/4G today that demands mobility and 10 hour batteries — systems that were designed for Ethernet and AC power are simply not “just fine.”
For the hardware out there now, outside of the niche group of high end PC Gamers, there are no killer apps to drive motivation to buy innovative hardware (or new utility software like over bloated operating sytems).
Maybe that will change when/if a new generation of high end/spec game producers figure out that focusing on anti-piracy instead of content is a losing game because in the long run you kill your entire market demographic. They poured all their energy and innovation into DRM and anti piracy tactics instead of producing entertaining games that make use of the hardware power available and now they are reaping the rewards. No market.
1) Desktop resolution is frozen in the ice age at a time TV's are going 4K 2) Software has stagnated with control freaks insisting you rent their software. 3) O/S are made for the bottom 90% of non sophisticated users, with a priority to spy. 4) Cloud computing is a throw back to dumb computers of a era gone by. 5) No one wants a corporate gatekeeper who thinks they know better. 6) Tools haven't become easier, just more complex with workarounds of Win GUI etc. 7) Hardware architecture is stagnate, SSD tech should be on the MB 8) Multiple CPU/GPU with multi cores should have replaced memory by now. 9) Too noisy, (best thinking is done in silence) too hot and too much energy wasted. Lack of Innovation is the #1 reason Desktop Sales are lagging There's just a total disconnect between suppliers and consumers, they're not on the same page. For MS to come up with a whole new way of doing things and using the Steve Jobs arrogant attitude, they'll take what we say is good and love it, without the ground work, is close to suicide. But the tech world is fraught decision makers who make the wrong decision. If you're going to make computer appliances, then use the KISS mantra, but if you want to sell more computing power house machines, start building them in consultation with the people who buy them.
I purchased a 2008 Macbook pro and applecare. Near the end of my applecare my motherboard died. They gave me a new 2011 Macbook Pro no charge. So I haven't needed to purchase another system in 5+ years ...
Zoid.com
Unless people have smart phones and tablets and don't have a need for a new computer or one that's vary fast or useful, as all of the PC manufacturers and Microsoft had been predicting for years. Far be it from me to keep anyone from bashing windows 8, but who wants a tablet on a PC? Its the less efficient interface that does not utilize the space on the screen appropriately and slows down navigation and usability in the Mouse and keyboard scenario. So why would it be a desire of normal users to use the less efficient interface on the desktop, unless the future for users is to digress their usefulness of a computer.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
People HATE changes, until they've been around long enough not to be "change" anymore. It's simply not time for metro yet, that will come much later. That said, I think it's impossible to site windows 8 as "the" smoking gun. It's the #1 thing people are going to complain about because it's just that different.
What's killing pcs? For the general public, tablet saturation, large phones, slowing pace of software complexity. You can run office from a web browser now. You can do 90% of what you want conveniently from a tablet without burning your lap. your 3 year old hard drives don't fail like they did back in the days, Consoles are still in full force. Where is the pc's place? The number of things you need a pc for, (specifically a new pc) is shrinking quickly every day. Sure /.ers sue pc's and can use all the power they can wrap their hands around, but grandma is just as well off reading emails on her ipad mini, kids are living off their cell phones, the market is shrinking as portable solutions get faster and portable software catches up.
My freaking phone has a 5.5 inch display, 2GB of ram, 80GB of storage and a quad core 1.6GHz processor. What I do for a living requires a pc and I prefer 27" lcd's to my 5.5, but it's not like I break out my laptop on vacation anymore ya know?
I think you're going to see the market move over slowly to keyboarded tablets as people don't need more horsepower, use more cloud storage and want light weight and long battery life.
Had to buy a laptop for a business startup. Couldn't get Win 7. Had to have Win 8 if I wanted a deal on a HP laptop (Offered one yesterday with Win 7 - of course). Man it SUCKS! So bad I should be able to get my money back. Not as bad as millenium edition or Vista. I've been using it for over a week. Learned some new short cuts. Seems to update every day to the point it wants to reboot. Major suck. Wish I could put Windows 7 on it, however this laptop is probably not bios (uefi) so I could end up with a brick. Had to be Windows by the way because the stuff it needs to run won't run on the Mac stuff nor Linux.
Thanks, and for those that say "Oh and E-Series doesn't stack up against a COre2Duo"? Here is the Passmark scores which the E350 scores 776, the Intel C2D T2400 at 1.83GHz scores a 789, so pretty damned close to the first gens. If you can score an E450 they score neck and neck with the 2GHz T2450 so again its neck and neck only the price is a HELL of a lot different.
And to the AC that says "I like AMD"? I like bang for the buck and hate corporate douchebaggery, intel STILL rigs their compiler (while AMD uses a fork of GCC and hands out the code) and if you'll show me where I can get a C2D WITH the heatsink AND the motherboard for $70 shipped? be happy to consider it. With the E350 you can take an old Pentium 4 box and turn it into a power sipper with better performance for less than $110, and that is with you buying a PCI to IDE adapter if the system still has IDE drives, if it has SATA you can do it for less than $95. I'm sorry but you can't beat that, you save money, save cooling, and save power, while getting better performance...what's not to like?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This all assumes you would be making a server in a business setting, with antiquated software, where simply turning it off any any point is unacceptable, and it must be rack mounted to be taken seriously by management, even if there's nothing but networking gear in that rack otherwise.
Sounds like most businesses today.
ECC: pointless unless running a machine which you reboot less than once a week.
SMP: Pointless unless you run software that doesn't support nodes/farming
1U rack: Possible with a desktop mobo but needs to not use any PCI slots and have a CPU cooler and PSU made for servers. 4U's are usually better anyway.
To me this says that 1U SMP Xeon servers are perfectly priced for the people that would be buying them. C-level's who are too lazy to do their research, modify their code to distribute processing or talk to their software providers, and then buy a bunch of cheap desktop PC's to do the heavy lifting for them. Or too lazy to listen to the tech guy banging down their door about it.
The real question is what happens when the next 2600k/3770k equivalent becomes a unit you can only buy soldered onto a Quad Sli/Triple Xfire bells and whistles motherboard that makes the K versions of all their chips super expensive and limits internally the over-clocking potential of them.
The market for playing Crysis 3 on a high-end PC isn't that great. Most people will either play low-end PC games on Intel integrated video, console games on AMD or on a phone.
Are you so proud of your ignorance that you must advertise it?
As is easily found via Google, the 15" rMBP 2.7GHz come with a Nvidia 650M with 1GB RAM. Of course, it dynamically switch between the onboard (Intel) and dedicated GPU's as necessary.
"Microsoft made a bet on PC hardware and capabilities, and the PC industry pulled the rug out from under it .. Microsoft .. didn't trust OEMs to deliver on the promises the silicon vendors were making"
...
ref ref
This is retrospective arse-covering by some Microsoft apologist. Microsoft got the OEMs to put a 'Vista Capable' label on the PCs and when people tried to upgrade - Vista couldn't run
AccountKiller
Having the ability to swap out processors also gives an upgrade path as my machine reaches its end of life. Maybe I want to double my cores and nothing else.
You don't seem to understand reality. Unless you are buying server motherboards, you do not get to do that upgrade in the Intel world. Intel CPU's with twice as many cores use a different socket.
"His name was James Damore."
For simple tasks they're fine. Now go and try to do something useful on them. I've also seen people attempt to write emails or even reports on them. It's sad to see, and while they have a laptop somewhere near them they still refuse to take it out simply cause they want to use the tablet. It's a disgrace for humanity. It's another fad that I hope will die down soon. It's like the netbooks that they said everybody would have by now. Most people I know who have one have downgraded it down to travel laptop or movie player. Only use I've found for those are presentations, mainly cause the battery lasts so long. But normal laptops are catching up with them in that area.so it's becoming semi useless. Additionally the processor is too slow to live stream high definition video. But to get back to the touchscreen keyboards. They work for typing small text messages. Then again I still give a preference to being social in public. Maybe I'm too old fashioned.
Well yes, but you still need tactile feedback to type quickly. Just doesn't work well without feeling the edges of the key under your fingers. Using a tablet to type is very time inefficient.
Well yes, we also use them as remote control for lab equipment. But the moment you want to visualize complex data you still need to have a computer somewhere to do it. And at that point I found that I can better use a laptop since it can do it without having to mess with remote viewers. Can't run MATLAB on a tablet. And lets be honest, Professional applications still are far more important than home use when considering these things. So I simply drag my good old 15" thinkpad along, I've had a tablet since the early move and I've bought a new one every time the old one became insufficient to run the latest software. But I simply don't see any use for it other than using it as remote control for my media centre at home. For reading books I hate LCD and OLED screens, can't help it. Guess for powerpoint slides during presentations they might be useful if you don't want to wear glasses.
So yeah, I hope this "tablet is all you need" fad goes over quickly and people get some common sense again.
Heh, most of the business systems I support have maybe 1 gig of ram, 60 gig hard drives, run windows xp and standard Rez is 1024x768. We replace 1 computer a month which gives us a 10 year turn around currently.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/18944/bill-gates-frustrated-windows
By the time I got ready retire my higher end P4 Dell desktop and laptop, I was immersed enough in portable devices that I just picked up a Chrome box to cover what I needed for desktop. Mostly to have a larger screen available. I see no reason to go spend money for W7 or 8 devices.
A computer used for a sales force or other miscellaneous business uses should not be used for playing games, which is the primary purpose of high end video cards. Intel video is just fine for business.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
There is not a single machine in my workplace that is rebooted fifty times a year. People stopped using Win ME years ago.
Or unless you want a lot of memory in one place. There also isn't a lot of software that supports multiple nodes well, which is frustrating when you look at performance graphs and see more than half the time spent on some sort of waiting instead of running the CPUs flat out for a week.
Closed source software means you have to wait until your vendor feels threatened by some cheeky startup for several years before they change, and meanwhile you use everything the cheeky startup can give you while filling the gaps with the original vendors applications.
Nobody is stuck with Windows 8. If you want Windows 7 on a new pc just download an official Windows 7 ISO, burn it to a disc, boot it up, install, then validate it with 7loader, its a free program. Recommended to all people that wanna keep using Windows but hate Windows 8. Hope I helped someone on here :-)
You forgot about the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit. Everyone knows how much the CPU ISA changed so that it's not economically feasible to support 32-bit anymore.
Apparently Win 8 has not outnumbered XP machines yet, so it's out numbered by two previously successful OS implementations Yes, our machines have gotten much better and more stable, but most of the large companies I'm familiar with finally went to Win 7, but are definately not going to Win 8 and that represents tens of thousands of machines. BTW they were dragged kicking and screaming from XP Pro to Win 7, not because they wanted to go, but were forced/blackmailed into making the change. They all would have been content to stay with XP and are not happy with the idea of the cloud.
No I'm not, board $70, 4GB of RAM $12, PCI to IDE Adapter $10...final total $92 shipped. And I noticed you pulled numbers out of your ass, I provided links showing where you can find the E350 at the price cited. I seriously doubt you are setting up Intel shit except maybe an Atom for $100.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Heh.. Considering that at least a third or so of those high-end mobile phones and tablets are powered with a Tegra 2, 3, or 4... I think NVidia saw that writing on the wall a while back and already made their move elsewhere.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I build my-own, so i dont drive PC sales but i do drive OS sales. Ive always looked forward to the new Windows. And Ive always been apart of the beta testing no different this time. So what I'm saying is Windows 8 sucks, plain and simple. There is too much i dont like,like mainly the Metro feasico which MS was told about all through testing it was just not wanted.They didn't listen, marketing is more important then functionality and Customer,s wants.So i will take a pass at 8 and any new OS forcing Metro.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I'm not sure that all the applications that I want to run are available for the Windows RT operating system that the Surface uses, and both the Surface and the Surface Pro costs several times what a comparable 10" laptop used to cost.
He doesn't bring home his programming homework, he does it at school.
There are two ways that one can do "homework" at school. One is if the instructor provides enough time in class to complete the assignment. The other is if the school makes alternate transit home available to the student so that the student can stay after school to complete the assignment. Which of these two ways did you envision?
And you replace your laptop with a bigger laptop
That's not a perfect solution either for several reasons. A larger laptop tends to be either heavier (if not an Ultrabook laptop) or more expensive (if it is). A larger laptop is harder to use in cramped spaces such as a bus, train, or carpool. A larger laptop would have to fit in a larger bag, and a larger bag that looks like a stereotypical laptop bag would result in more theft.
why pay money for software you have to hack when win 7 works just fine and doesn't require such drastic usability kludges?
Because unlike Windows 8 OEM, Windows 7 OEM doesn't come with a personal use license. So if your're building your own desktop PC, Windows 8 is cheaper than Windows 7.
Hell all you had to do was put your hand behind a P4 tower to see what a power pig it was, the things would be just blasting VERY hot air out the back, even when idling!
You could even take the supposedly "low end" like the Celeron and the AMD Duron/Sempron and the Celery would just belch out heat constantly whereas a Duron would be cool to the touch. I have a Sempron from the netburst era I'm gonna have to finally change out because of XP going EOL and even jammed into a corner it never overheats because the Sempron just doesn't use squat compared to a netburst chip.
Sadly I would argue AMD has done the same mistake with their newest "bulldozer based" chips in that they focused on number of cores and clock speed above all and now have 125+ watt chips that blow through power and belch heat while needing a GHz more speed to top the previous gen, just like how Intel had to rig the compiler against the P3 to make the P4 look good. This is why I've been sticking with the Stars based chips like Athlon and Phenom II, they don't just blast through power and belch heat like the new BD based chips.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And when you have to turn the heating power back up by a hundred watts ... what precisely have you gained?
(The original poster didn't indicate his climate region. Here, there is some degree of heating on for 8-10 months of the year, and the windows are rarely opened. So the heat chucked out of the back of the office PC is a non-trivial component of the heating budget. If you have air conditioning, your sums may be different.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sounds like a good fit for citrix or a VM.
Cheap storage VM.
This is probably why sculpture class isn't common.
In elementary school, all students in all grades took a required art class. In middle school, all students in sixth grade took a required art class. In high school, all students in tenth grade took a required art class. And all these art classes had a sculpture (3-dimensional artwork) unit of some sort. But I'll admit that the required art classes were on the same level as physical education, health, or required music class: no homework.
If it does ever become common enough to the point where all kids are expected to know the 'Four Rs: Reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and GNU S'
Compare to high school math class, where students are already required to carry a programmable graphing calculator. Fortunately, my family was never poor enough that I ended up on tax-subsidized lunch (TANSTAAFL), but I imagine that students on tax-subsidized lunch would get their laptops the same way, provided that computers even remain available to the public at all.
Because of laptops, tablets and smartphones (unless we're counting laptops as PCs, which I can understand).
Most users don't need everything that a PC offers, especially the bloatware pre-installed from companies such as Sony, Lenovo, HP or Dell. Most users require very little from their computing device: e-mail, social media and web browsing. And smartphones and tablets provide all those, in a compact form-factor, along with texting/messaging.
This isn't a huge mystery. The market is shifting to sleeker, more task-focused computing. The PC is going to be relegated to those who require it, and the tablet and smartphone are taking over the task of more general computing.
Even integrated graphics these days are an order of magnitude more powerful than any GPU tablet.
Missed the point completely. And I mis-said a few things.
ECC: I originally meant to say: pointless unless running a machine which you CAN reboot less than once a week.
Only actually useful when you either really need stupid GB of RAM, or you will be running an program 24/7 which happens in core server room machines but generally not on workstations. In my environment I have never seen a machine that you strictly CANNOT reboot for weeks else you lose everything. I know they exist, particularly in the heavy rendering and scientific fields, both of which have distributed processing in all examples I know of.
SMP: SSDs would just as effectively fix that problem. Most of that wait time is HDD spin latency based anyway, unless you are repeatedly and randomly accessing a 150GB+ working set then DDR would do the same but at lower latency (as ECC adds latency and so does SMP), and if that is the case I really think your product dev should have a real hard look at nodes.
And the part about closed source and vendors is an importantpoint that I did miss, almost deliberately, with the assumption that alternatives exist. Unfortunately I know as much as you probably do that that sn't always the case