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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.
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.
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?
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)
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...
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.
Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages, but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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?
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
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.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time.
Dell or HP would be happy to sell you a Win7 machine:
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." That's Microsoft's original slogan.
Microsoft cares about the license fees, but they also care about the power to define the industry. As long as the vast majority of PCs are running Windows, then Microsoft technologies will dominate, which makes it easier to convince companies to install Windows. It's a vicious cycle.
Also, they have direct financial incentive to keep you running Windows. As long as you run Windows, you are eligible for Microsoft Office license fees, and Microsoft Support fees, and advertisement dollars connected with the Windows Live account that they want you to get. If you have Windows 8, then they also benefit when you use the Windows Store to get apps.
Have a nice time.
Dude do NOT save that P4, the amount of juice you waste feeding that beast makes it not worth the trouble. Since you like Tiger kits (which I do to, they are fricking fantastic) you should look at the $130 E350 Mini which just uses 16w under load while giving you a dual core APU that is great for everyday tasks. Since you already have the box you can get just the board at Amazon for like $70, slap in a $12 RAM stick and the system will pay for itself just on the amount of power you save and waste heat you don't have to deal with.
I've been turning old P4 office boxes into E350 boxes and its quite popular with the SMBs, better performance than the P4 at not even a fifth the power. I like 'em so much if I ever get a few days "me time" so I can take my time and set my software up the way I like I'll be ripping the guts out my old Sempron nettop at the shop and replacing it for an E350, I'll get a nice performance boost while using even less power than the Sempron, its cheap, great for basic tasks, and low power, its really a sweet little unit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You will have to break it down to what people use their machines for.
For the usual tasks like light office work and web browsing tablets nearly have all the processing power you'll ever need. Which means a machine like an Ouya with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen are enough. Ican remember whan PCs hardly could handle a GUI and autocorrection of Word would bog the machine down. These days are gone and have been gone for 10 years.
Gamers used to buy/upgrade every 2 years if they could afford it. But even for gamers, CPU power ceased to be an issue 10 years ago(with very few exceptions). We upgraded our machines when the newest graphics cards didn't fit into our mainboards anymore and upgraded the whole thing instead.
Speaking of graphics cards. The current console generation has kept us at a DirectX9 level for ages. Since most games tend to be either cross plattform or not very resource hungry to begin with, that is the level you actually needed. If you've got a Geforce 580 you will be good to go for some time even though upgrades have been available for some time now.
If you do really heavy lifting development then you propably also are content with what you have and if you aren't you might rather buy a second machine. I do a lot of development and I typically run a database, an IDE, an application server, tons of browser taps, multiple PDF and OpenOffice documents at once and my machine is bored stiff. I've got an i7, 16gigs of memory and the single biggest and best upgrade I got in the past years was an SSD drive. If that machine were bogged down by the stuff I run I'd rather buy a cheapass second machine to run the application server and databases on.
This is something that's currently just thinking in. We have a hardware generation that is basically good enough. If you have specialised need then as in any generation before this one you will need specialised hardware(for example for video encoding...but I suspect a stock beefy graphics card will be sufficient).
A lot of companies understand this. For instance nVidia(I've been following their strategy the closest out of curiosity) bowed out of the big 3 console market and left that to AMD. Instead they eagerly beaver away to get the power consumption of their current gen Kepler tech down. They seriously want to build this into phones and tablets. That's their 600 line of products. In a phone!
I can see the appeal of simply sliding your tablet/phone into a docking station and have a full gaming grade/office machine. We are already nearly there.
I've ditched my laptop for a tablet-come-netbook(Asus Transformer series) for my computing needs on the road. I decked it out with 256GB of storage and use all my notebook pripherals with it. It's more than enough for web browsing, giving presentations and outlining specs.
If that is powerful enough for office work then you can see why Microsoft is crapping their pants. This is a non-Windows environment poaching on their turf. And ARM based non-Windows machines with these capabilities outnumber PCs by a staggering magnitude with a lot of growth in power and a 1-1.5 year upgrade cycle.
The tablets you now can buy for 700 bucks have graphics capabilities of 10 years ago. Those you can buy in summer have graphics capabilities of 5 years ago. And they continue at this pace. And if you were clever enough to go Android instead of iOS then you most likely can use stock peripherals with these. My PS3 controller works flawlessly with my tablet. No rooting, no hassle. Connect via USB and it's paired via Bluetooth. For the lulz I tried using a cheapass wireless keyboard and mouse with my tablet. I attached the USB dongle thing and was good to go without faffing around in any systems menus. A beamer is easily attached via USB and the controller support is so good I can control presentations with a PS3 controller. Mouse support is equally good. Same goes for keyboards. And I get 12 hrs of heavy use out of this thing because it has a second battery in the keyboa
20 minutes into the future
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.
Of course it makes sense - you bought a Windows 8 machine because your mother needed a new machine, and you have no problem installing Linux on it.
The sales that are slipping through PC makers' fingers are the "Oh, my old laptop with the factory Win7 install still works perfectly well, but I'm in the mood for something new that's slimmer/lighter/has better battery life." When faced with the prospect of upgrading to a new machine and having Windows 8 on it (and actually wanting to use Windows), it's a pretty easy decision to just stick with what you already have.
I bought a Windows 8 machine myself, so I'm actually a traitor in that respect, but I needed a full-blown Windows tablet with decent battery life for OneNote, and Windows 8 Atom tablets are the only option so far...
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.
>, 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
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 :-)