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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."
Obviously. I don't know anything that can kill a computer better than a few feline-induced keystrokes.
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.
No silly.
The cloud is the new floppy disk.
I went to a few computer shops in the last month, and not only did my old computer seem good as the demo models, it seemed better. When I looked at them, I felt the pain of having to learn something new. They gave the impression of unnecessary and non-useful crapware. Touching the screen is kind of lame, and Windows 8 is confusing until you get the hang of it.
So yeah, not only is the current computer good enough, but there are actual disincentives to upgrade. They could at least put a racing stripe on it, make it prettier.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Windows 8 is kind of like getting your naughty bits pierced. At first it hurts like hell, but once you use it for a while, you begin to take really like it.
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)
And then the infections start appearing.
just like apple did in the late 90's
oh your 2 year old mac is doing fine? OK heres os 9.22, everyone will be using it, except for you cause we told our installer to specificly ignore anything less than our brand new shiny G3, pay up or fuck off
or in the mid 2000's
oh you just bought a G5 OK we switched to intel, pay up or fuck off
Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages, but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
Windows 8.
It may be fun and easy to bash Windows 8, but I don't think that is the reason. It's fine. When I see the metro desktop after logging in, it just looks like the menu was automatically opened on Win 7. That's not such a big deal. Once you have organized your app icons, though, it is really no different than clicking on one in the taskbar or the desktop. I find it inconsequential from that perspective, but you also get the live tiles and new apps, some of which are useful. Windows 8 is not the fiasco that Vista was, with its required hunt for drivers. On a multi-monitor setup, I can have the metro UI pop-up on any monitor, which is useful at times. Most of the time I am in the desktop. but I really don't notice switching between metro and the desktop. I run Windows 7 in a VM as an attempt to isolate the email, Flash, etc, and browsing risks. I am impressed with the performance if Hyper-V, but not happy that you can't mount USB drives or burn CDs from the VM. Hopefully that will be fixed in the future.
If I think of my own hardware purchases, it's easy to understand why PC sales are declining - tablets and phones. I by a new PC or motherboard about once every 7 years. I just bought a new PC after upgrading my mb about 7 years ago. I put it in a case that is 10 years old now. Since buying that last mb, I bought:
I am going to sell the iMac and Windows laptop soon. I'm interested in a Chromebook and some sort of Win 8 laptop. I am sure all of the above will be replaced by the time I upgrade my PC again, part of which is due to how its speed is now more than sufficient for almost everything I do. Eventually I expect my hardware mix to be a powerful desktop, a cloud-centric tablet/laptop, and a phone, with the latter two being replaced much more frequently than the desktop. Note also that it is easier to upgrade desktop hardware, so the replacement cycle is longer for PCs. Tablet and phone hardware improves much more noticeably with each new model at the moment. The same isn't true for PCs. That is what is slowing PC sales, not Windows 8, IMHO.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Actually? And as much as I HATE THAT STUPID DUMBED DOWN WIN 8 %$&%$^$...I gotta be honest and...TFA is pretty much right on the money. hell my AMD netbook is 3 years old, runs great, I was the guy that HAD to build a PC every year for gaming, but I'm up to a 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space, what more do I need here? Games are just now starting to really use duals and triples, most games won't even stress a triple so half my cores are sitting idle or doing other stuff, so why do i need more?
This really hit me over the head about 2 years ago which is why I'm doing more HTPCs and security cams now, and that was when the Phenom II quads first got REALLY cheap. You see my dad is the perfect "test case" if you will for your "bog standard PC user" because he is as MOR as you can get, he surfs, watches movies, uses chat and webmail, runs his little office software, its about as bog standard of a use case as one can get. So I start seeing the new quads below $100 and I think "Hmmm, its been awhile since i built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to build a new system" so I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find?
45%. No shit, we are talking a 2.2GHz first gen Phenom I quad and he ONLY was able to get to 45% usage and looking closer at what was going on it looks like a browser hang caused that spike, if I remove that? he's barely hitting 30% and that is when he is going full bore. I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble. I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3 and now we are seeing laptops going 5-6 years and desktops that can easily go 8 or 9, I mean that Phenom I quad my dad has is circa 07 so its already at 6 years and its not being stressed.
It all comes down to both AMD and Intel building chips that are just so insanely powerful that folks can't come up with enough useful work for them to do, certainly not enough to max 'em out. Of course Windows 8 being Satan spawn certainly isn't helping matters any but there are still plenty of places selling win 7 systems right now but if your system is already a multicore seriously what more do you need?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Youve never really experienced cloud computing until you've put your pagefile on Google drive.
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 !
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