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PC Sales See 'Longest Decline' In History
dryriver writes "Global personal computer (PC) sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the 'longest duration of decline' in history. Worldwide PC shipments totalled 76 million units in the second quarter, a 10.9% drop from a year earlier, according to research firm Gartner. PC sales have been hurt in recent years by the growing popularity of tablets. Gartner said the introduction of low-cost tablets had further hurt PC sales, especially in emerging economies. 'In emerging markets, inexpensive tablets have become the first computing device for many people, who at best are deferring the purchase of a PC,' said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement."
The PC is doomed, blah blah blah. All the grandma's are buying tablets. Anyone who does any real work are buying PC's or already have what they need. Nothing to see here.
The era of the PC is over. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised at this.
Tablets now fall under the umbrella of being a PC. BAM! Problem fixed... no more PC sales decline.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
pc owners are the producers of content on that computer network, not tablet users
Computers made in the last 5 or so years are darn fast, and unless you are a hard core gamer, will be plenty fast for the next 5-10 years. I just built my father a modern computer in the hopes he won't need a new one for about 10 years.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I have been using this computer, an intel Q9650 for quite some time, in fact I believe longer than any other computer I have had and I will be using it for the next several years.
For some reason, there still remains this weird claddistic requirement that "pc's" (ie desktops, I guess?), laptops, and other devices be all conceptualized in separate boxes. Or, it could just be that the companies that are paid to do this sort of info gathering (and sorting) aren't changing as fast as technology...?
PC stands for 'personal computer', at least it did.
The laptop was the evolution of the desktop into a more broadly useful form factor.
The smartphone, and the pad device are precisely the same thing - just other points on the spectrum, not a whole different genus of computer.
That said, then, if one were to include the counts of all such devices that have the computing power and utility of a desktop even as short as 10 years ago, I hardly believe that the "PC market" is in decline.
One might even wonder then what the agenda is for such a naked contrivance to present the situation in such a gloomy light might be?
-Styopa
I wonder how much of this is due to the cost associated with buying a new PC. It seemed for a long time there, that folks would buy a new PC at the drop of a hat (slow, virus, 2 years old...). I doubt that it has anything to do with smartphones, or we'd just see the same trend with tossing out smartphones at the drop of a hat.
I wouldn't be surprised that Windows 8 was a large culprit as well. I don't know anyone with a favorable view of the OS, besides the Microsoft PR department. They have been hitting home runs with XBone and Win8.
No mention of the fact that Intel and Microsoft are still bleeding customers on gross margins of 70%. Computers have to compete against other computing devices, and they are not doing so on price. Windows 8 being a tablet OS is the nail in the coffin.
Just still works.. But I guess I should go buy a new one now before the specs go into a slump :/
The main reason for the decline of PC sales is that PC's have gotten to the point where their useful life is far longer than it used to be. Other than bleeding edge gamers and enthusiasts, there is just no need to upgrade as often as people once did. The same applies more or less to businesses.
Nearly every person I know who owns a smartphone and/or a tablet also has some sort of PC. I really don't think the portable device boom is the culprit here.
Even hardcore gamers don't need to upgrade anything right now. There's no need.
The game industry has killed most of the game-side innovation due to the mergers and tunnel vision on anti-piracy and now nothing is pushing the envelope that would typically have driven gamers to buy the latest hardware to run the latest games.
So why pick a more expensive & less mobile PC?
What worries me is that if the PC market can't continuing making profit off volume sales, the prices of a computer (or its components) will go up. I'm still on core 2 due (hey, still works), and waiting for it to die so I can build something with 8-core.
does this take into account people buying parts of PCs and assembling them themselves? i feel like it's gotten easier to just upgrade one or two parts rather than the whole computer now too.
pc owners are the producers of content on that computer network, not tablet users
Except its not true...real keyboard and mouse have uses, but the rise of pen+drawing screen is actually a better input for artists, hell anything where a pad beats static computer.
As for an iPad being better for consumption....seriously my 24" monitor is so much better for consumption than a tablet for *anything* videos, web pages. games...
The main difference is the trade between portability at the lack of some screen estate, power, storage, ease of input and it just happens in most use cases these are not as important.
At the end of the day, we just need fewer PCs than we used to:
- People can do their "consumption" media (browsing, videos, etc) on tablets or phones. Don't need a PC for that.
- People who use PCs for work have no reason to upgrade them as often as they used to, as the machines last for years and real world performance gains in hardware have slowed to a trickle. When most of my software is single-threaded, upgrading from dual core to quad core (or more) does absolutely nothing for me.
- Even gamers don't need to upgrade that often, as requirements have stopped going up unless you want the ultra quality mode. A three year old gaming PC can still play everything new at high quality, and that's never been the case in the past.
Add it all up, and we need fewer PCs today than we used to need. The ones we do need last longer than they used to. The market isn't going to go away, but it is going to become a lot smaller.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Me: Good morning i would like to buy a PC for the purpose of gaming which means i would require power.
Employ: Sure you have here this lovely...
Me: That seems to have 6 GB of RAM and also the graphic card is an old Nvidia with 1 Gig dedicated only... i would require more
Employ: Well no one complained about gaming on this one.. its even playing currently Bioshock Infinity.
Me: That's the trailer.... it's a FMV
Employ: It still renders pretty fast thanks to Windows 8
Me: Also without windows 8. I still accept 7 tho...
Employ: Sorry no windows 7... we recalled all those for Windows 8 equivalents..
Me: Bye
This is where the golden goose has been slain.
The main reasons that sales are dropping...
Everybody that needs one has one, and they work well enough. Very few people need the latest and greatest
The various different activation and protection schemes make it a royal pain to upgrade
I used to buy new hardware frequently, and just clone my hard drive
Now, I hold on to hardware for as long as possible
I fear that if I upgrade, I will end up spending hours on hold waiting to convince some dude in India that I'm not a pirate
The PC is here to stay. What we are seeing is a longer life cycle. There is no need to update the hardware these days,
Hold on there why does anyone say this....I want more powerful hardware and can use it. Where is my 4X 1080P 24" touchscreen monitor, with keyboard with LED keys with these futuristic storage sizes with android compatibility...at a price I can afford. Microsoft turned the computer into a tablet...and Apple turned it into a none upgradable cylinder. At least they are still sat on massive profit margins while sales shrink, but who cares its a duopoly Anyway.
No wonder we are all running to android.
I suspect this is primarily because people who think of buying a new PC go to the store and see Windows 8 and think 'WTF? Why do I want a tablet interface on my 24" monitor?'
In a vain attempt to gain a few percent market share on tablets, Microsoft are killing their PC cash cow.
The Mainframe isn't dead, however it isn't as widely used as it once was. They are still new Mainframes being made, and any true Computer Scientist would drool to get their hands on one.
But that being said, they are not selling as many as they use to, most companies are going to PC based servers, because they are cheaper, and more software flexibility, and you are not as stuck with one company for support, and a large group of developers who can handle the platform.
Now the PC, are tablets going replace them? No, but they will bring the PC down to a few manufacturers. I expect Lenovo, Dell, Apple to survive in the desktop area, as they (Apple to the lesser extent) have a good hold in the business markets. However PC's would probably be more like Workstations reserved for more computer intensive work such as Software Development, CAD, Finance... But for other people tablets, with say keyboards could replace the rest of the people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Perpetual exponential growth? Good luck with that.
I would expect this to be obvious to the casual observer, but I guess not. So, let me enumerate:
Primary reasons for the decline:
1) The PC has been around now for over 20 years. It no longer possesses excitement and consumer appeal.
2) SMARTPhones and tablets are better meeting the needs and desires of the consumer; their increasing sales are supplanting PC sales.
3) The PC market is saturated, either due to consumer need or financial constraint. (Plenty of foreign markets have consumers but lack capital to meet the saturation levels of Western countries.)
4) Digital product producers, online retailers, and brick & mortar stores have all been significantly marketing tablet and SMARTPhone devices to consumers while ignoring their traditional PC products.
5) Tablets and SMARTPhones have much shorter average lifespans than traditional PCs, creating more consistant and continual demand for their replacement.
Ergo, you have a very simple recipe for the decline of PC sales.
"PC sales have been hurt in recent years by the growing popularity of tablets."
That's BS, it's Windows 8's fault entirely. This study doesn't count used PC resale or a drop in computer (scrap) recycling levels. Tablets replace laptops, not PCs. There is no drop because of tablets. It is completely Windows 8's fault.
You forgot consoles. They are so woefully underpowered right now compared to desktop computers that it limits games since no big budget games will go PC only. The PS4 and and Xbone are not exactly sporting impressive specs either. I was pretty let down when their specs came out. You can be sure they will be around at least as long as the current generation, so that will stagnate gaming pretty seriously on the performance side of things.
More people know how to build a computer at the fraction of the cost. Consider the fact that a considerable amount of kids back when windows 95 was released are full grown adults, probably married as well. The generation before it knew almost nothing about computers. Now, Dell, Gateway, HP etc... They all make solid PC bundles from time to time but it can easily be done at home at the fraction of the cost and they are usually built with the customer's needs in mind, versus on what the corporation wants the customer to do. For example, if I want a computer that will last 3-years, I will build one that lasts for 3-years and still be slick. Additionally, computers are "Fast enough" as it is. My computer was originally built in 2007. The only three things that are still original on it are the motherboard, processor, and dvd burner. I did upgrades incrementally and I can play BF3 at full settings. Incremental upgrades is the keything here and I can't be anymore redundant because these polls are always the same deal. Focus strictly on bundle sales and you're going to pretend that the market is dying. If anything, the PC is just as important if not more important than before. Steam is an amazing thing.
Maybe this was emphasized too much ... maybe
Microsoft, with Windows 8 said that the PC is dead and only the tablet has a future.
They stopped completely to support developers on desktop development because the desktop is dead, they said.
At the recent build the message was clear, all the technology to make desktop application are deprecated and probably Windows 9 will have just the don't call it Metro interface.
This is so idiotic that no one would believe they will make it.
They did it.
I know, this argument was emphasized too much in the past days and even without these decision by Microsoft, the PC sales would have dropped because all the people out there are just buying a tablet and for that, now all say Microsoft has nothing to do with it, come on ... it's not Microsoft fault.
But I invite you to consider the opposite scenario ... if we had a Windows 8 totally dedicated to the desktop and with great features, or better without the schizophrenic interface it has now, used maybe on a separate Microsoft OS just for tablet, do you really think that had not helped to draw a different scenario?
There are few reasons to buy a PC at the moment just to run Windows 8 in any .x releases they will make. This is the truth.
Thinking that customers are just a bunch of idiots buying anything you push to them doesn't pay in the long run
"PC sales have been hurt in recent years by the growing popularity of tablets" NO NO NO BS!!! Tablets compliment PC's, no SANE person would completely replace their PC with a tablet (at least not one that actually uses their PC for work)
The PC sales decline is due to one thing only, NO requirement for new PC, it's that simple, new PC's these days don't offer any better performance or experience than the PC of 3-4years ago. Why buy a new PC when the one you have works great!?
Tablet sales are doing great because they compliment PC's, best option for when you're out and about on the move & not everyone has one, YET!
That's the main reason PC sales are down, I would almost bet that more PC's are in USE & more people use PC's now than have ever been used in the past.
I love how this article fails to mention Windows 8 and focuses entirely on tablets. I haven't even owned a desktop since about 2006, instead using a laptop, but even at the office, anything with multiple cores has been fine so far as long as we have plenty of RAM.
I've been replacing a few Pentium 4 (pre-HT with 512MB-1GB RAM) systems here and there, but that's about it.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I've ignored your drivel about a smartphone replacing the Desktop Computer...even though I agree the smartphone is a personal computer, I find them complementary devices.
Looking at your statement "PC has been around now for over 20 years. It no longer possesses excitement and consumer appeal." It needs to generate it. It needs to lower prices...produce compelling exciting machines, Where is the sambuntu +android compatible 8 core ARM laptop with 4X displays for under $200. The only think old is Microsoft + Intel (and Apple)...and Ironically copying Apples losing (vastly profitable) strategy. Looks like Android Desktop computers for us whatever you think of that.
I bought a T61p Thinkpad in 2007, and it's still my everyday machine. I've upgraded the memory to 8GB, hard disk, replaced a keyboard, and the battery, all very economically when the prices of those components came down. I love this machine, especially its keyboard, and am loathe to give it up unless I can find another with the same layout. In particular the pgup/pgdn/home/end keys are layed out in a manner which makes them very useful and natural for navigating within a window. I wish laptop chassis were standardized enough that you could customize these sorts of components easily so you can get just exactly what you want. I'm thinking about finally upgrading sometime in the next year, but am in no hurry. I'm considering a Thinkpad T530 or a 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display. I looked at the Razer Blade Pro, but I didn't think I'd like the keyboard, and had concerns about durability (due to lack of data on that aspect and not having seen one in person to gauge how sturdy they are).
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I put a more powerful PC together for less than half of what comparable laptops sell for. Even desktops. They don't mention that though. Only the failures are mentioned. Yay PC! It's your NAS, media center, personal workspace and porn machine all in one!
Correct. I did not forget them but I see the console interaction as part of the consolidation/anti-piracy-control problem/profit over quality issue with the electronic game industry in general.
Until you can give me a tablet that can reasonably multitask, is NOT Windows 8 EVER, has decent keyboard, mouse, peripheral support, support for external monitors, possibly even support for external graphics card bays that are slowly growing in numbers to make laptop users not feel as gimped, PCs will never die.
Seriously, think of it this way:
Remember that Big.LITTLE thing mentioned earlier from ARM? Now, imagine instead of that being inside the tablet, imagine extending that to external hardware instead.
The beefy stuff is in a box dedicated to high CPU and GPU load. Literally an embedded CPU/GPU solution in a box with extra working memory, sorta like those current external GPU bays you can buy now, mainly used for laptop solutions since they can't upgrade. You just plug tablet in to this box, box to screen (even wirelessHDMI)
Add better support for external hardware through USB hub. (that powers it too)
There could probably even be a hub designed for this in particular. It has a CPU/GPU connection, say, 4 USB, ethernet, audio connections, and all of this goes in a high-bandwidth single wire in to the what is now the USB and powering method for most tablets just now. You could probably even separate the CPU/GPU, USB/AUDIO, ethernet lines but just have them inside the same cabling. No faffing around with so many different cables, plug one thing in, sit tablet down, done.
So, now I can have my mobile tablet, take it around outside with me, do whatever crap.
Come home, plug in to hub, sit it on stand, optionally turn monitor on, have keyboard and mouse control, can play Crysis on my god damn tablet and monitor at the same time with no problems.
I would get rid of my desktop in a heart beat for this simplicity in PC design. PCs are terrible, disgusting messes of hardware from an industry scared to change.
Where the hell are 3D motherboards already? Motherboards don't get THAT hot, it is the components on them that do. And even some of those aren't that hot.
Why the hell is half my motherboard not wrapped up in to a tiny little box yet?
Why are RAM chips still huge instead of laptop form-factor? Expensive? Because you won't bloody adapt and still make stupid huge chips! Take the pill already!
The desktop industry will have to adapt at some point, and the above is honestly the best idea for everyone.
It packs the simplicity and complexity of hardware in to a very neat solution, the portability of mobile solutions to fixed hardware, the weak underpowered applications to bleeding eyeball inducing games.
And this is from someone that screws around with hardware and the like.
Common interfaces are the best thing, everything else around it can be whatever crappy terrible hardware it wants to be, just use common, simple methods to link everything together and everyone is happy, from the casuals to the enthusiasts. (people that like pain and suffering need not apply)
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors.
The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.)
Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.
Who would buy a PC you can't use?
Many people are finding that they didn't need a PC in the first place when all they do is light web browsing and posting on Facebook. Previous to the smartphone/tablet, they needed a PC to do that. I think we'll see more special-purpose devices taking over functions that were previously relegated to the general-purpose PC.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
The "real" fallout will be the decline in quality hardware.
First will come the Castoffs as cheap discounts.. like Compuland closing
Then will come the rising costs for Boutique Computer Components.. like a legacy high performance video card
Finally all you'll be able to get will be Gamer Computer components at the high end whose cost justify why they're still on the market
Whoe is Us.. we're gonna have to pay bazillions for all the cheap stuff we take for granted now.
Why are people satisfied with 1080p. [?]
Main reason? Scroll wheels.
If you're looking at a long web page, text document, or spreadsheet, you're going to be scrolling back and forth all day anyway. A 10% increase in vertical resolution doesn't change that and is not worth paying extra for.
I have what I need and it is quite old. I wouldn't mind an upgrade but I don't have to get one. Plus if I do want an upgrade I will buy a used machine where someone put the best of everything into it 3 years ago.
./'rs can remove that crap in a second but for most users they are stuck with the stuff and the various ads annoy and scare them.
Most desktops can be repaired for around $70 so they can last until they are so old it becomes silly. Laptops are way less repairable and more breakable so they vanish from the pool of used machines faster.
But one factor keeping laptops running is that when the batteries die people just turn them into desktops and are happy with the mobility of their phones and tablets.
The biggest factor keeping people away from new machines is the relentless bloatware infesting most new machines. We
This is probably the most fitting, in my perspective, folks think their PCs are "fast enough" and "capable enough" that when they are tight on money will put off purchasing a new one.
Windows 8 certainly isn't a reason people are scrambling to upgrade, not only do you get something different (change==bad to most non techies), you loose compatibility with some of the hardware and more importantly the older software you already have. This includes DVD playback.
You want sales you have to offer carrots, give the consumers more capability, less restrictions, bundle in Office... something that the consumer would think, wow, "I gotta get me one of those!"
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The PC is not dead. For Windows, it was nearly perfected with Windows 7. Intel's Core i5 and i7 plus NVIDIA or AMD GPUs + 16GB RAM + SSD deliver the computing power of supercomputers from just a few years ago, and complete everyday tasks almost instantly. Why do people need to buy a PC that is only marginally faster, only to downgrade to Windows 8.n which is user-hostile on the desktop?
Tablets are new and rapidly advancing and people are buying them to do many things (snapshots, social networking, light web browsing) on the go, on their sofa, etc. but not to actually replace their PCs. Nearly any PC made in the last five years is "good enough" so why replace it before it fails?
The PC isn't dead; the market is simply saturated with computers that are finally "good enough" and a new computer is a downgrade thanks to Microsoft forcing the tablet UI upon everyone. I've had to install Classic Shell for Windows 8 users who are novices and complained the OS is unusable, so you can't convince me at all that Windows 8 is good for newbies.
Then for business, the Metro^H^H^H^H^HModern interface breaks usability and productivity; Windows 2.0's "innovative" overlapping windows (not so innovative actually - it was copied from Amiga) is removed. I don't know about you but when I am doing any kind of sysadmin or development work, I often have five to seven applications open, often overlapped so I can read documenation as I write scripts and code, or even work on spreadsheets.
I'd like Windows 8 if it came with the Aero interface and still supported glass, and the touch UI could be enabled as a choice - or even if it were the default and could be turned off, and if Metro apps could be moved around freely rather than be confined to full screen or tiled. I don't know about you, but even if I cared about touch screens on desktops and laptops, it would be a very secondary UI for me, because I want to keep my hands on the keyboard and mouse. I'm not new to touch screens either - I've been a PDA/tablet fan since WinCE. I own PocketPC (which I still use on occasion), iOS, and Android PDAs and tablets, and have used Windows XP tablets and each is great for its purpose, but when I did use the XP tablet as a desktop, I docked it and used only the keyboard and mouse. I never once used the touch screen while it was docked, nor would I bother with Win8's touch screen on a desktop or laptop.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The report says most of the decline is from the collapse of the mini notebook market. AMD's main competitive product these days is it's Brazos and Kabini APUs. It's high end Richland/Pildriver CPUs are not selling at all.
The desktop industry will have to adapt at some point
No they don't HAVE to adapt.
the above is honestly the best idea for everyone.
No, it's the best idea for YOU. Your idea SUCKS from a low-cost perspective. Connectors cost MORE than chips, not less. They are the #1 failure mode on computers, each connector adds more risk of failure and warranty expense.
Have you noticed the trend toward FEWER and FEWER connectors on computers? This is why!
And this is from someone that screws around with hardware and the like.
If you eat twinkies every day, does this make you an expert on how to make a better twinkie?
is the driving force behind the decline in PC sales. Windows 8 and the Metro interface, is such "a turn off", it is keeping many away from new PC purchases.
Performance isn't as much of a factor any more - a 7 year old PC will browse the web and get your e-mail just as well as a brand new one. Monitor resolutions are stagnating at 1080p... video cards that are 3 generations old still play games great on single 1080p monitors.
In short, for most people (gaming enthusiasts and developers excluded), older PCs still work fine, so WHY UPGRADE?
Yeah, maybe a new PC will boot in 10 seconds, or that office app will launch in 50% of the time as the old one, but when that 50% is only another 2 seconds, who cares?
There was a time when improvements in PCs were more dramatic - you could FEEL the change performance between one PC and the next, but we've entered an era of diminishing returns with those performance improvements. Sure, we will see good improvements in media encoding time, or see lag on a game that is run on 3 monitors, but most people don't do these things all the time, or even some of the time.
This is why PC sales have dropped. Everybody who needs a computer has them, and most people are ok with the computer they have, until it breaks down. This obviously will slow down sales.
Windows 8.....
Yes they should. If you feel like swimming and I do too, then 100% of users surveyed want waterproof models. Or is that not how this works?
Alot of you have touched on the point, but I feel the need to go a little deeper on this. The way I see it, there has been a combination of little innovation and little need to upgrade PC components in the last 4-6 years or more.
I remember the days when PC games weren't ports of console games or weren't codeveloped for PCs and consoles. In times like these, new games with ever increasing hardware demands were released so often that unless I upgraded components on a 6 month basis and built a new computer every year and a half to 2 year, my computer couldn't run the latest games.
Today, while I've since built a second computer for other things, the system I built for Crysis 1 is still able to run nearly everything I throw at it. PC games haven't made big leaps and bounds in requirements for a number of years now.
Strangely, this goes even deeper than PC games though. Outside of gaming, software and operating systems hardware requirements really haven't changed much since Windows XP. Hard Disk capacity, memory and processor capabilties has substantially increased while the overall requirements of the OS hasn't changed proportionally like one would expect.
Combine these two situations with tablets which covers alot of typical usage of the average computer user (non slashdotters) and you get a product that has no demand by consumers because there is no demand by the software and there are cheaper alternatives that do the job just as well.
PC computing is becoming a niche market again like it was before it went mainstream. While I don't think the death of the PC is here, there is a definite downturn that only now are PC manufacturers and component vendors beginning to understand.
Not niche, it is becoming an appliance. Everybody already have one. The exponential growth and amazement period has passed. So you keep what you have until it breaks. There is no (big) money to make on this kind of market anymore. It is just another mature market, like dishwashers. We are seeing the transition from boom market to appliance market.
The funny thing is that I've been on a computer buying spree lately. I replaced an old Dell Windows 2000 PC that had run over a decade flawlessly - kind of sad because no one makes them that good any longer - just because it was too slow and obsolete even to use as a browsing kiosk. I got a cheap Asus laptop to run Win8 just to check it out, and a recent Mac Book Pro as a lightweight laptop. If Windows 8 had not been such a phenomenal flop, I would have gotten a touch screen, but I'm not going to bother now.
But my desktop Core i7 is ... my goodness, I can't even remember when I built it (two? three? years ago), but nothing faster has come along. Where is the i9? If Intel made a chip that would run the Android simulator faster, I'd be upgrading right now. Computers have simply stalled out. Today's Core i5 or Core i7 is the same as last year's, and the year before that. I buy best-of-breed components (especially the power supply) so mine just keep on keeping on.
...what a PC is. They think it stands for "politically correct", if they think at all. They also believe that the internet only exists on their iPhone or iPad, and cannot conceive of the idea that the internet is available on a computer.
I buy a phone every 1 to 2 years. I buy a tablet for everyone in my household including my 2 years old son. I buy a PC for myself and wife every 4-5 years.
I would have expected the longest duration of decline in history to be the Roman Empire, that thing took centuries to collapse.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Since when are tablets not PCs? PC=Personal Computer. First PCs were desktops, then there were the portables, like Compaq that were the size of a suitcase. Then we had laptops, then notebooks, then netbooks, and now tablets. Aren't they all personal computers? Or does Gartner's use of PC somehow mean Windows desktop/laptop/notebook/netbook computers only?
In practical terms there are personal computers where the person owns and manages them and there are non-personal computers where somebody else owns and manages them (mini computers, main frames, super computers and arrays come to mind). Whether a personal computer has a keyboard or not is no more a distinguishing factor than whether a car has a manual or automatic transmission.
Sales of personal computers has not declined and is actually accelerating. Sales of personal computers with keyboards is on a decline. In other news, sales of wifi keyboards to use with tablets has been increasing at a steady pace.
Get yourself a really nice tablet for browsing from the couch, in bed, or on the road. But, you STILL need a decent PC for typing up that occasional document. High-end tablet and low-end PC is perfect for the general user. People erroneously go for the laptop when what they want is something uber-portable not semi-portable (there are some cool laptop-tablet combos out there).
I figured this out as a movie buff who loves looking up actors and movies on the fly from my couch.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
2 adults, 2 kids. 1 new Samsung "smart" phone that no one wants to use -- I charge it once a month "just in case". Each of us has a dumb phone that can call & text, and we are all very happy with our phones. PCs? A dozen or so.
They are looking only at numbers of the "integrated" systems... Acer, Dell, Compaq.. yes those sales are down cause they sell shit. Heck even in the 90's you were picked on for owning such a integrated system, Packard Bell was the biggest pile of crap pushing out non upgradable systems left and right.
So for brand name pc's sales are down, but it's because PC users have gotten smart, we build are own.
and if you look at those numbers, people who buy motherboards, cpu, ram, hard drives, cases you will notice the numbers have never went down.
Cyberpower PC states their sales have been the highest ever in 2012 and are on target to breaking last year's records in 2013.
Newegg's blog stated their CPU and barebone sales have been up the lasts 3 years as more and more pc users put their own systems together and know what they want.
rather than some Dell, Acer, Compaq throwing together crap parts, pc users pick and choose their parts and build themself. Or they pay someone to build the pc for them like Cyberpower where you pick the parts and they put it together for you with or without an operating system.
In those cases PC sales are actually up higher than ever. It's just people have moved from an integrated PC platform and PC users now "roll their own" and sales are higher than integrated pc makers.
If Dell, Compaq, Acer went out of business it wouldn't harm PC users one bit, we still buy our parts and put them together ourselves.
hell my "frankenstein" gaming pc is an Intel Core I-7 cpu, 16 gigs of kingston ram, a Kingston 120gig SSD system drive, a Western digital black 1tb data drive, an asus motherboard, Nvidia graphics card, etc etc
all different brands and parts i bought seperately and I buy new pc's every couple years.
PC sales are not down, go read the blogs of companies that sell these parts and barebone systems. Sales are only down for the shit systems that corporate buys in bulk like Dell/Acer/Compaq
Think of the desktop PC industry as being akin to the heavy truck industry. (A "heavy truck" means anything bigger than a pickup or van.) Heavy trucks move around most of the stuff in the world. Most larger businesses of own or lease some heavy trucks. Almost all businesses use shipping services that operate heavy trucks. They're an essential component of doing business, and they're not going away.
Heavy trucks work well, are used until they wear out, and are then replaced. About 2 million heavy trucks are produced per year worldwide. Nobody gets a new heavy truck because a new model just came out. New heavy trucks are better than older models, but not by much.
That's the role of the desktop PC today. Businesses need them and will buy them, use them until they wear out, then buy new ones. Some people will have them at home, and those are the people who had a typewriter at home before computers.
Companies like Microsoft, Dell, HP, and any other OEM PC maker need to wake up and realize this isn't a slump, it's a death spiral.
Yes there is a niche market for PC's now. Developers need PC's to actually create the applications and content used by mobile platforms. Many enterprise operations still require a proper PC to do things properly. Hard core gamers will never use a tablet or a console as their means to waste hours a day until those platform match or exceed the performance of a PC, and include a laggless mouse and keyboard combo..
However the rest of the world has move past PC's. Its not a question of form-factor, price, performance, or quality of OS running on it. There is no killer app or OS that will lure people back to the PC platform, there is no price point that will make people say, hey, lets revisit the desktop. Even if PC's got 100 times more powerful people have obvious indicated they do not care about performance if they can update their Facebook status on a phone with 1/100 the processing power of a modern desktop or laptop. To say that PC's will regain popularity among the masses is to also suggest that the abacus could make a comeback if you invest enough money into the platform.
PC is a deprecated platform relegated to a niche market that is waiting for Tablets to catch up performance wise.
There is also a generation of people that will NEVER buy a PC. Children today are growing up on a Tablet, and will see no reason to ever invest in the platform and will only use one if their job requires it.
Also I will see a shift eventually where the PC simply morphs into a Tablet, in which case you could argue that PC's as "Personal Computers" have made a comeback. But "traditional" platforms such as a desktop shoebox and clamshell laptops will disappear altogether.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I know more and more people AND corps who would rather opt for real servers that can host 18 to 24 SATA disks at once, rather than for PCs with their limited set of 4 or so SATA ports. Add to this that it is easier to upgrade RAMs in server-grade machines than on classic PCs, and you've got a shift in demand. I fully expect classic PCs to be phased out in favor of server-grade PCs (a la supermicro or so) on one side, and by tablets and other small portable gadgets on the other side.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Redundant internal engineering and resulting high reliability and security
Extensive input-output facilities
Strict backward compatibility with older software
High hardware and computational utilization rates to support massive throughput
There's no drive to design machines this way anymore? Somebody better tell IBM, as they haven't gotten the memo. They keep rolling out new models and customers keep buying them. (I think the latest estimates are that they are, after all these years, still responsible for about 40% of IBM's net profit.)
While they get little respect, IBM mainframes still meet all of those requirements (and no other significant architectures do.) The toughest is the backwards compatibility. You can, with a daisy-chain of dusty interface adapters, load any punch-card-based program (or a reel of tape), and run them just as if you would on a S/360 from the 1960's without changing a single line of code. And you can do this with a box just rolling off the line in Poughkeepsie today. It doesn't even involve a troublesome and bug-prone software emulator; every instruction supported on an S/360 is supported with current processors natively.
The I/O capabilities are still massive, and it's quite common for a mainframe to have more space dedicated to I/O adapters than CPU modules. (It's only in the last couple of years that the I/O offload capabilities on PC/UNIX boxes have come anywhere near to what mainframes have been doing since the 70's.)
And due to their cost and licensing structure, most of them do indeed run flat-out as much as possible.
That'll teach me to post before Googling. It makes sense that coupling links (previously using wholly propriatary "magic") would shift to Infiniband to save cost.
I don't doubt that the Top500 list has a bunch of iDataPlex boxes on it; it's built from the ground up to be a budget-oriented pre-integrated HPC solution.
But nobody at IBM, even the most greedy iDataPlex sales drone, would ever call that thing a mainframe, which are dedicated to transaction and business data processing, not FLOPS.
An individual PC will eventually fail physically. A cap might blow, a chip might blow, etc. Once 8-core monsters are all they make, it won't be any cheaper to buy a PC that runs existing PC software and is comparable to a Core 2 Duo.
I define "PC" to mean that the person who owns a device controls what computing is done on it. If a device's owner needs permission from some other organization to run a given piece of software, it's not a PC. Kindle Fire and anything with Galaxy or Nexus or both in the name are PCs. Apple devices whose name starts with iP are not. PlayStation 3 was until system software 3.21.
Nice w/ the HP, Dell & other big box shit-box PC declining... the home "enthusiast" PC builders can finally get some breathing room & build machines that will not deliver a crappy experience for end users. *cough Dell
All the newbs can buy an overpriced MAC or grab a Chromebook..
The rest of us that have real work or play will build our custom rigs & let the sheep flounder!
nothing to see here...
There is no longer a rush to purchase a new PC every 6 months as now PC performance has stabilized since 13 years ago.
Ever since we hit the 1 ghz barrier, the useful lifespan of the average PC, pending hardware failure has jumped from several months to several years.
A laptop from 2006 is still just as useful as one made in 2013. May be slower (though core2duo based systems still hold their own) but it can still go online, run windows 7, and do basic things like email and casual web browsing, which is what the majority of people do. I have customers with old P4 systems from 2002 that are now just considering upgrading.
To put some perspective on this: a system from 1992 would have been next to completely useless in 2003. Let alone in 1995. A system that is 10-11 years old now can still function and be useful to someone.
This is the real reason the PC industry is on a slow decline. It's slowly levelling off where it should be rather than where investors want it to be. It isnt dying, it's stabilizing from an initial high saturation of sales.
People buy tablets and smart phones, but those arent the only things they use. They still use a PC at home, as a backup.
The only reason the PC is "dying" is because market players want it dead so people can be trapped on their locked down, limited devices, allowing people to only use their online services. PCs allow you to use any service you want and generally give you more freedom. Which people who make money generally hate.
Businesses in the end will be the main buyer of PCs and computer systems. Especially in the upcoming years as the economy rebounds.
I still don't believe "pc's are dying" - the problem is PC's got "fast enough" several years ago. There's no killer new feature that requires gobs more horsepower. My pushing 5 year old desktop can still play the latest games at max resolution on my 24" monitor without slowing down. Why on earth would I fork over several grand to upgrade it when it gets the job done? Until the hardware starts failing I won't be replacing parts anytime soon. *THAT* is why pc sales are slumping IMO. I don't know anyone who owns *JUST* a tablet and nothing else. They'd never get a thing done.
I remember a few years ago -- from about 1990 to 2005 - the PC would be significantly faster, about twice as fast, twice the size of RAM, twice the size of HDD every two years.
Every four years you had to have a new PC, if you were doing any serious work on the PC. (For instance gaming... ;) )
The last years I haven't really seen that, other than the graphics cards.
I look at laptops and they still come with 2GB RAM, just as they did four years ago. The normal graphics isn't any better than four years ago either, because they focus on making it energy efficient, not fast. The HDD is getting slightly, but not very much larger.
There's no need for me to upgrade if there's no need for me to upgrade.
Windows 8 certainly doesn't feel like an upgrade, either.
IPS screens in high res feels like an upgrade, but it's mainly Asus that managed to make something out of that, and those "zenbooks" have their own flora of problems...
Make me something I want to buy, and I'll buy. Stop waiting for *APPLE* to make something, then copy that and wondering why noone buys your stuff!
(Also, what's up with keyboards? PCs use to have a lovely line of PgUp/Home/etc to the right, but when apple removed it, it vanished on PCs as well! The key keeps walking away to the right. The enter key can't make up it's mind. Whut?)
Thanks to the blessing that is HDMI its beyond butt simple to plug a PC into a TV
But you'll need the right case in order to get a spouse to agree.
and you'll be rocking your games in glorious 1080P in no time, with your choice of controller. Hell with Steam having Big Picture mode
Does Steam support buying in Big Picture mode? And a few weeks ago, I tried going to Big Picture mode on Steam on my aunt's PC running Windows 8 (with Classic Shell) and either Steam crashed or the video driver crashed.
if they want to game i can take something like this quad core
PlayStation 4 has eight cores. Eight is greater than four.
and just have me slap it into one of the mini cases
For one thing, you don't serve my area. For another, a PlayStation 4 allows one to walk in and walk out 15 minutes later with a console.
So if they want to sell more PCs and laptops frankly they need to be putting out some ads showing folks just how easy it is
Someone in another thread claims that any gaming PC under $500 will lack most or all of these:
What answer should I give?
However PC's would probably be more like Workstations reserved for more computer intensive work such as Software Development
I code in Python on my netbook. If a tablet with a keyboard can't do this, and devices capable of software development become no longer affordable to the general public, then on what machine should high school kids be exposed to programming?
... CPU performance has stalled. Software tools and programmers are still decades away from re-learning how to code in parallel. Lastly many programs cannot be parallelized.
CPU's have hit a brick wall in terms of clock speed/power. Until the next breakthrough in materials science that allows clockspeed/heat to not be an issue again performance will remain mediocre.
Facts:
1. More people use computing devices than ever before
2. More people carry around their computing devices than ever before
Facts 1 and 2 are consistent with my use of a 10" laptop to code on hobby projects while riding the bus to and from work. Programming is one thing that tablets have historically been bad at, especially Apple tablets. Once this 10" laptop finally dies, I worry about what I'll use next.
3. Many (most?) people use computing devices to consume media being it music, movies, or web pages (posted). The one outlier is text messaging and Facebook posts which both seem to be quite conducive to most common computing platforms
So am I the "out", or am I the "liar"?
The next big thing is H.265-- and I'm guessing there will be a few years of people complaining about battery life and high cpu-load until video chipsets incorporate dedicated circuitry.
Since 2007, the programmable GPU has become commonplace. Watch some smart guy implement some of the processing passes of VP9 and H.265 as shaders.
If you attach an external keyboard to a tablet it becomes a laptop with a touch input as a mouse. Thats a PC to me.
I agree, so long as the person who owns a device gets to control what computing is done on it. An Android or Windows 8 tablet is a personal computer; iPad and Surface RT, not so much. If you have to ask the OS publisher "mother may I" before installing anything, it's not really your personal computer.
Not necessarily. h4rr4r just happens to be an intelligent Slashdot user. Still, in a way, every logged-in user who writes intelligent comments that get moderated up to Score:5 works for Dice, as do the randomly selected moderators who perform this filtering.
My definition is more along the lines of "a device that provides data-processing tools to help the user solve original problems."
I agree with you. But the claim of the post-PC crowd is that outside of businesses, people who want to "solve original problems" form a tiny, commercially insignificant niche.
The rule of thumb is that a PC is a machine that can run the x86 build of DOS and/or Windows natively.
Consider a device that allows the person who owns it to control what computing is done on it without having to ask the operating system publisher "mother may I". Do you have a clear, concise term for such a device?
I have a 46" TV. I have no cable.
You can still use it with an antenna to receive over-the-air signals. And unlike your 24" monitor, a TV probably came with 1. composite inputs, 2. YPbPr analog component inputs, and 3. an audio output. Composite and YPbPr component inputs are useful for legacy SDTV picture sources, such as VHS decks and any video game console older than Xbox 360 S, PlayStation 3, or Wii U. An audio output is helpful because HDMI devices transmit audio in the blanking intervals of the video instead of sending it on a separate cable.
So basically the same function, yet one would be called a TV, the other a computer.
They're sold in different sections of the electronics store because the big manufacturers that make mass-market consumer products don't feel like confusing the user. If a monitor has no speakers but is used as a TV, a manufacturer would have to deal with expensive support calls asking why the user can't plug in his Nintendo and can't hear what the people on TV are saying.
I'm sure a lot of the reason PC sales have slowed is simply because there is no "killer app" for mainstream consumers that requires beefier hardware. For example, my parents are using an 8-year-old CPU (Athlon X2 4200+), and it would be very hard to justify upgrading for what they do. Unless you have a specific use in mind (like gaming or video editing/encoding), PCs have been "fast enough" for awhile.
In my experience most new PC purchases now are because of hardware failures or people borking their OS with malware/McAfee, and rather than risking $200 in the Geeksquad lottery of incompetence they just get a new PC.
I disagree, the fact that the new consoles are using PC architecture it will be easier to beef up graphics etc on PC versions
But sometimes, a machine is a laptop. SSD will help here, but it's a lot harder to find a new video card that fits an old laptop than to find one that fits an old desktop. And in a few cases I've seen, the real problem is that the battery no longer holds a substantial charge, and a replacement lithium ion battery pack is so expensive that one might as well buy a new laptop.
The PC will never die - someone somewhere needs to code the applications for the tablets
And if you have such a hot idea for a tablet application, you can afford the $2,000 that workstation makers will charge once the economies of scale of home and office PCs evaporate.
and then there are the PC gamers, who will never go away
Even if they don't go away, they can still become commercially insignificant. NES gamers haven't gone away, and there are still new NES games for sale, but I'd bet they're a drop in the bucket compared to even OUYA.
The only teenagers that buy PCs these days are the geeks
The opinion has been growing that everybody ought to take at least an introductory programming class in high school. This would probably involve buying some sort of home PC on which to do homework.
People can do their "consumption" media (browsing, videos, etc) on tablets or phones. Don't need a PC for that.
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Add to playlist to watch it later on a PC
There are plenty of things that won't play on a device running iOS or Android. This includes games on Newgrounds or Kongregate, YouTube videos with certain kinds of music, the entirety of Hulu Free, anything uploaded to Vimeo by a user who doesn't subscribe to Vimeo Plus, and Pandora past a few hours a month.
WTF? Why do I want a tablet interface on my 24" monitor?
Because ideally, it can be navigated without a mouse or keyboard at all. Consider someone who has plugged a couple Xbox 360 Controllers into his PC's front USB ports because he's about to play a PC game with a friend. I haven't tried it yet, but seeing as how the Windows 8 Start screen looks just like the third Xbox 360 Dashboard introduced in the fourth quarter of 2011, I'd be surprised if one couldn't use an Xbox 360 Controller to navigate the Start screen.
My ZAGGkeys FLEX keyboard works fine with my Nexus 7 tablet. I've used it to post to Slashdot (make sure to turn off "mobile version") and forums.nesdev.com, for example. Or if you have an Android device and a USB OTG cable, you can use any existing USB keyboard.
Why do you need a file manager if you are not administrating files?
A flat object store might have been fine in the click-wheel iPod days, when the device ran only the single audio player application that came preloaded. But on a "smart" device, there exist data types other than music, and some of these data types can be used by more than one application. The iOS model, as I understand it, is that a piece of data is "in" an application. That doesn't help if multiple applications are able to work on a particular piece of data stored on your device. For example, one may have both iWork and QuickOffice installed on a given device and want to share documents between the two. Or one may have both a word processor and Safari an HTML form with an <input type="file"> control can attach any stream of bytes that has a name and a MIME type to a form submission, but in iOS 1-5 it did nothing, and in iOS 6 it was limited to pictures and videos. Sometimes one may want to attach a document created in a word processing application, a spreadsheet created in a spreadsheet application, etc.
I haven't actually used a 386, but I've developed games on a hand-me-down 80486SX computer with 8 MB of RAM and a 340 MB hard drive. In 1999, that was enough to run DJGPP (GCC for MS-DOS) and RHIDE (Turbo C++ clone IDE for DJGPP).
So you are using a device for purposes for which it was not intended and then you are complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to work?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How about this: "People use PCs when they're on the job. When they get home, they use tablets."
So what do people use when they work from home? What do students use for homework?
There's no such thing as Netflix or Steam, those are just myths.
Both of those are already more effectively delivered to the average consumer through some sort of speciality appliance. Game consoles have been the primary focus of the likes of EA for a long time now.
The major consoles are good for major label games. But through which specialty appliance should the sort of indie games greenlit on Steam be delivered?
The use I envision for a computing device involves sharing data objects between applications. I believe a tool should do one thing and do it well, and a task should use whatever tools, plural, are best for the job. The fact that iOS is not intended for this sort of use is the problem, and it's why I've seen no reason for me to own an iPad. The problem comes when someone already owns an iPad and his needs outgrow the intention of iOS.
I'd agree with you for something like a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a real Wacom digitizer with a real pen. But the capacitive digitizer in most phones and tablets is much less precise with a comparatively large uncertainty caused by the irregular shape of the finger's contact surface, and I don't see how it beats even a mouse.
Consider a household where the kids can use the tablet as much as he wants, but the PC is daddy's, and either the kids aren't allowed on it or even if they are, it's for only a half hour at a time. So if one of the kids gets an idea to learn to program, how will he fulfill it?
Then your iPad is inferior to a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a built-in Wacom digitizer.
I work for a company that has an interesting policy of setting aside a $1,000 "PC bonus" for each employee to use within the calendar year on upgrades to their home PC. The intent being to make sure that everyone has a PC they can use to work from home with, should the need arise.
Usually I have more than enough things I want to spend it on. But this year? I'm still sitting on it, and I have no idea what I'm going to buy with it.
Processor? My 3930K is still at the top-end of the range after two years, unless I wanted to spend $2,000+ on a Xeon.
Video card? I bought a 680 last year. The 780 isn't much faster, and AMD has yet to make another move.
RAM? The 32GB I have is still more than enough, just as it was when I bought it. The price has actually gone up since then anyway.
Storage? We're finally starting to see some terabyte SSD drives, but the 512GB model from last year is still basically current.
OS? I wouldn't touch Windows 8 with a 10-foot pole.
Basically, the PC industry is killing itself by not moving forward anymore. They are not giving the people who are used to upgrading regularly a reason to do so. The next time I make a major upgrade is probably to an 8-core Haswell-E at the end of 2014. If I were just a gamer, and didn't do any work on the machine, I wouldn't really have a compelling reason to upgrade even then. The Sandy Bridge 4-cores from 3 years ago are more than adequate, and even the graphics card upgrades have dropped off of late.