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."

Comments

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I got yer fix!

[KatchooNJ]

Tablets now fall under the umbrella of being a PC. BAM! Problem fixed... no more PC sales decline.

Re:Not necessarily because of usage.

[Hsien-Ko]

But it has Windows 8.

Re:This is the slope before the cliff

[Anonymous Coward]

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, there's plenty of power and storage for people writing the odd letter/email, social media and most games. Unless you're a developer or working with huge amounts of media data, PC users aren't going to notice a shit load of RAM, loads of cores CPU and a GPU capable of real-time Avatar level of rendering.

No Mention of Windows 8

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:Not necessarily because of usage.

[kelarius]

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.

Pretty much this. I run a couple of repair shops and we end up fixing 5 year old computers more often than replacing them simply because for day to day browsing tasks, they are more than sufficient. Hell, most of them can even decode HD to some extent, which pretty much rounds out what 90% of the market uses them for. PCs are becoming a niche market, get used to it, it wont change. Tablets and phones are the future, especially as input methods improve (attachable keyboards, docking stations and such)

Re:This is the slope before the cliff

[MetalliQaZ]

That is a truly misguided statement. Here's a better one:

"Consumers use touch screens. Producers use keyboards."

Good luck using a tablet for tasks such as Photoshop or Blender. Heck, even using a tablet to type out a proper letter could be classified as cruel and inhumane.

The era of the PC is not over... only the era of the PC as an entertainment device.

PCs are not going to die.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:PCs are not going to die.

[hairyfeet]

Kinda doubt it, with the chips an idle fab is still gonna cost a pretty penny and I think he have reached pretty damned close to the limits on die shrinks, so they'll still crank out enough chips that I doubt prices will climb much beyond what we see now.

But as someone down in the trenches those pundits with their "Death of the PC,grandma is buying tablets" bullshit? hey morons, it was a BUBBLE and like all bubbles it had to burst, what we are seeing now at around 200-400 million units a year is the NORMAL STATE, its only the bubble that is over. this is as stupid as somebody saying "Well you can't flip houses for instant 40% profit anymore,houses must be dying". Its total horseshit.

For those that missed the memo the MHz wars created a bubble, with single core speeds so easy for your even less than average programmer able to take advantage of we went from a pre-bubble lifespan of 5-7 years for a PC to one where a PC would be damned lucky if it lasted even 3 because the chips were advancing so fast a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the latest programs. When we switched to cores because taking advantage of SMP is anything BUT easy, with many programs simply not able to thread, and the number of cores jumping so fast? The programs quickly got blown away by the hardware.

I mean look at what my cheapest build was FIVE years ago...Phenom or Athlon X3 with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDDs...how many folks will be able to slam that setup enough to need a new one? I have a customer that does extremely intricate Solidworks robot design on a Phenom I X3 and he is happy as a clam with the performance. even myself, who is the major multitasker and rarely have less than 4 things running at once and who built a new PC every year and a half like clockwork, what am I running? A 4 year old Phenom X6 with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space which no matter how much I throw at it has cycles to spare so other than the GPU upgrade I'll be getting in the fall why would I build a new one? On the mobile side I lucked into one of those AMD E350 netbooks, gets nearly 5 hours on its 3 year old battery and does 1080P over HDMI, why would I buy a bulky new full size?

So despite the "sky is falling ZOMFG!" articles that I'm half convinced is being encouraged by Ballmer trying to burn MSFT to the ground by forcing them to become Apple (like folks are gonna pay $1000+ for walled Windows gardens, not likely fat boy) PCs aren't going anywhere, now that the bubble is burst folks will just be going back to the 5-7 year cycle. if anything not only have I not met a single person that is "getting rid of the PC" (and since I'm supplementing my PC work with home theater I'd have plenty of opportunities) but its the opposite, even the kids have their own PCs, they have PCs up the ying yang...which is of course why they aren't buying as many, because that 6 year old Pentium D or first gen Athlon X2 still surfs the web just fine,runs Win 7 just fine,so why fix what I ain't broke?

Microsoft kills the PC

[0123456]

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.

Re:Not necessarily because of usage.

[h4rr4r]

Get an SSD.

Dropping an SSD into a 4 year old machine will make a bigger difference than getting a new CPU for 90% of people.

Have you ever actually seen a mainframe?

[sirwired]

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.

The PC is not dead

[kimvette]

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.