Slashdot Mirror
IDC: PC Shipments Decline Worse Than Forecasted, No Recovery Expected
symbolset writes "Zach Whittaker over at ZDNet covers an IDC report. In it the 2013 9.7% forecast decline in PC shipments is advanced to 10.1%. Further, IDC's longer-term forecast turns quite grim: contracting 23% from 2012 levels by 2017. There is also a projection of future Windows tablet sales, and a statement that total Windows tablet sales for 2013 are expected to be 'less than 7.5 million units.'"
“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
-- Ernest Hemingway
That means less being added to the landfill.
That's what you get when you plan for planned obsolescence and then can't actually make the machines obsolete. What's "grim" about it?
Ezekiel 23:20
For many people (more in the future) their personal computer (PC) is their phone.
Declining sales of PCs can only mean rising sales of Macs, right?!
The Macintosh personal computer is finally winning against the IBM PC clones, at long last!
Microsoft helped the NSA bypass their crypto. They were the first to join PRISM.
Why would I buy products from a company that spies on me for the NSA?
It used to be that a house with multiple PCs wasn't that uncommon. With phones & tablets there are now many households that can get by with zero PCs, and many more that can do everything they need with just one.
Real world user performance has stagnated, with hardware gains not translating into doing a given task faster anymore. A PC from three years ago isn't that much slower at what most users are doing than a brand new one, so there's no particular need to upgrade.
This is what a mature market looks like. The product is going to continue to sell for a long time, but it's not the hot item it used to be.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
We're past the time when computers are already obsolete by the time you're walking out of the store with them. I don't have a problem with that.
Not being a heavy gamer, I've had the same core PC (updated disk and graphics is all) for now 10 years. I have bought newer ones for the family, but even the worst new computer is better than the one I still use, and that one is still quite good.
Unless you're a hard-core gamer, computers should last LONG time for your average user.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
PC horsepower exceeded the needs of the average non-professional user a long time ago. I'm sitting in front of a $400 laptop from a couple of years ago that I can use for Adobe Premiere workflow! The market is flooded with computers that do everything a person needs, so why would you expect sales to continue increasing? People who barely use computers are moving to tablets, but tablets aren't what is trashing PC sales. People just don't need new ones, and good for them for milking that hardware until it blows up.
...whether it's PCs with Windows or tablets with Windows - MS gets their cut regardless.
And it it's a MS-made tablet, the cut is even greater.
If you have to bypass UEFI just to have a working computer you might as well buy some other restricted device. Talk about killing the goose...
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The biggest remaining reason to get desktop machines is for development and high-end PC gaming. The customers in those markets tend to build from parts.
"Even so, these Windows devices are projected to account for 10% of a combined PC & Windows Tablet market by 2016 – making them an important growth segment for the PC ecosystem."
Really makes Mr. Loverde sound like he's being paid to say good things about Windows. Who in their right mind could possibly believe that Microsoft's failure of a project is going to end up accounting for 10% of the market? It's a failure amongst tablets alone. I don't even know if there would be any benefit from him saying this, it just sounds crazy.
On a related note, I currently play Battlefield 4 on a computer I put together for around $400 a year ago, so I can definitely see why the PC market is struggling. But it will never disappear, which is enough for me.
And moreover, why the hell pay that money in the first place?
Modern AAA games are the only thing that getting a new PC is required. But why the hell buy them? YOU CAN'T. You can pay for the privilege of being allowed, under severe restrictions that can change at a whim, to benefit from the largesse of the label that created that game. But be prepeared to pay for nothing other than the temporary and circumscribed privilege of enjoying the works of these people far far better than your miserable self.
And be prepared to hand over the keys to your computer you paid for because you're such a miserable piece of scum compared to Eidos et al that they have to ensure you're not being a pirate.
When you've got a crappy tablet OS, and they you put that onto a PC where it simply does not belong even if it was any good, then what the hell do you expect?
If I was making sandwiches and selling lots, then I started pissing on them and advertising that as a selling point, I should not be surprised that sales go down.
Newsflash, Windows XP expires Q2 2014. There will be a massive uptick in PC sales Q1 and Q2 of 2014 as companies refresh and replace their XP infrastructure. There will be rejoicing in the tech world. It may even lead to foolish bubble like expectations.
In Q3 2014 PC sales will start declining again and they will continue to decline for several years until the next surge. Even stupid economists realize this.
Tablets are not replacements for PCs. Tablets are mobilizers for browsers. PC are still required and will remain so, if for no other reason than, it is a pain(literally) to work on a tablet all day when a large screen, keyboard, and mouse are a much better interface for extensive and long-term typing, creating, and manipulation of data.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6--_Z4unLQ0
And it's happening even faster than he probably thought.
I blame Windows 8.
Thanks, Obama!
Almost 35 pop (Euro) for an old 2GB DDR2 bar. I mean come on!
Then the split happened. Finally people realized, the market demanded and the free market delivered a computer purely optimized for content consumers. They have deserted and are deserting the all purpose computer in droves. At the end of the day, we code warriors would be forced to pay more for our computers. Still the commodity common components like memory and peripherals would be amortized over a larger set of computer users. The desktop pc might not get to be as expensive is IBM 3090. But the days where you can run Fluent solver to simulate fluid flow on a "home" PC are gone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For years now I've been looking for a lightweight laptop that worked, with linux-compliant hardware, and a good screen. (And good battery time.)
So far I've managed two out of four (five).
Build machines people want to buy, and you'll have an easier time selling them. Stop building the same machines over and over again, with mysterious, buggy hardware, incomplete hardware drivers, too little battery. Even the nice "retina" full-hd screeens bug. Sometimes it seems to have everything, but the build quality is low or the manufacturer decided to mess up the keyboard (I blame Apple for that).
PC industry is suffering from the fate of going from an easy sell (everyone needs to buy one) to a hard sell (everyone got one already and/or doesn't need one).
I think the GSM-phone industry and car industry went through this already. Smartphone and pad industry will hit this any second now.
I just want a laptop with a 17" or bigger WQXGA (2560x1600) display that isn't outrageously expensive. It could have a cheaper processor like an AMD A8-4500M and I'd happily buy it. It doesn't seem to exist. Monitors that go beyond 1080p resolutions are way too expensive relative to their 1080p brethren of the same diagonal as well.
I ran tablets for a few years, generally wanting to not lug aournd a notebook. After having a tablet stolen, I’m back on full blown PCs again. I missed having windowed apps, real keyboards and media players that didn’t suck (I’m looking at you, Comcast, blocking HDMI playback on your lousy player).
Granted it’s not as portable as I’d like, and I still use a tablet for reading books and remote controls on my home theater, but when I want to do much of anything else I prefer the PC.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one".
Why would someone living on such slim margins buy a smartphone and its expensive data plan in the first place instead of buying a dumbphone? A lot of smartphone customers are paying $80 per month; I pay that much per year for my dumbphone.
People go into stores, look at new PCs, see Windows 8 and say 'WTF? I thought this was a PC? Don't PCs run Windows, not this tablet shit?'
I built a new games PC at the beginning of the year because I could see what a clusterfsck Windows 8 was going to be and wanted to get something that could play games for the years until Microsoft smarten up and release a new desktop version of Windows. Can't see any reason why I'd want to buy a Windows PC until then.
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years.
In this measure, are you counting the iPod touch or the PDAs that preceded it? Those are pocket-size tablets by some definitions.
Sounds like what everyone else is saying, that current hardware is good enough and they have no reason to update.
That was true in the seventh generation when PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were stuck on tech that was high-end in 2005. But now, the latest consoles are up to 2013 tech (AMD Jaguar, do the math), and PC games' system requirements are likely to rise to meet PlayStation 4 and Xbox One specs.
Want a bigger disk? Buy a bigger disk and put it in your PC!
Want more memory? Buy more memory and put it in your PC!
Want a faster CPU? Buy a faster CPU and put it in your PC!
Want a faster GPU to play games? Buy a faster graphics card and put it in your PC!
The rest of the market, phones, tablets and consoles is all "consumer packaged components" which are not replaceable or upgradeable.
The whole AMD/Intel war would not have happenbed without the PC.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Agreed. Bought 3 Lenovo laptops, for home use, in the past 18 months. Versus 1 new desktop (and several used ones from the local recycler). Anecdotal, but mirrors the big picture.
Another factor in favor of laptops these days -- dirt cheap. Well under $300 now, whereas middling desktops at Costco are at least $500 to $600 AND you then need a monitor (that can go from $100 to $1000 depending on your hunger for pixels).
I come here for the love
That's assuming that all one needs a computer for is to look things up on the internet and have an email address, if someone needs a computer to write, or some such (for example they have school aged children) it obviously isn't a substitute.
I guess I'm not the only Slashdot user assuming that "someone needs a computer to write". It'd be heck trying to key a post like yours into a touch screen. So just by virtue of being Slashdot regulars, we write a lot. Besides, what's the good of having an e-mail address if it's hard to type an e-mail? Or do people regularly buy a smartphone and a Bluetooth keyboard? In addition, experienced Internet users tend to use services such as YouTube and Netflix that would quickly deplete the 5 GB per month of faster-than-dial-up Internet access. Do these people with a smartphone and no home PC also rely on free-to-air antenna TV?
I will continue to have PC's for many years to come. They are under MY control, not some corporation.
If big companies can get the parts, then I can get them too, and if they become too hard to obtain, then we will go back to the old Apple paradygm, which is to make one from scratch in our garage, and then start mass producing them for those that still want them.
I agree. I'm hanging on to my Dell M4300 because the screen resolution is good, and it supports a second (external) monitor. May be forced when XP support ends next year and I have to upgrade (company policy)
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Nobody has the $1000 it takes to get bleeding edge graphics, and that's what the PC is all about. Nvidia and AMD need to take a good, hard look at their release price-points if they want to resuscitate the industry. There most definitely is potential for growth - The few people I know who have a PC hooked to their HDTV draw crowds to their houses for play-time on the big screen.
Dang, I wish I still had mod points. This is my concern with the shift as well.
But as I think about it, the general public's desire for nice-looking games and fast web browsing (on the crappiest kludges of nasty javascript-heavy sites) means that even devices optimized for content-consumption will continue push performance. The new iPad has better resolution than my laptop, and should have plenty enough performance to do software development -- we just need better tools than "they" like to give us. iOS (as well as every Android flavor I've used) just have a terrible interface for efficiently getting work done, and a shortage of decent tools.
So I'm (mostly) not worried about the hardware. That will change over time, but will continue to be powerful. It's the UI, software, and the locked-down nature of these devices that worries me.
That is no surprise to me. I've had my 3x core with 4gb of ram and a gt440 for several years. The only upgrade I really want is a ssd. Maybe if I played newer games I may need better gear but so far the market hasn't released anything that I really want to play. I almost think I'm growing out of video games. The last couple games I've played are EQ, emulated wow wotlk server and Baldur's Gate EE.
Release more interesting games that aren't designed for grandma to play and maybe I'll spend some of my money.
I have tons of storage, good AV playback, lots of apps that do what I want, games still play pretty well (or are a video card update away)
I have two machines currently, the newest one is reaching the 4 and half year mark and it's still fast / reliable. The other has been kicking around for 7+ and even that still runs all my productivity software / backup storage.
I mean a decade ago I was cycling about every 2 years but there were a lot of leaps between those generations usually.
I mean I've thought about building a whole new machine again but I can't justify it when I have existing stuff doing everything I want right here.
So...?
crazy dynamite monkey
You know why a several year old PC still runs game well? Because the performance target for games has been 7 year old hardware for years. We just hit a new console generation, game design is going to shift to a new hardware target and in a couple years a lot of those 2-5 year old systems won't be able to handle the new stuff. Will this boost a flagging PC market? I'm not sure, but there's a core audience of gamers that will need definitely need to update.
Or do I?
You and a lot of other people suffer the same blindness, mostly because you are unfamiliar with business and irrational owner/managers. Remember that most businesses are small owned and managed by said same irrational people.
These businesses didn't upgrade because they didn't have to. When they were told, earlier this year, that the piper had to be paid, now. They said; 'it's not in the budget, we have to put it off until next year'. Still others haven't yet accepted the inevitability. They'll either replace when some never to be patched backdoor devastates their network or their hardware dies. But, replace they will and, if they grow, expand(increased PC purchases) they will.
My anecdotal evidence already shows a 200% increase over the past year for PC orders in the coming Q1 2014 and it is expected that the floodgates will open after Christmas/year end.
Tablets and phones are great. They're selling like hotcakes. But, PCs are still required. The sales may not grow constantly year over year any more, but news of the PC's demise is still greatly exaggerated.
Is that computer hardware has become much more reliable over time. In fact some business now waits 3 or so years before refreshing hardware. And personal is anywhere from that 3 to 5 years range.
But vendors want to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. It's to the point where you can't avoid Microsoft's little tablet experiment. But I already know what I'm moving to next. System76 here I come! No more Windows that's for sure.
People try to push tablets into this "consumption only" role as if it were the only thing they were capable of. First-generation tablets this was so with their single core, poor GPU low-power requirements. But times have changed. My tablet shoots, edits and natively displays FullHD video. It converts FullHD video at 15FPS. Next year tablets will be able to do live-action HD stream editing like a broadcast booth at the Superbowl. This is not a content consumption task.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My computer is about 4 years old, in the past I've always been one to upgrade when a significant performance gain is available, but right now I can still play games on the highest settings and only use 1/4 of my CPUs. This is the first time I've ever worn out a CPU fan before I replaced the computer.
As part of "platform enablement" Microsoft works hand-in-hand with PC OEMs helping them select platforms that are fully supported on the Windows install disc, with drivers that are optimized for lowest power consumption, highest performance and reliability. It should be no surprise that they guide the OEMs to ancillary devices from manufacturers who have agreed to keep their hardware API a secret between only Microsoft and them, and prevent official open drivers. And naturally making a device that is hard to reverse engineer makes for a quirky interface even Windows can't keep up with now and then. If you want a laptop that works great with Linux try one that came with Linux, Android or ChromeOS. In your specific case the Chromebook Pixel might be ideal.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
. . . I tend to build my PC's, and do incremental upgrades. And, as such, I have 8 year-old cases and 6-year-old power supplies and monitors on a boxes that just did a Motherboard and Video upgrade last year or two. And so my waste profile is close to throwing away a tablet, rather than the whole PC. But I suspect I'm in the minority. . .
if you don't need home internet, and live in a city, why would you pay for TV?
What OTA + a game console doesn't get you is live sports and daily political talk shows. In my extended family survey sample, one household keeps cable for NFL, NHL, and UFC, and another keeps cable for Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show.
I'm still happy with my Core 2 duo machine, and don't have a dire need for anything newer.
So, I'm looking for a PC capable of running ZFS/FreeBSD on at least 8, if not more spindles. The only PC I found was some custom-made platform using a SuperMicro motherboard, 96 GB of registered EEC RAM (expandable to 512 GB) and so on, with two CPU sockets sucking up to 150 Watts or so. Somewhat more expensive than run-off-the-mill PCs, but the only way to provide redundant storage on ZFS file system basis nowadays. Basically, it's a "fat desktop" or a "desktop-capable server". Normal PC makers rarely include more than a couple of SATA ports in their machines, and there are severe limitations on RAM slots. No wonder, the PC market is dwindling fast: there's no upgrade path from a standard set a decade or so ago. Industry-PCs or servers are doing well though; they're just not for the consumer market.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Other than needing a Mac as a dongle, OS X is probably less locked down than Windows once you turn off Gatekeeper or at least add applications to Gatekeeper's whitelist.
Ballmer forced this Windows 8 and 8.1 drek on us. Windows 7 use is UP because nobody wants this carp.
Get real, stop trying to make our PCs into toys, and GIVE ME A REAL OS, Microsoft!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, my son has built the last three PCs in our house. All have Win 7 OS, range from 6 to 8 core AMD, with DDR3 usually 32GB and 1-2TB HDD or SSD, and a high end graphics card.
The fans on the CPUs wear out before anything else does.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Are you looking for a PC or are you looking for a desktop for home use with 8 spindle ZFS? What are you looking at?
Most machines, that I look at, capable of containing 8 spindles can support 8 SATA. But, more commonly, they support SAS which would allow them to have up to 16 SATA spindles.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bect32&model_id=poweredge-t320&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04
2U Rackmount 8 spindles.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bectf2&model_id=poweredge-r520&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04
But, if you really must use some Acer/eMachines box from Walmart with 8 spindle SATA volumes, then throw two of these cards in it and go to town.
http://www.siig.com/it-products/controllers-storage/serialata/pcie/dp-sata-6gb-s-4-port-hybrid-pcie.html
I used to drink soft drinks. [Buying my own fridge paid for itself.] Good thinking, maybe [...] But, not the best. Now I drink water.
I drink Diet Mtn Dew (caffeine), in 24-packs from the grocery, because psychiatrist agreed it'd be cheaper than staying on Strattera (atomoxetine).
Why are we so hung up on lawns, even to the point of many cities having made it illegal to have a natural lawn? It's an infraction to let the grass get too high!
Is it to the point where it has become worthwhile to choose an employer based on the lawn care obligations of the job's location?
Do you use a clothes dryer, instead of a line or a rack?
Yes, our family uses a professionally maintained dryer because it's hard to carry wet clothes home from the coin laundry, and it's hard to keep a home washer and dryer working when the bathroom above it has leaky pipes that are so old that no local plumber is willing to try to fix them without a complete remodel of the bathroom.
Buy cars new, instead of used?
I bought a new bicycle a decade ago, and I take the bus when I can't ride.
Try to keep the house at 75F all year?
77F (25C) in summer and 68F (20C) in winter, with about a 5 to 7 rankine (3-4 K) swing between day and night.
Pay for cable TV?
A lot of people do because it comes free with the purchase of cable Internet, with some cable system operators actually paying customers to have TV. And because of sports blackout rules, there's no other way to watch games that happen to have been sold to national or regional cable networks. But if you think you can help me wean my step-uncle off his NFL, NHL, and UFC habit, be my guest.
2012 was the biggest year for PC purchases I've ever had, including laptops, desktops, and other things (iPad mini). Probably half a dozen or more. This year I built two computers from Newegg parts, so they don't count as sales. It's a cycle - this year is down, next year will be down, but in 2015 I'll probably start all over again. I imagine that's the case on the macro level too - some years people just won't replace many PCs.
A slot-in hardware upgrade model for TVs could revolutionize the set-top box and home gaming markets
What advantage would a cartridge slot have over the existing HDMI connection?
Desktops will never die due to human ergonomics.
The fear is that general-purpose computers on desks might die in favor of locked-down tablets on desks paired to Bluetooth keyboards and running locked-down mobile operating systems. This already happened in the 1980s when the Nintendo Entertainment System replaced similarly capable 8-bit home gaming computers such as the Commodore 64.
It's like cars - for the most part, most drivers don't care what goes on under the hood
Unless it's something that keeps the driver from driving on a particular road. Locked-down devices are limited in what applications they can run on; I've made a fairly lengthy list of what'll never run on an iDevice.
Ditto consoles - pop the disc in, play game.
Unless a game isn't available for a particular console because of console maker politics. That's why Bob's Game never shipped for DS and The Binding of Isaac won't be getting a 3DS port.
The only thing holding tablets back from content creation, and many other roles is the operating system... If we could flash any Android device with a full-fledged Linux/X11 OS image, lots of us would buy tablets instead of laptops/netbooks.
Honestly, that content creation was going on just fine back in the days of Pentium-4 PCs, and the lowest-end tablets have more computing power than those. Storage is an issue, but 64GByte SDXC cards are good enough for most tasks, and USB host mode allows larger storage, up to full-sized spinning hard drives.
Content creators also find the current crop of desktop CPUs faster than necessary, if not more than they can utilize effectively... Tablets have the performance, input devices, and most of the connectivity you could want. What they lack is the software content creators would want. Linux wont make everyone happy... Many important tools need Windows or Mac platforms, but it would start filling some of that demand, and maybe be an alluring target to software developers (like Adobe) who haven't been interested in Linux before...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What general computing are you prevented from doing on a Surface Pro 2?
Computing while someone else in the household is using it. For the same price, I could buy one Surface Pro 2 or two laptops.
Personally I see two great advantages in tablets in certain situations: the smaller form factor (use it where you need it)
Tablets have a bit of a weight and thickness advantage over my 10" laptop, I'll admit. But I get along fine with my 10" laptop on the city bus, and it fits in a reasonably sized satchel. And unlike a laptop, most tablets don't ship with a keyboard, making it hard to type.
and the fact that they are available instantly when switched on.
I open my laptop's lid, and four seconds later it comes out of suspend and I'm staring at the unlock prompt. Is that not "instantly" enough?
I haven't met anyone who isn't pissed off by the crappy Windows 8 (and 8.1) experience on the desktop.
I was pissed off for all of fifteen minutes, and then I put on Classic Shell.
By the way, isn't the past tense of "forecast" also "forecast"?
Dialect differences, I'm assuming.
It is when home users run more of a risk of data destruction caused by not knowing how to back up than of data disclosure caused by physical theft of a device.
Maybe if it was an HTPC hooked to a TV, but SmartTVs and Roku type boxes are cheap enough now that having a PC for watching movies is just silly.
Not if the PC is for both movies and games.
There's a bit of a nasty feedback spiral, making the issue worse.
Manufacturers are selling less, so they price their systems higher to bring in more money. The higher prices push even more people towards cheaper tablets, which might only be $50! Those further-declining sales numbers then push manufacturers to price their systems higher, which then pushes more people towards tablets, and on and on it goes.
The PC market is ripe for disruption, just as the laptop market was when netBooks came along. Somebody providing less powerful desktop computers for a much lower price, COULD compete with the uptake of tablets. But the entrenched players don't want to cannibalize any of their higher-margin products to do so. The sad thing is, they'd likely end up more profitable in the end, slowing the migration away from PCs and laptops.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
People try to push tablets into this "consumption only" role as if it were the only thing they were capable of.
Good luck being able to develop apps for a tablet on a tablet, or even just install a community-created mod for a tablet game, unless the tablet is a Surface Pro or something else built on the Lenovo-compatible x86 PC architecture.
I'll just leave this here for you:
http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Ultrabook-Convertible-Touch-Screen/dp/B00G1PQVPQ
If those two laptops come with Windows 8, what general computing are you prevented from doing on them?
Software-wise, absolutely nothing. I install Classic Shell and get right back to work. It's just that if I were to buy a Surface Pro 2, only one person can use it at once, while the same amount of money buys enough laptops for two people.
Even after PCs took off and were common at home, many companies still relied on very expensive workstations for R&D work; Suns, HPs, etc. Because the PCs at the time were extremely slow things doing 286/386 stuff with a dumb-as-donkeys operating system. Things didn't really start to kill the workstation market until Windows 2000 and XP eras, and indeed much of what drove this was having commodity hardware driving the prices down.
Also important was the rise of Linux and FreeBSD meaning you could swap out your expensive Unix workstation and replace with a high end PC running Unix for half the cost.
Production of basic pictures and videos is one thing, but the tablets just aren't built to do any amount of typing on. Even if you splurge for an extra keyboard the support for them is weak. People want to use PCs for things like spreadsheets, development, documentation writing, accounting, etc.
What sort of thing do you imagine I'm spouting these missives on? It is a 7" tablet with Bluetooth keyboard. It uses Slimport (mobile Displayport) to drive ridiculously large high def monitors over HDMI. Works great with a Bluetooth combo optical/air mouse. Or my 50' USB inspection cam, btw. It works with everything. With a monitor I could use this all day. With my mobile BT keyboard and mouse I could do it in a coffee shop, or at the lake in a boat. These things are more than capable of handling mere office chores. I don't know if you remember back to the dark ages of the release of Office XP but back then we managed to get the printer to scribble the marks on the paper quite capably, and such a powerful PC as this 2.2GHz quad core beast with 2 GB of RAM could not be had for love nor money. Office XP required a Pentium 133 and 32MB of RAM. For the modern kids that's single core 0.133 GHz and 0.032 GB RAM.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I blame Windows 8.
Yeah, it really sucks but that is not solely the cause. It's the lockdown that is the cause of the eminent death of the PC industry. Why buy a general computing device that doesn't let you do general computing?
I still haven't gotten an answer from anyone about why a Windows 8 device is not a general computing device, yet that post is still +4 insightful.
A Windows 8 (x86) PC is a general-purpose computer, at least on the desktop side. A Windows RT PC is not. Any machine that gives one entity absolute power to approve or deny execution of a binary is not a general-purpose computer. EzInKy was trying to tell us that Windows 8 isn't as much of a threat as much as the lockdown endemic in game consoles, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows RT.
Almost everyone has more computing power than they need at this point. So they want tablets. There will have to be a must-have software item requiring newer computers before that will change. Also, don't know about you guys, but I have to laugh at anyone predicting what computers will be doing in 4 years.
PCs are in the same final decline that minicomputers were in the 1980s. Mobile is the new disruptive technology and it's eating the PC industry's lunch. And EXACTLY like that transition, MOST incumbent companies dominating the PC industry will go the same way as the dominant players of the minicomputer era - they will die. You don't hear about Wang Computers, Sperry-Univac or Data General these days - most kids don't even know their names. So it will be for the current incumbents as it seems the only two players who are likely to survive are Apple and Samsung.
* Intel is hurting now
* Microsoft is hurting now
* HP is hurting now
* Dell is hurting now
I went to Staples to look at an HP Chromebook on Cyber Monday, and they were all gone in the first hour. Plenty of choice between Windows machines, though. Nope, my next PC will run Linux, sorry, I said. Salesgeek then brightened up, said he was a recent Ubuntu convert at home...
For GPU Virtualization in a laptop or AIO desktop. I want the CAD & image editing software I run on a copy of WinXP or Win7 kept in a virtual environment to be able to talk to the GPU (but not the internet).
Intel made the decision to go for longer battery life rather than processor speed.
High end users who usually pay for the R&D costs with greater profit margins on their chips will not upgrade just to get a 10 to 15% speed increase.
Now that AMD has stopped competing with Intel on the high end they were not concerned with providing power users with a much faster chip and now they are paying the price.
I hope Intel learns their lesson this year and gets back on the power wagon.
Since AMD has not taken this break to catch up much in terms of speed Intel can further erode their market share by jumping another generation ahead of them.