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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'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
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!
They didn't say that there's a drop in overall computing devices sales, only in PC sales. They actually say that tablet sales are up... If anything, this suggests *more* in landfills, because a number of PC's that would otherwise be donated to a charity like Computers for Schools are no longer happening, meanwhile tablets that can't be upgraded/repurposed are being tossed.
Case in point, I've owned two tablets in the last 18 months. The first one turned out to be a piece of junk, and I gave it to a friend who was looking for something for the kids. There are people who would, in the same situation, simply toss it.
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
No it doesn't, overall PC ownership isn't in decline its just people are stopping buying pre-built from places like HP, Dell etc.
Alot more people are building their own or having their own built which do not count towards these figures. I'd also be highly surprised if all the thousands of "boutique" sellers of complete systems on places like ebay are counted towards the figures too.
If pc sales really were in such decline you'd see an awful lot of component suppliers going under like scan, ebuyer, newegg for you americans etc. Not seen any of them go under yet and theres even more boutique high end PC sellers around now than there was 2 years ago when all this doom and gloom started.
Its purely the old guard that's struggling there's nothing to see here move along let them all rot away in peace we'll be better off without them
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.
What makes you think that the kind of people who would toss a perfectly good tablet wouldn't also toss a perfectly good computer? At least a tablet's small, and correspondingly is a smaller item of waste.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
Or phones and tablets with Android.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Every friend I know who games has built their own computer in the last couple years. If anything I've seen this trend increase rather than decrease. As a whole, less people are buying desktops but gamers are sticking with it.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Microsoft helped the NSA bypass their crypto. They were the first to join PRISM.
Do you actually have any evidence for this? Seriously, there are huge amounts of accusations flying around, but no real evidence. And what are the alternatives? Walled garden, becoming property of the advertisers, or a UI that only Stallman could love.
I was sceptical, but I looked at the numbers and you might be right. AMD and nVidia GPU card shipments continue to be good, which suggests the gaming PC market is healthy. Although direct-to-consumer motherboard shipments have declined quite a bit in the past few years, that's probably more to do with games tending to be GPU bound and there being correspondingly less need for CPU upgrades. Looks like it's just the general-purpose PC market that's fading out, which is what you'd expect now that "good-enough" tablets have hit the £200 bracket. (I'm looking at the Hudl and Nexus in particular.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"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.
In my experience, the larger something is the more value people associate with it. I've known dozens of people who buy $20 dust covers to protect their $5 desktop keyboard, but have lost (usually multiple) $300+ phones due to stupidity... err.. negligence (washing machines, sitting on them, etc). They'll also spend hours trying to clean out a keyboard they spilled beer on, but half the time won't even try waiting for their phone to dry out before getting a replacement.
And hardware sales are down. Sounds like what everyone else is saying, that current hardware is good enough and they have no reason to update.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
High-end PCs are still worth building IMO because you're trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of it and it's easier to upgrade a year or two down the line. It's similar to how high-end cars usually have a lot of custom work put into them. However, for the bulk of PCs it's cheaper, easier, and causes fewer warranty headaches to buy from Dell or HP, and the PCs will likely not see so much as a RAM upgrade before being replaced in 3 to 6 years.
I built my last PC but I'm seriously considering just buying my next one because my only "special" requirement is that I need it to run at least 4 monitors, and that's easy enough to do with any two video cards (or even one card plus integrated graphics these days).
Don't take this the wrong way but I suspect it might be the people you know, and not a general trend. I see - and know - plenty of people using phones with completely shattered screens covered up with a cheap screen protector because they don't want to buy a new one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And the PC games that do catch on are lasting a lot longer, which means fewer PC upgrades. Look at WoW - it's in decline, but it's still pretty popular in spite of being 9 years old. There's plenty of other older games that still enjoy large followings. Then some newer games don't require much at all. I ran Diablo III off integrated graphics when it first came out, Minecraft runs fine on my 7 year old laptop, etc. Games don't drive hardware nearly as much as they did 5 or 10 years ago.
Which, of course, means an end to the tattered remnants of literacy on the Internet.
Don't take this the wrong way but I suspect it might be the people you know, and not a general trend. I see - and know - plenty of people using iPhones with completely shattered screens covered up with a cheap screen protector because they don't want to buy a new one.
FTFY - The other manufacturers seem to be able to make devices that don't shatter if you just look at them wrong.
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.
The larger the item, the more difficult to find a place to dump it (or throw away). Therefore, I fail to see that small tablets would reduce the waste space in the landfill compared to PCs.
For a phone that represents 50% market share iPhone users seem to have broken screens far more commonly than the users of any other phone manufacturer.
Almost 35 pop (Euro) for an old 2GB DDR2 bar. I mean come on!
Either he was right and that included the time scale.
Or he was wrong.
It's easy to predict this that and the other with disregard for the
time scale on whcih the prediction should be evaluated.
Example: Jobs thought he licked cancer. The cancer in the end
proved him wrong.
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'd have to argue that PCs last longer. I've never replaced a desktop or laptop more than once every four years. Using my family, which I understand is a very small non-representative sample.
I've had two laptops in the last 6 years, one is sitting in a closet being used as a media server for my house the other is my primary. I've never owned a tablet, but I'm thinking of getting one. I just don't know if I can justify it for the stuff I want to use it for (games and programming). It might be alright to take to the in-laws to read the morning news or surf the web rather than lugging my laptop back and forth. Or I could give one to my wife, since all she does is surf the web and play facebook games, and save some money on replacing her three year old over powered laptop, which I might turn into a Minecraft server.
I digress, In the last six years:
My brother has gone through three tablets and is looking at another one. iPad, playbook, iPad2, now looking at a Transformer. (3 tablets)
My younger sister took one of his old ones as her first tablet, but has since gone through two more and currently has an iPad2. iPad (hand-me-down lasted 3 months), iPad (dropped in pool), Kindle (not a hand-me-down), iPad2 (3 tablets, I didn't count the first iPad since it was a hand-me-down)
My Step-mother has had two tablets (one was a Kindle replaced by her kindle fire) (2 tables)
My mom, who lives in the states, has had more tablets than I care to mention, she comes to visit every year and for the last five years has a different model every time she's here. (5 tablets)
My Dad did get one, but he's barely touched it in three years. He's an old school developer and prefers something with a keyboard and mouse. iPad (1 tablet)
My older sister has had an iPad and a Kindle and currently has a surface RT. Her BF gave it to her two weeks ago and she hates it, too slow, too heavy, doesn't run the software she expected it to (because she thought she was getting a surface pro). Supposedly the BF is taking it back this week, but she wants another tablet to replace her original iPad, which runs like crap now. I recommended a Nexus if she didn't want iPad2 or iPad Air. I think she'll probably be going with the iPad Air since carrying weight matters to her as she travels a lot for her job. iPad, Kindle, Surface RT, TBA (3 tablets)
My Mother in-law is getting her first tablet for Christmas. ASUS Transformer Prime (1 tablet)
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years. Where as between me an my wife three laptops over the last six years and the laptops get repurposed until the literally don't function anymore so they really last me between six to eight years. Tablets get handed down or tossed out because once they're not useful for everyday tasks anymore they sit around collecting dust.
That's just my take on it though.
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.
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one". smartphones are expensive gadgets, and for a lot of people, $400+ is a lot of money and something people can't afford to spend every 6 months.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
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."
Yep... I was looking at a Microcenter ad the other day and they were advertising an AMD CPU+motherboard bundle that looked interesting... until I realized that the CPU was only about 15% faster than my 2-year-old one and that the motherboard was the SAME MODEL (except now with USB3 support).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one". smartphones are expensive gadgets, and for a lot of people, $400+ is a lot of money and something people can't afford to spend every 6 months.
So don't buy a $400 phone.
Added bonus, I don't think I've ever broken the screen on multiple phones in the $150-300 range, and some of those phones have suffered some serious abuse. One of them was dropped from a 3rd floor balcony, winged off the edge of a swimming pool, and into the drink. I had to change into my swim suit, and go down the stairs to fish it out... it *still* works... my dad's using it now. The only scar it has from its ordeal was that I needed to buy a new battery, and there's a small divot on one of the edge bezels. (That was an LG Shine Plus).
I would like to see the iPhone that could survive a drop like that....
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.
I've been using Linux since 1995. Linux has been falling behind not gaining. I can't find any Linux distributions that boot on my MacRetina, a hugely selling laptop that's been out 16 months.
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
I think this is exactly the case. The desktop machine I use before my current one (bought last year around this time) lasted at least seven years, and the only real upgrade was a video card, and a card for more USB ports.
It isn't that desktop sales are declining. It is that tablets are expanding, and new niches are appearing.
Take the MS Surface Pro for example. For most gaming (other than the latest Crysis), it is good enough. It works well as a tablet, and when docked, it works well as a desktop replacement, except it doesn't have Thunderbolt for decently fast video or drive I/O. I'm sure some company will be making a tablet that will fix those issues. Then, why buy a desktop when a tablet that drops into a dock has virtually as much power?
Android/iOS tablets are also expanding. The line between a tablet and e-reader is extremely blurred, other than the dedicated e-Ink devices. Often, people want a general media consumption device, and a tablet tends to be good for that.
What I'd like to see compared is the server market. That would help with numbers because that market is a baseline and is not affected by consumer fickleness in general.
PC hardware is "good enough" where games tend to not be pushing the envelope on graphics anymore.
Take Everquest: Next for example. Instead of continuing with detailed textures, they have decided to follow Blizzard's lead and go for the low-res, "cartoony" type of world. Part of this is due to their voxel technology, but part of it is so their game can run on almost anything.
PC games are not really declining either. GOG seems to be doing a good business, Steam is doing well, and even MS's store is hanging in there. If PC gaming really was dropping off, the game makers would have already left the platform in droves to focus on consoles only.
Why not load it up w/ PC-BSD?
I have a 3 year old desktop, quad core 3Ghz machine with 12GB of ram, but the video card was too weak to run the modern games. Well the new R7 series actually uses less power than the one in there. So for $100 for a R7 250 I find the old machine keeps going. Granted it as PCIE 2.1 where the newer ones are 3.0, but I plan on getting a new computer in 2015. Considering it's $20 to go see a movie at the theater I'll get my $100 out of it in the next year to 18 months.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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?
Of course they "seem to have broken screens far more commonly", they're half of all the phones you encounter and you're using the availability heuristic.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
ten seconds with google: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro11,x
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
50% market share. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *breath* AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Please, take up standup.
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.
I'm amazed how quickly everyone forgot the old "NSAKey" debacle years ago. I wasn't convinced then, but now I see why people assume Microsoft was first.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Try that EUFI boot loaders. Pain in the neck and last time I tried didn't work.
Nobody has the $1000 it takes to get bleeding edge graphics, and that's what the PC is all about.
Uh, what?
I think my GPU cost $250 in January, and it plays almost every game I've tried maxed out at 1920x1080 at 60fps. Most games are designed for consoles, which currently have the GPU equivalent of a gaming PC from the mid-2000s.
Yeah, I totally want to write code through a VPN on a 7" touch-screen.
Totally.
That would make me so much more productive than spending $1500 for an i7 with an SSD and a ton of RAM.
PCs did fine before they became a mass market consumer products. Some of them were even cheaper and more powerful than the Macs and DOS clones a lot of people like to fixate on now to the exclusion of all else.
Plus business computing of various kinds will support x86 clones for a long time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You don't actually have to get your hands dirty in order to "build" a PC. You never have. Even in the days of Computer Shopper, the numbers of bespoke box builders was legion.
You get a similar price point to Dell but better gear and more interesting and useful options.
Even HP and Dell offer this to a similar degree but with inferior components.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
I call BS on this. I highly doubt there has been a major push towards build-your-own PCs. Frankly, I think we all have to deal with the fact that smartdevices have kicked the piss out of PCs.
Case in point. We have a three year old laptop which we turn on maybe a couple of times of week. Both the wife and I have 7" tablets (I have a Nexus 7 and the wife has a Kobo Arc). These little critters do the bulk of the surfing and email at home.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or do I?
We're still running mainly Windows Vista workstations at work. We are making a move to replace the last XP machines (about eight or nine of them), but other than that it's basically going to be playing the attrition game. Most of the computers are dual core processor systems with 2 or 3gb of RAM and 200gb hard drives, more than enough to run browsers and Microsoft Office. Most of my suppliers are desperate to get me to buy new systems, and one of their carrots is they'll ship them out with Windows 7, not exactly boding well for Windows 8 future.
On the other hand, I did do the upgrade to Exchange 2010 to get better support for all the iOS and Android smart devices the staff are using. I get more requests these days to set up smart phones and tablets than I do to configure workstations. It's not that the PC is dying in our organization. Quite the opposite, they're still getting used, but feature-wise they really all plateaued about three or four years ago, and short of a motherboard smoking, I really won't get any bang for our buck by buying replacements.
I know that the suppliers I usually deal with are pestering me a lot, desperate to get sales up. They're just not moving PCs in the enterprise market any more. Even worse, some of the manufacturers are literally competing against themselves. I can buy HP and Dell refurb Windows 7 machines that are a couple of years old for like $150, with Windows 7 Pro license included. The last three computers I bought to replace failed hardware were Dell refurbs. At $150, if they last a year, I figure I've done pretty well, and the oldest of them is sitting at about 18 or 19 months.
Where we once looked at about a three, maybe four year cycle of PC replacement, we're now talking of pushing well past the halfway mark of this decade. Notebooks and laptops will probably have a shorter lifespan simply due to the rigors they go through, but still, we have four year old laptops still in the field.
We can't be the only ones pondering such a replacement cycle, and that's just got to be freaking manufacturers out.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No it doesn't, overall PC ownership isn't in decline its [sic] just people are stopping buying pre-built from places like HP, Dell etc. Alot [sic] more people are building their own or having their own built which do not count towards these figures
Maybe in your geek-circles this is happening, but in the world-at-large I don't know anyone who builds their own PCs. In the consumer space the just go to the local computer retailer and, more often than not, buy a laptop. Corporate just buys from one of the 'big three' (Dell / HP / Lenovo).
Ah, the Eternal September.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Here's a quick start.
I don't mind writing code through a VPN on my Nexus 7 with a touch-screen. But then I have a Bluetooth mouse/airmouse and keyboard, and a 55" widescreen FullHD display over Slimport. Just one 1080p is a little limiting, but the couch is comfy. RDP, VNC and SSH to servers and PCs works just fine.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Ubuntu 10.04 is not lately. Still running it because I was not happy with the Ubuntu's that came after it, and not sure what to pick next (again). However, "far more usable than Windows" is a very long stretch. I would say it's slightly more a pain in the ass than Windows (XP or 7). I am going to give the latest Mint a try, but I am afraid it wouldn't change much of the feeling I have about Linux on the Desktop; great if you want an additional hobby.
Perl Programmer for hire
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.
I am afraid it wouldn't change much of the feeling I have about Linux on the Desktop; great if you want an additional hobby.
Weird. I gave a Linux netbook to my girlfriend and it just works. No longer do I have to fix bizarre problems with Windows that make no sense to anyone, like the time Windows stopped letting anyone log in because it corrupted the home directory path in the registry somehow, and, my God, you can't let a user log in without a home directory. It's not like you need to log in to fix the problem. Oh, no, actually, you do.
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.
Sure. Very easy. Microsoft actively works with Apple to support their systems.
Yup, that's the thing with anecdotes: every good one has a counter one. And of course, each OS I've worked on had its weird issues, but my experience is that Linux has them where there shouldn't be. Or make that Ubuntu. And yes, the majority can be fixed by Googling a bit (showing me that I am not alone in this). For example, a few days ago suddenly the desktop theme fell back to a more archaic looking one. This used to happen way more often; last time might have been a year ago. No idea what causes this. This time I just copied some directories back from backup and it was back to normal.
Perl Programmer for hire
I'm still happy with my Core 2 duo machine, and don't have a dire need for anything newer.
Bullshit. The only thing that shatters literacy on the Internet is impatience. I take the time to convey full sentences in my messages simply because it will many times avert confusion and it's easier. I converse with all manner of people through text and messaging, many of whom don't understand txt spk. It's easier for me to take the time to communicate in full sentences to everyone than to have to convey a message twice to someone who I assume would understand txt spk, then find out they don't and have to use the proper sentence anyway.
I found the opposite. I used to build all of my PCs. Then about 8 years ago, I found that it would cost me twice as much to build a machine than it would to just buy a prebuilt system from one of the big players. Windows XP was pretty stable, so it came down to the cost in time of removing all of the crap that the prebuilts added vs the much higher cost of buying components. So, I spent a few years buying prebuilts instead of building myself. I am now back to building myself. The prebuilts quality is so horrendous, and warranty support so bad that the cost savings of buying a prebuilt just isn't there anymore.
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!
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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! --
I'm still building my own desktops, but I would agree that upgrading it is not necessary as often anymore. For various reasons:
1) The innovation speed (and I'm using the word "innovation" loosely) has gone down. From hardware generation N to N+1, the gains are smaller than they used to be five years ago. Less incentive to get that shiny new CPU and graphics card...
2) The hardware requirements of most software have grown only moderately in the last years. Even mediocre hardware can play movies in full HD and most games in passable graphics quality these days. Only hardcore gamers and some professionals need $2000 machines these days.
3) As a subset of 2), Microsoft is finally doing one thing right: the hardware requirements of their OS are no longer growing massively with each release. I'd still call Windows 7 a bit greedy for RAM, but that is cheap enough and the performance is usually (given enough RAM) as good as XP's.
All things summed up, my PCs last longer and are cheaper these days. Good for me, not so good for the industry.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
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.
That's a lot of bias and anger there. At the businesses I see, there are some XP machines but the vast majority are being upgraded to Win 7. For the few machines that cannot be upgraded, those were designated to be scrapped due to normal obsolescence anyways. The new machines come with Win 7 Enterprise not Win 8. No one is in a rush to buy a plethora of machines because over the years, they were frugal and smart with their IT budgets (as they should be). They only replace machines as needed. I was supposed to get an older Win 7 machine from a coworker but because of workplace attrition I got his workstation when he resigned.
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.
The term you neglect to understand is "anecdotal". The IDC study shows something opposite to your conclusions and they are looking at much larger sets of data.
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.
You lack of understanding is two-fold. No one with any sense thinks that PCs will disappear like the dinosaurs, especially for business productivity. For consumers and other applications, tablets are replacing them. Take for example, POS systems. They used to be full PCs. I've seen many small businesses switch to iPads instead with the main reason being cost. Cost-wise a PC, touchscreen monitor, and POS system software, would be more expensive than an iPad/Android running Square.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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 seriously suspect many of the people tossing these into landfills are otherwise very hip urban liberals considering being vegan in order to save the planet. They may not even realize these go into landfills as they gave the items to some company's bogus recycling program (ie, landfill will be in China instead of their back yard).
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.
That's because the glass goes all the way to the edge with only a thin piece of metal to protect it. So yes, drop and iPhone and you stand a good chance of breaking the screen. Other phones do a better job of protecting the screen.
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'd say building your own PC is more popular than ever amongst enthusiasts. For someone who wants a gaming or a high performance system the major manufacturers really don't offer anything interesting anymore, and what they do is seriously expensive. So I see more people building their own, that way they get the video card they want or can get a SSD without paying through the nose for it. It doesn't hurt either that building a PC nowadays couldn't be easier now that all the ribbon cables are gone, no more jumpers, and the BIOS (EFI, whatever) pretty much optimize the settings for you, including automatic overclocking.
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.
not really since once tablets/phones have seen their day, they're discarded.. desktop and laptop computers can be repurposed..
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.
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).
I, too, prefer complete sentences and proper grammar in my attempts at communication. I will admit this has not led to a 'five nines' success rate against misinterpretation during texting, drinking, or driving... although my own personal study suggests you should never do two of these things at the same time.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway