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PC Shipments In 2013 See the Worst Yearly Decline In History
An anonymous reader writes "The PC market continues to be in free fall, having now seen its seventh consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments. Worldwide PC shipments dropped to 82.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, a 6.9 percent decrease from the same period last year. It's worth emphasizing that this past quarter resulted in a total of 315.9 million units shipped in 2013, a 10 percent decline from 2012, and the worst decline in PC market history. The overall shipment level was equal to the one in 2009."
Film at eleven.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Iron lungs and horseshoes are still way down.
what does the worst in history mean?
Anything sold in the last 4-5 years with an i3/i5/i7 with over 2GB of RAM and Vista or Win7 is still more than enough for most businesses and individuals. There is no real incentive to replace the whole machine when there are cheap options to upgrade with a few more GB and an SSD to give it a new lease of life.
1. Tablets.
B. Consumer hardware performing daily tasks at a reasonable speed for longer.
III. Tech savvy generation coming of age to build their own PCs.
Apple's PC shipments are up 28% in the US. Good for them as a side business.
How many brand PC units were replaced by custom built PCs?
The general public and most end users have never needed the power of the PC in the first place. With the advent of throwaway tablet trash, the herd has finally found the correct fit.
This just isn't news to me. There is a large percentage of people that don't really need a PC todo what they do. play online, email, Social media, shop, pictuers, etc.... Until a few years ago the PC was the only way todo this so, they bought a PC. They bought an item that designed todo work and tweeked for home use, so it was overly complex for most. Along came the smart phone and tablet. Small, portable, works, it's SIMPLE and does everything they want/need it todo. Couple that with the slowing of PC speeds advances and new techknology, it is no wornder PC sales are down. They will continue to go down until they reach their new equilibrium.
I don't think may homes are going PC-less, they're simply realizing they probably only need one or two instead of four. Also, why is Apple excluded from these numbers? They sell PCs that happen to also run OSX in addition to other OSes.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
my prediction for 2014 to 2016
apple comes out with a somewhat cheap A7 powered laptop in the $300 to $500 range sort of like a chromebook
most of the cost of a computer goes to intel and MS. once you trade those out for cheaper parts you can make yourself it fairly easy to make a nice profit
as long as it has a 500GB hard drive, its enough for close to 90% of the people out there
Economic calamity notwithstanding, tablets and phones give most people more than enough power to do what they need.
All you need to do is slap the UI of XP on Windows 8 and kill the tile interface for desktops: Massive sales in 4 months.
Windows 8 general release Oct 2012... pc sales downward trend... any possible relation?
Wasn't Window 8 released about seven quarters ago?
This is no shock. They've been proclaiming the death of the PC for 15 years or better and the laptop for the last 5 or so. Tablets are cheap, they perform all of the functions the average user needs (browsing, email) But sit down and try to type a novel on a tablet. Or do any sort of CADD work. Programming, 3D modelling, animation, it's not going to happen on a tablet. And 3-4 years from now when everyone's tablet batteries start failing and people realize they have to throw them away and buy another, we'll see the laptop and PC coming back stronger, but it probably won't ever reach the levels it was once at. Doesn't mean it's going away, just the market balancing itself.
Why buy a PC when you can buy an iPad or and Android tablet ?
What can be done on a desktop or laptop PC that can't be done on a tablet ?
I just miss using my scanner and burning CDs, but nowadays let's be honest, we don't scan or burn CD that often..
The computing market has been divided between Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, and Phones.
What did you think would happen to PC sales?
Prefab PCs manufactured? Core PC component sales? Retail PC sales?
Now I'm only going by my circle of friends, family and acquaintances so this might be a small anomaly but...
It appears that not only is tablet use displacing having a 2nd or 3rd PC, it is more importantly replacing the laptop (name brand). When buying a desktop, the people in my circle have been moving away from buying the Dells and Compaqs and other name brands and have either been building their owns or buying the local PC shop pre-mades, Numbers that wouldn't show up in these reports.
As others have mentioned, today's desktop PCs also tend to last longer as they are still very powerful 3-4 years later.
Mix all of these together and it's no surprise
It's better to burn out than to fade away
The year of Linux on the desktop!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...and still running just fine. Very little is happening on the PC market (except graphics card wise), I just couldn't justify upgrading to an i7 gaming platform that in Scandinavia cost around 2500$. It only had 16 gig memory, whereas my old one got 8 gig. The only thing I did to my "old" quad core pc, was to add a brand new Nvidia 760GTX, and basically every game ran smooth as ever. Even my 3D design software (which uses GPU rendering anyway) ran fantastic with this upgrade. So yeah, if more people do what I just did (which I suspect they do), there's part of your decline in sales right there - the new computers just aren't innovative enough to justify spending hard earned cash on them.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Everyone will say "no sense replacing what works" and I agree. Let's look at what one would be able to buy now, though, and why people wouldn't buy it.
On the low end of the price spectrum, you have Chromebooks (yuck, puke, no one sane buys these unless they put Linux on it instead), Celerons, and AMD E2 and A4 processors; none of those are even remotely fast. Moving up in price, you see a lot of AMD APUs and Intel Core i3-M systems. I've owned two fairly new laptops recently, one with an AMD A8-4500M ($400) and one with an Intel Core i7-2630QM ($830). The i7 was disappointing (it's a freaking i7, it should absolutely blaze) and only more so because for tasks that are not heavy in the data processing side of things (i.e. data/video compression, software compilation) the A8 seemed to move much faster than the i7 with identical Windows 7 images. Unfortunately, someone at AMD had the stupid idea of making the L1 instruction caches a pitiful 16KB in size and that makes data-heavy tasks run like dog poo.
On the higher side of things, you find ridiculous and exotic offerings like the Yoga 2 Pro with a 13.3" LCD that has a 3200x1800 resolution (hint: you can't read anything at all unless you squint) and it comes with a low-performance ULV version of a mobile (read: already low-performance without being ULV) Core i5 and a nice low-performance Intel GPU, and all versions of this insane hardware combination are around the $1000 mark. I also firmly believe that while there is a market for "ultrabooks," the majority of people out there are wasting their money on "convertible laptops" and having touchscreens for Windows 8. It's a neat shiny new feature that ends up only being useful in niche situations and otherwise was no different than wrapping $400 up and chucking it in the rubbish bin.
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when they are so ridiculous? If you're penny-pinching, you get a machine with tons of RAM, hard drive space, and maybe even USB 3.0, but the CPU is slow beyond belief and the whole system suffers. Dropping a few hundred more bucks might get you into i7 territory but even the i7 up to Sandy Bridge is, in my experience, not much better than equivalent higher-end chips in laptops made four years ago. Why blow $1000 on a really nice new laptop when they're either not much better than what you already own or they're an expensive high-resolution joke of a machine? No thanks; I'll wait until they sweeten the pot some more. (And until the convertibles fad goes to hell.)
My main PC is a 2.5-year-old Fujitsu Siemens workstation with an 8-core Xeon and 4 hdds in it. It will prolly run fine for another 3 years.
As for building your own: at work, I recently proposed we build our own server, for a certain project - at a cost of about € 4000 - rather than buying a COTS Dell box for about € 10,000. The proposal was met with enthusiasm by colleagues, only died because of archaic in-house regulations. The PC is not dead, in spite of what is being heard each year again. It is changing. That's all.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Windows 8. 'nuff said.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Last I checked tablets and smartphones are still selling like crazy and both are PCs.
6.9% decline in the past quarter? I swear, when I started reading the article after this punchy headline, I was expecting 69%,
Here's the deal: computers nowadays are pretty fast, in combination with processor speeds didn't increase by much. In fact, I used to replace my laptop every year, because it was worth it for the extra speed. But my 1 year old i7 laptop is still going super strong, and an upgrade would only net a small speed increase. The only thing I would get is more battery life, but then I already get 6+ hours. Other than the compiler, not many applications take advantage of the 8 threads it can chug at the same time either.
So guess what? I'll keep it for another year.
When looked at this way, 6.9% is actually not that bad at all.
Now that we have Smartphones, and tablets, and internet connected TVs, and all manner of other cheap devices for consumption, only the content creators need full PCs.
The desktop isn't going away, but the inflated market must shrink back to its previous levels before the sales numbers will stop falling.
Given the industry is reporting a downward trend in shipments I have good news to report. The sale of GNU/Linux systems are on the upswing. It's been a record setting year for the company I work for. Now the down side is that this niche market requires 100% commitment of the GNU/Linux user base to make interesting things happen and at the present time less than 1% of you are buying. With an overall downturn of PC shipments that means that GNU/Linux support for 2014 will be even harder to come by. The support situation will be worse. You'll have fewer choices and those you do have will be shity. Because you didn't all contribute in 2013 and those that did often contribute to companies that didn't care about the community there are now fewer larger companies (ie the ones who get to choose weather or not they release the source code) interested in participating in proper community developed drivers/firmware. That means we can't do our job, because, well, nobody is working with us when we ask for the source code/documenation.
.. cpu advancements in terms of speed have slowed to a crawl. Without performance their is no incentive to ugprade. Not only that many industries simply can't keep up with the speed we have.
I think that's a factor. Last time I bought a PC it was partly because I wanted to upgrade to win7. Nobody wants to "upgrade" to 8, I expect a lot of people are waiting for MS to replace it with an OS that sucks less.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
People are still buying and upgrading computers.
It's just that they're buying and upgrading the tiny computers that they carry in their purse or pocket - their smartphones.
I probably do 65% of my computing on my phone, with the desktop reserved for bookkeeping (because I need to run a Windows VM for Quickbooks); long form writing (because a phone screen keyboard still sucks for anything beyond two sentences); and for the kind of on-line research and reading that just doesn't work on a phone screen.
For all of those my 5 or 6 year old Dell is good enough. I added a second monitor, and I do plan to add to the RAM and another drive, but that's it - it works.
I upgrade my Linux distro every couple of major versions, and let most applications just upgrade themselves. I may need to upgrade the bookkeeping software at some point, but hopefully it will still chug along under Vista.
In any case, I can't see any reason why I would buy a new desktop PC unless this one just ups and dies.
Three Squirrels
If you define "internet device" to include laptops, tablets, and smart phones as well as PCs, the total sales are up. As total sales of a product (internet device) go up, segmentation occurs, niches occur. I was at Best Buy today and saw mostly all-in-one PC/Screens, and the little MS "Surface" tablets were between the PCs, the laptops and the tablets.
Total sales of devices are up. If you want to make the "PC decline" look even bigger, separate out the all-in-one screens as a separate category. It's all the same brands using the same ODM/Contract Manufacturers anyway. But bad news headlines sell better than good news.... "if it bleeds, it leads".
Gently reply
Why do you read "PC" and infer "Laptop"?
My PC is an i7 860, 8GB RAM, was 4TB (backed up to another 4TB) and is now 6TB, don't play 3D games so have a bog standard graphics card, that's it, never goes above 10% CPU, even when writing music in FL Studio. I won't be buying another PC until Windows 9/10/whatever comes out and I can't get drivers for it any more. Will probably buy 4TB more hard drives in a year or so, to store DVDs on, saves time trying to find the one I want to watch, and that's it.
Does this mean PC sales are down or just shipment of PCs (is there a difference?) which means less money spent in countries outside USA, and that money stays here? I know a silly question. Car analogy: If people slowdown buying cars, then they will use that money someplace else. And if trying to keep that clunker going, they will spend it locally to the mechanic.
mfwright@batnet.com
I have managed a computer repair shop for many years. Guess what comes in the front door the most often and ISN'T over 3 years old? Hint: laptops. People largely buy laptops. If PC sales go down, that's where the biggest losses will be found.
"It is difficult to use a PC/laptop on anything other than a desk and chair."
Uh, not for some of us.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I've wondered why PC makers don't get out of the "good enough" mold and start working on addressing user concerns, especially in security. Preferably in a way other than demanding people move to a restricted, locked down platform. Some suggestions:
Built in hypervisor and AV software that can run as a separate VM, pause the Windows partition, do a RAM image scan of that, then go on. Rootkits can hide from the OS, but they have to show themselves somehow, and something that sits outside the memory space that can't be touched would catch them sooner or later. It isn't a 100% magic bullet, but it can help catch things and require fewer signatures (mainly heuristics) as opposed to the hundreds of thousands needed for conventional AV signature detection. The hypervisor and virus scanning VM can also scan the disk image for stuff that is hidden from the OS. Not perfect, but this is only a tool in some of the highest end enterprises.
Some "mini-SAN" features on the disk controller. Snapshots, a LVM tool, disk encryption on the controller level, the ability to save snapshots to an external hard disk as backups regardless of what OS is on the drives, and so on.
A read-only flash disk with the recovery media burned on it. This way, when someone has a corrupt disk, the recovery volume on the same disk is also infected, there is a way to completely zero out the drive and install a clean OS from scratch without having to repurchase Windows or other OS media. This isn't new. There were Tandy with built in MS-DOS in ROM.
A hypervisor where one can easily clone and switch between Windows installations. That way, one's general Web browsing is on one VM, banking on another, gaming on still another... and all the VMs use a deduplicated LUN so creating a new Windows instance takes up a small amount of space. Of course, updates can be handled by a WSUS-like mechanism so only one set would need to be downloaded for all the VMs.
Built in 3G/4G/LTE/CDMA/GSM connection that can be turned off and locked down via BIOS or a switch. The onboard hypervisor would offer it as a vSwitch, or perhaps even with router/firewall functionality, so the inner OS is well protected. This way, there is always some connectivity to the Internet, barring areas with zero cellular service.
Thunderbolt, so one can use tape drives and other high I/O stuff. USB 3 is OK, but it can't drive a modern tape drive without shoe-shining.
we can't consume electronics fast enough anymore? Jeez you'd think moore's law had been broken or something.
I need a new PC now as my current one is 8-9 years old p4 3.2Ghz.
If I could find something decent without W8 on it I'd get one. But as it is, I refuse to buy a W8 machine and be forced to buy W7 pro full price to replace it. Every store around here only has W8 systems on the floor.
Speaking as someone who just bought a Haswell convertible, the only problem is Windows 8. I've got a touchscreen convertible with an SSD and eight hours of battery life, and I don't want that horrible abortion of an OS.
Okay, it turns out that you're right. I don't understand the convertibles thing either. Why would you want to do that with Windows? The best, by far coolest, reason I've found is that I can have a laptop where the keyboard isn't attached to the screen, so I don't kill my back, and the screen can be put in profile mode, so I can work on full pages. Good grief, this fad is the sorriest excuse for something hip since the baby boomers started the SUV craze ("Finally, a car I don't have to lean down to enter").
Yes, for a Tablet, I use a Tablet (and with a 7.7" AMOLED screen, like they used to make back in the old days); for a desktop, I use a desktop (with a Model -May God Continue to Bless America- M keyboard, and an embarassment of screens. But for something portable, I've got this convertible monstrosity.
Why?
Well, a low-velocity body-computer bag-ground impact wiped out my Windows 7 netbook. That's why I buy 'em cheap. And, Windows 8 wiped out any cheap Windows 7 netbooks. That's why the drop off. Sure, I HAD to buy a portable computer. Otherwise, why the hell would I spend money on that abomination unto the Lord known as Windows 8 (or 8.1 -- "8+ iterations and we still haven't figured out that pixels don't correspond directly to use visibility").
I entirely agree. Just for fun I looked around some of my favourite sites that sell PCs (NewEgg, System76, HP....) I found one computer (a notebook) I would consider buying for the price offered. It was out of stock and the specs weren't all that different from my four year old laptop. Really, the only difference was the hard drive size and my four year old laptop was pretty low-end back then.
My quick look around revealed that almost all machines begin offered right now are either woefully under powered or vastly over-priced. The PC industry appears to be trying to kill itself off.
Unit sales for Apple computers are way up year over year. Likewise unit sales for smart phones, tablets, game consoles -- literally everything with a CPU that doesn't run Windows -- are up year over year.
This is a Windows problem. People don't get excited by clunky old Windows. They don't buy it because they love it, they buy it when they have to. And increasingly they don't.
This OS has to be the worst OS ever released by Microsoft, they basically removing programs from it and calling it upgrade. WTF is that?
And let's not forget that browsers have improved--both becoming more optimized & more feature-laden. The Javascript, DOM, CSS, etc. optimizations, even without using the GPU as a coprocessor, are light years ahead of where they were 10 years ago. Just try to run Firefox 2 or 3 nowadays--it's painful!
So, you have browsers that are more optimized than they've ever been, fewer people using fully-installed "desktop" applications (excluding the browsers themselves, and excluding gamers & enthusiasts that need raw computing power), and a schizophrenic Windows 8.x experience, and you have a perfect storm...
Why buy a new PC when Firefox/Chrome/IE/Safari/Opera just put out a new version with a major optimization?
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I've owned two fairly new laptops recently, one with an AMD A8-4500M ($400) and one with an Intel Core i7-2630QM ($830).
...but even the i7 up to Sandy Bridge is, in my experience, not much better than equivalent higher-end chips in laptops made four years ago
An I7-2630QQM is a 3 year old sandy bridge chip, it launched Q1'11. I don't know why you would expect 3 year old chips to be much faster than 4 year old chips, especially if you bought it recently. I mean, there are 2 generation of newer Intel processors out, and have been since Q2'13. Heck, if there's a 2 1/2-3 year old chip in the laptop when you bought it the manufacturer is probably doing other stupid things that were contemporary at the time like putting 5400 rpm drives in the laptop and less than 4 gig of RAM at which point it wouldn't be any surprise that it's slower than expected.
Most of how a computer feels isn't from how fast the CPU is for most tasks anymore, it's about having sufficient RAM and fast enough disk (usually an SSD) to not have to wait long for data to load. That's is a big part of the reason why so many people say that CPUs are fast enough now. The number of problems that are computationally constrained is much smaller than it used to be, especially for the typical laptop user. If you were upgrading today and looking for something faster (and for $830 I'd hope you could do better than a 3 year old chip), I'd say to look for something with an SSD. At $830 you can probably find one and at $1000 you certainly could, and it'll feel faster and have better battery life to boot.
Now, landing thrusters.. landing thrusters, hmm. Now if I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?
A lot of people like to say that the Desktop PC is dead or dying. I doubt that but I think the market is going to shrink A LOT in the next 10 years. What people seem to forget is that before the internet most people did not have PCs and yet, there were several companies making a lot of money selling them.
I think most people in our society have a strong aversion to technology. They don't want to learn about it, they may want something from it (the internet) but they don't want to make ANY effort to learn anything about it in order to get that. It's not that they are unable or even unwilling to learn something, it's specifically technology. They learn other things in absurd detail like sports stats and clebrity trivia.
People don't want to see technology. They are repulsed by the site of something that looks technical. That's why TVs have to be flatter. You only see the front, the front is a picture of something else, not a TV. Before flat screens the big thing was to hide them inside cabinets with doors that close. People do that to their stereos too. Somehow a overpriced but cheap piece of fiberboard is better to look at than some shiny piece of kit.
I think what we actually have is a society full of wannabe ludites. They would be ludites except... they can't break themselves of their internet and entertainment habits to become real ludites.
But, now there are tablets and other small devices. Tablets and phones look more like jewelry and require less actual learning to use. So, the ludite wanabee masses are ditching the PCs they didn't really want to have in the first place and getting their fix from their.
But, that tech friendly minority of the population that always existed before has not gone extinct. We too will use our tablets and phones where it is appropriate but some things are just better on a bigger device that is not encumbered by the size, energy and weight restrictions of a portable. We will buy Desktops just like we did 15-20 years ago. That is a much smaller market but it was big enough to float large corporations then, it will be big enough now... once the number of competitors is whittled down a bit.
The sad thing is I think their time with PCs was actually starting to mend people's mass psychosis of tech hatred. Now people will just revert back to their old ways.
Any cites for that so-called fact. MAC's are closed systems with a much more engineered life span than a clone PC. As stated previously no parts to be swapped any failure is the end of life for a MAC. The anomaly of MAC's upswing could be attributed to the absolute lack of any upgrade path.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You need an SSD to make a laptop Core i7 blaze. The 5400-rpm hard drive's data transfer rate is too slow to see much difference between a 2.5-GHZ dual core Pentium and a 2.4-GHz Core i7, which costs $200 more.
I didn't mention when I bought the laptops; they're not new as in within the past 12 months, but I have gotten my hands on bleeding edge hardware to test and don't find it to be much better. You should see the CPU overhead that USB 3.0 transfers alone tend to suck up. CPU performance is a massive factor in the perceived speed of a system, especially in an era where seriously minimizing both price and power consumption are the biggest driving factors in CPU design and fabrication decisions. Using an SSD instead of a hard drive is definitely another game-changing option, but I have seen precious few retail laptops under $1000 offered with an SSD and absolutely zero in the sub-$500 ranges. The average person won't be buying and installing an SSD in their new laptop, so SSDs aren't really relevant to the discussion, and as I've said, the CPU being a cheapie can negate other theoretically speed-boosting goodies. RAM also doesn't change the size of the cache and core configurations of a CPU.
It's "to do" (two words), not "todo" (one word).
Depends which guesstimates you are reading.
.
So what not-a-tablet computing device with a 10" screen is the right computing device for someone's needs? I'd say a netbook but laptop makers by and large stopped making those a year ago.
We have a couple of aging Windows laptops in our house but they are slowly getting replaced by Chromebooks and tablets. There's just nothing that we run on Windows that absolutely 100% demands Windows. We're using Mint instead of Quicken now, that was the last Windows thing we used. On the Chromebooks, the kids use Google Docs or Microsoft's own cloud based Office when it is absolutely called for. They have yet to hand in an assignment this year where the teacher could tell what source program was used.
The Windows laptops are used mostly for browsing and there's one that my husband keeps around because his work VPN is on it, but he hasn't used it in so long, he's not entirely sure the password is up to date. We also have one Macbook that gets a little usage.
Even so, it's much more likely that if we ever buy an actual full on computer, it would more likely be a Macbook Air rather than a Windows PC. Just never warmed up to the Metro look at all. I tried it and it looked ugly and busy to me whereas the Mac look is still familiar and simple.
With Steam computer being released many PC gamers who don't want to build a PC will have an easy to get a good gaming PC rebuilt. Maybe the lack of sales is due to the very high unemployment/underemployment which is near 14%.
Having a PC is as basic as having a cell phone, so not like PC is going to die.
You didn't say when you bought them, just "recently". That's entirely why I responded actually, your anecdote sounded so off. The PC market has certainly slowed down, but calling a computer purchase that's more than 1 year old (and is probably 2-3 years old) "recent" seems a pretty big stretch to me, especially when you say:
Why blow $1000 on a really nice new laptop when they're either not much better than what you already own...
The answer is that they really are better and faster (and better battery life and...) than what you bought because some other, non-CPU component is what's making that difference. That's the same reason as why people are switching out their HDDs in their desktops for SSDs (I recently did this very thing and put a SSD into my desktop). It's not compute power they're looking for but faster IO. Your response admits the same thing.
Using an SSD instead of a hard drive is definitely another game-changing option
So which is it, a current laptop with an SSD is not much better than what you currently own or a game-changer? At the $1000 price point you mention you certainly can find laptops with SSDs.
Now, landing thrusters.. landing thrusters, hmm. Now if I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?
Reason why they skim on cache is that they used the transistor budgets for their integrated GPU. Silicon are cost money. In stead of getting that last few percentage of performance making larger and larger cache, they use it on something else that they think would boost the system level perfromance. This is why had L3 on their regular chips, but not in the APU.
Windows 8.1 can be customized to work just like Windows 7. 1) enable boot to desktop. 2) uninstall all Windows 8 apps 3) change file associations to desktop applications like Windows photo viewer 4) place shortcuts to frequently used programs on metro start screen that has NO tiles
ALL DONE!
This just go show several things:
The market is saturated
New computers are not that much better than what you have now.
Most people never wanted a PC but wanted a tablet..
The economy still sucks..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i sold all of my MSFT stock...although surprisingly, the price has been pretty stable.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
A cup of coffee is not "just a cup of coffee" unless you're drinking Folgers or Maxwell House swill!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
market saturation
- I stole your sig.
Processors and graphics haven't mattered for a long time.
With RAM and SSD upgrades a 5 yr old computer is very fast.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
First, Windows 8 is awful. Secondly, computers have for the most part stopped advancing in great leaps and strides. The low end laptops that most people use have about the same specs as they did 3 years ago, so why would anyone need to buy a new computer? The new software works just fine on their old Win7 laptop.
The materials aren't the same cheap plastic and while you may consider this just aesthetics, I do not.
Apple sometimes has something genuinely new before others. Say about five years of having the latest Xeon processors for the old design of the Mac Pro sometimes as many as four months before they were available standalone or on any other system.
OS X is mighty useful OS. iLife is a nice suite of software. iWork is included nowadays although I stick to Office.
For those lesser knowing than the all knowing /. poster, the support provided by Applecare via in-store or in another form is quite simply unmatched. This isn't to say there is some good support out there, I think Dell for all their faults does a great job with respect to tech support and warranty repairs, but it's nothing like "there, better now" or "it'll be done in an hour" or "it'll be ready for you in the morning". And anyone else offering this tends to fairly uneven about the experience (I'm looking at you Best Buy!).
You have to consider the entire experience, not just the box.
Hand held now.
It connects to the tv screen bluetooth mouse and keyboard and it fits in my pocket.
I want to be able to type up a document in a pinch. Plug in my USB devices. Connect to HMDI TV, plug in an SD Card
Seriously, you can get a Nexus 7 for $200 that does all of this.
How so? I can connect a keyboard or mouse through an OTG cable to my first-generation Nexus 7 running Android 4.4. But it doesn't mount USB flash drives or SD card readers through the same cable, nor does it have HDMI out. Were both features added to the second-generation Nexus 7?
Is that still the case now? Seems like the consoles might be siphoning away some of those gamer sales.
PCs have grown to be powerful and surprisingly durable enough that it will work well for five years. In our office, we do cascade our workstations where the powerful are for the graphics and video teams and go to cascade it slowly to the rest of the company. We have some computers running on Core 2 duo/quad that are still ok for use in administrative computers.
The only time we purchase computer is when the old system conks out and parts are no longer available (such as lga 775 motherboards) or we have a new employee to use it. But generally, the cpu, memory, monitor, keyboard, mouse are ok. So we do just replace parts (harddrive, power supply) instead of replacing the entire computer. One factor is to retire high wattage workstations in favor of the modern low power system that will hopefully reduce our energy consumption (we have one of the highest electricity rates in the world.)
I think this will happen to other computing devices such as mobile phones and tablets where Apple and Samsung recently reported a drop in income (started.) Afterwards, it will just reach some steady state replacement cycle much like what we have in PCs.
Moving forward, this 2014, we have a couple of high end workstations lined up and desktop PCs for purchase. This will hopefully slow down the demise of the PC industry that is seeing 82.6 MILLION of sales as of the recent quarter.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I think the primary reason is not that people don't use desktops, but they don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. Sometime in the previous decade, the progress of hardware outpaced the bloat of software. Moreover, software bloat actually slowed down a bit. Win 7 is just as fast as Vista, and Win 8 is supposedly faster in many ways than Windows 7. I am typing this on a 3.5 year old laptop with Core i3 330M, 4gig ram, and Windows 7 and honestly it's hard to justify upgrading either hardware or software, except perhaps for wanting a lighter, thinner machine.
The next issue is software. Windows 8 is very unwelcome by users. I act as a sort of sysadmin for the extended family and friends, and I see a huge amount of confusion among non-techie people. I am telling them all that if they have a decently fast PC running Windows 7, they should just stick with it. After all, if they run into issues with Win 8, it's not just their headache. It's mine too because I am the "support" person. I setup their system to boot into desktop and use the desktop all the time, and yet Windows still cons them every once in a while into using the Metro versions of Mail, IE, and other things, and then people ask me "how do I get rid of this thing"
Just last week, Windows 8 conned my parents to switch the machine from "local" account to MSN account and that caused quite a bit of headaches among people who can no longer login into a shared account because it requires one specific person's email password to login.
Most people don't program, but I do. Let me know when Visual Studio Express, or any programming environment for that matter, has been ported to Windows RT. Heck, last time I checked, you needed to give Microsoft your home phone number (to create a Microsoft account) and then apply (and reapply each month) for a developer license just to be able to run apps you compiled on a device you own.
I'd rather have a tablet that's a great tablet and a PC that's a great PC than one device that's only marginally good at being either one.
Unless you can't afford to buy both a great PC and a great tablet for your child. Sometimes parents have to compromise.
Websites are also way faster and snappier with Flashblock, and some would be even faster and snapper with minimal function loss if I installed NoScript.
Unless an AMD E2 or a Celeron 847 is slower than the single-core, dual-thread Atom N450 in my current laptop, it can't be that bad. I've made the N450 tolerable on the web by installing Xubuntu and making Flash click-to-play. I'm told APK could make it even faster with his DNS blacklisting tools. Pretty much the only web feature that I know I'm missing is WebGL, and that's because Intel GMA in practice stands for Graphics My Ass.
One thing you should keep in mind is that there are two kinds of Intel Core chips. The ones with 15W TDP and others with 35W TDP. The ones with 15W TDP are effectively the same, but are clocked slower to conserve the power. The 15W models are lighter and use less power, but they're portable. So, it's entirely possible that 15 mobile 15W TDP i7 feels slower than a 35W i5, and 15 watt i5 feels slower than 35 watt i3.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is that the name "i7" on mobile space is completely arbitrary (thank you intel so much for consistent chip naming convention). The cheaper i7 CPUs are dual-core with hyper threading, unlike the desktop parts where are quad-core with hyperthreading. Likewise, the mobile i5 is dual-core with hyper-threading even though desktop i5 is quad-core. So effectively all mobile Core processors, except for a few high end quad-core i7 models, are basically the same as the base i3. The only difference is the clock speed. All dual-core i7 models should really have been called i5 since they're all 2C, 4T, with turbo.
So, your experience with the i7 is entirely dependent on the kind of processor you got. There is the 15watt i7, which is slower than 35watt dual-core i7, which is slower than +40watt quad-core mobile i7. Having said that, I am surprised with the observation that an i7, even possibly a low TDP one, is slow. I type this on 3-year old i3-330M portable, and feel quite happy with the speed. I need to start doing something truly nefarious, like 40-tab web browser windows to feel it slow down.
And Camera sales are plunging just as rapidly.
Everything is migrating into the portable.
So what should I buy if I want a camera but don't want yet another $70 per month phone bill?
My i7 was a high TDP quad-core with hyperthreading.
It was easy to see over a decade ago that REAL computers will be for nerds once all the consumer devices are computerized so they no longer need a general purpose computer.
People bought computers to replace multiple old technologies (it cost many times more so it had to) from paper to typewriters to encyclopedias, CD collection, and now even the bookshelf. Most consumers didn't even scratch the surface of what the general PC could do.The general computer allows everything to converge on it because it's so flexible but it's also always going to be more complex. Once you can do what you want with the upgraded version of the old tech, you don't need the general computer. Outside of "pocket knife" like phones, divergence is the trend, not convergence.
Books never got far on the computer; but now eBooks are gaining ground like never before because of electronic book devices - which will gain ground against the book as long as the feature creep doesn't undermine the device's primary purpose - replacing a paper book. Your TV is increasingly smart and computerized all by itself and is mostly incompatible other than the shared cloud services, it's abilities are limited and again, anything to over generalize it will eventually undermine it's primary function. It's moving into the DVR and Blueray space; both of which are not really compatible with each other or the smart TV other than the image signal... not even the remotes are compatible enough to chuck any one of them. They have some overlap but they don't work together and the specialty add-on box is NOT desirable... consumers would prefer an app or plug-in device over another box. It could happen that cable TV boxes and SAT boxes become locked down apps for smart TVs... if they could converge against the generally divergent trend. A DVR could simply be storage and software on the TV; but again, we are still not converging (either way, it's still diverging from the PC.)
Smart phones like I said are an exception to the trend; but as we can see, it's a consumer device in a walled garden - even when business replaces PCs with smart phones wireless controlling operating your office space - it'll be a specialized set of tools in a walled environment with less flexibility. Most office computer needs are extremely limited and now migrating to the "cloud" where thin clients are all the rage.
Gaming is already diverging to all the different niche devices, each of which are well positioned for certain kinds or situations for playing games. Consoles in some form will exist but they'll be a slice of the market instead of defining the market. Just like the PC will be a small slice of the computer market.
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I do know where an Apple store is
So do I. It just happens to be 90 miles away if the local Apple authorized dealer can't fix a problem. What experience have you had with Apple dealers other than an Apple Store?
All the hardware Apple uses is available in OEM form for less money.
Including the case? I'd be interested to see what other major brand small form factor desktop PC comes close to the Mac mini.
I built more than a few [PCs] for people [dissatisfied with shitty name-brand PCs] too. $50.. an hour of my time picking parts. an hour assembling and installing windows. $25 an hour for something i enjoy doing.
Hey AC, can you build me a new laptop?
Don't worry; it's not just you. A lot of other "Who needs a camera if you have your phone?" comments have been posted to Slashdot over the past year, and people often forget that this portable convergence comes at a cost. Anything merged into the phone tends to require dumbphone customers to upgrade to a smartphone and pay several times more for the plan. I currently pay $84 per year for my flip phone, and if I were to get an Android phone from the same carrier, that'd be $420 per year.
I missed that. Well, your use pattern does seem quite unusual, or say in the upper tail of the distribution of PC users by performance applications. I mean, building software can be very taxing on the system, not just CPU but also I/O. I know some people like to put their home directory on a RAID array to build things faster. Also multimedia editing. Laptops can be used for this, but in the end, this is why we have desktops and even "workstations". Some things will be always slower on laptops. But I do see a certain degree of stagnation in hardware. If you have a nice Sandy Bridge system, there is little reason to move to say Haswell.
For what it's worth, I spend the vast majority of my time on Phenom II desktops with 12-16 GB of memory and big RAID-5 arrays, so most laptops are likely to be disappointing. I suppose Moore's Law works actively against me.
Yup, Me to. My wife's XP box, 6 years running, new: MB, CPU, RAM, and SSD, Win 7. Very fast.
Reused: DVD R/W, Large quiet case ,silent power supply, data drives (2 x1 TB, one switched as an internal backup drive.
How is that the case? A PC maker would buy enough Windows licenses for all machines that leave the factory with Windows, and it would install Kubuntu or FreeBSD or SteamOS or Android/x86 on the rest. Or has Microsoft returned to its blatantly anticompetitive practice of including PCs that leave the factory without Windows when counting the number of Windows licenses for which a PC maker must pay? In that case, do PC makers that make both Windows PCs and Chromebooks pay for Windows on the Chromebooks?
Game hardware requirements are now driven largely by the developer's desires to be able to sell into the console market.
ergo, *PC* gaming requirements aren't increasing like they used too.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Steve Jobs made the same analogy to cars and trucks. Right now, for someone who needs a car daily but a truck occasionally, the market provides a way to buy a car and rent a truck. How would one go about buying a tablet for daily use and renting a PC for occasional use as a workstation?
[Adding an external keyboard] just turned [your tablet] into a crappy laptop.
For one thing, the advantage of a 10 inch tablet with keyboard like the Transformer Book over a 10 inch laptop is that tablets are still available, unlike 10 inch laptops that have been discontinued for a year. You don't have to hit up eBay or Craigslist for "as is" netbooks; you can get a new machine with the manufacturer's warranty. For another, there's value in being able to detach a tablet from its keyboard and use it alone as a tablet when you happen not to be typing at the moment.
First let's get the terminology straight so we don't end up talking past each other. To me, "consumption" means either A. an old name for tuberculosis or B. using something up. When you view a work of authorship created by someone else, you don't "consume" it; the work is still there.
Now the real problem here is one of upward mobility when one who currently views works decides to start creating them. Someone who already owns a PC, which is useful for both viewing works and creating them, can switch from viewing to creating with very little up-front cost. But someone who owns only a tablet that runs a locked-down mobile operating system must first buy a PC. This sticker shock could end up discouraging people from even starting to create.
the inflated market must shrink back to its previous levels before the sales numbers will stop falling.
With reduced economies of scale by selling PCs only to people who work for a living, prices are likely to rise to meet the previous prices, with a decade of inflation on top of that. This only makes the sticker shock of a viewer-to-author transition even worse.
So if you have a PC game, and player 1 uses the household's only PC, how do players 2, 3, and 4 use smartphones and tablets?
A tablet with a keyboard and external monitor is indistinguishable from a desktop for most user tasks.
But once your needs grow to encompass a task not among "most user tasks", you'll notice that key applications aren't in the App Store or Windows Store, and you'll need to save up for a PC. For example, if you start taking a programming class in school, you'll notice that Xcode isn't ported to iPad and Visual Studio Express isn't ported to Windows RT. The only way you'll be able to complete the coursework is if the class is "flipped", with lectures viewed at home and exercises done in the school's computer lab.
I haven't replaced my laptop for almost 5 years because it ran nearly everything just fine. It didn't lag, it could play HD movies in full screen, it could even play certain games when I'm traveling, it even had a 10 hour battery life, still goes about 8 hours. I had to finally give in to buying a new laptop because the plastic casing is falling apart :O
And in all honesty, performance wise, it's still great even compared to the new laptops.
I wish I could have found a laptop like that when I bought a XPS 13 Developer Edition with the 1080p display in a 13 inch form factor, giving 169 DPI. It was the only Linux-compatible laptop I could buy with reasonable pixels for the screen size. The 275 DPI display of the Yoga 2 Pro would pack 63% more pixels in and allow me to adjust my fonts 40% smaller. I still see the pixels in my current display at 18" away from the screen, especially on curved letters, and it's the lack of pixel density getting in the way of smaller fonts. A 300 DPI laptop would be wonderful!
Be relentless!
I can do all of that on a Samsung Android tablet for half the price
Microsoft has delivered two customer-visible innovations to Windows PC's in the past decade:
1. Fisher-Price^h^h^h^hAero UI
2. Non-atrocious security and stability
The eye candy has never been enough to move units on its own. It looked pretty, but no one in their right mind jumped on the bandwagon for the translucent task bar. Microsoft did (mostly) fix the gaping security vulnerabilities though; A decade ago Win Rot was a given, just a matter of time. Sure, we geeks took that as the cue to wipe the hard drive and start over, but "normal people" bought a new PC, and threw the old one in the nearest dumpster or out of the way closet. Today, it takes a modicum of active effort (or ignorance) to spoil a Windows installation. People have to wait for the thing to actually die, hardware-wise, before they have an excuse to go shopping for a new one.
In the meantime they're snapping up tablets and smartphones, and are finding themselves on the computer that much less. I don't think too many people are actively ditching their PC's in favor of their iPad, but an awful lot of tablet owners are skipping the second (or third) PC for the house, and they're not urgently buying replacements when their PC's die, even if it was the only (or last one).
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when they are so ridiculous?
They actually become slower because of very aggressive CPU throttling which you can no longer turn off.
If you take the sales figures from the US, assume that all non-Apple units are shipped with Windows, you get:
Apple: +28.5%
Windows: 15380497 down to 13627274 = -12.9%
Obviously it is NOT just the competition from tablets and smartphones. (if it were, Apple would see similar declines)
It is two things:
- Windows 8
- Microsofts reluctance to allow Windows 7 on new PCs
When Microsoft inflicted Vista, almost all PC-makers just ignored it and continued with XP, but now things are different, it is pretty hard to get a Windows-PC without Windows 8 today. You seem to need some special deal with Microsoft.
It looks like we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Windows-hegemony. While Windows will hold the largest marketshare on the desktop for some time, the alternatives will grow into "too large to ignore" territory.
This comes with Windows. Most Windows desktop applications are developed in a 75 dpi environment and massively bumping the dpi on Windows makes this become painfully obvious. Most users of this machine will use Windows. Imagine 3200x1800 at 75 dpi. That's why I'm pointing it out as ridiculous.
The experiences I had prior to Apple opening it's stores are a major reason I do not want a computer from a company that doesn't have retail stores where I can go bitch at a guy in person.
My circumstances happen to be such that there exists an Apple store in my country, but it's in another city 90 miles away. In your opinion, would having to pay someone to drive you 90 miles there and 90 miles back still count as "access to good tech support in-person cheap"?
Tablets are good for the bus and train rides, when reading long documents and just browsing stuff on the web. Even though my tablet has a keyboard, it is a pain to type on. The lappy helps me get work done. At home, the desktop is the best unit for that. My phone is pretty powerful, but I mainly use that as a music player and to check e-mails and texts. More work spread out over more devices. It is no surprise that Lenovo edged out HP, however. The HP lappy was good, but I hated to run to a wall socket every two hours, even with an extended battery. Lenovo has a far better battery life. I am happy to see that their latest lappies can now handle video editing, which is awesome. I use all my devices and find it hard to function without them.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
when a decent laptop is $300
My gamming rig that was 5 years old needed a refresh so I bought a complete rig from one of those online places that sells you the Motherboard, CPU and Memory combo. Along with a deeply discounted graphics card.
No difference whatsover in performance in my current games or apps. Software still has not been opmitized to take advantage of faster CPU speeds.
If your PC is 5 years old stay with it.
The next frontier in ripping people off for the next 10 years is Cellphones. The industry has shifted and it's new phones every year for people.
What an awsome platform for planned obsolence and a captive audence of millions CHA CHING!
I built my first PC a few years ago, and since then, I never buy prebuilt. It takes a bit of time, but I prefer to build my systems myself. Are people like me considered in these numbers? From the looks of the companies listed, I would say no. Hopefully this is a combination of people moving to tablets and phone as well as people actually building their own machines. Though obviously I expect the former to be far more influential in these numbers than the latter. Oh, and I use Windows 8.1. With mods/programs (specifically ClassicShell), it looks like a new Windows 7 that uses less resources. Metro is still there, but I haven't touched it since.
SO let me see if I get this straight. Apple sells 15 million ipads in Q4 and it's a huge success. PC makers (of which there are only a few anymore) sell 6x that and it's a huge disaster?
I'd eagerly buy a 15" Wuxga laptop.
You don't need to wipe the device to unlock the bootloader and root.
You can reflash it with standard linux. /dev/usb.
You can install third-party applications that will read
You *could* decide to wipe and unlock, but you don't have to, so that catch 22 is one that you're manufacturing so you can whine and whinge.
So does anyone thing that increasing growth forever is possible or sustainable?
Putting horrible Window 8 and the growth in popularity of tablets aside for the moment, the summary actually says that they are down to the levels of 2009. Which at the time were the biggest ever (at the time). It is just like when people get all crazy about it being a 30 year temperature low or something. You mean that in as little as 30 years ago, it was slightly just less cold? And you are surprised and astounded by this?
Anyway, some have mentioned about power of computers being sufficient etc... even putting that aside, at some point after year over year growth in an industry that has been around for decades, where it has been getting cheaper and cheaper, at some point you are going to get a bit of market saturation, and along with ALL the other factors already mentioned here, a bit of a market correction. What should be surprising is that it is so small and it took this long to happen. There has also been a lot of consolidation among PC makers over the last 10 years...
Yes, actually. My current, homebuilt, sub-$1,500-when-new desktop is already two months past its third birthday, and it still runs absolutely everything like greased lightning. The only failure it has had in three years is a failed RAM stick (replaced free of charge -- forgot to mention that in my last post) and a faulty power supply fan (worked fine, but started making a clicking noise even after being cleaned -- likely a faulty bearing). The PSU was replaced free of charge, including free shipping in both directions. And the only upgrade the PC has had in that time is a second SSD added to replace the original, first-gen SSD it was built with, while the original SSD became a secondary drive.
And before that, my previous machine was an Acer notebook computer which passed 4.5 years of age before it was replaced -- not because it was failing or even too slow, but because I decided I wanted a desktop to complement my laptop, and the desktop became my primary machine.
That notebook, now 7 years and 7 months old, *still* works perfectly, and is still used as my tertiary machine. (I bought a newer laptop solely because I wanted a daylight-viewable LCD for the rare times when I want to work in direct sunlight.) The older laptop's quite capable of running a current Microsoft OS, as well, although I choose to run it on Windows 7. Note that it actually shipped with Windows XP, so it is already running two major releases of the OS after that it shipped with, and is capable of running three releases later with adequate performance.
And in that time it has had precisely zero components fail. The only maintenance it has had is the cooling fan cleaned once every 6-12 months. The only damage it has is completely cosmetic -- I accidentally left the hinged flash card compartment door open once when I shoved the laptop in its bag, and snapped the door off. The keyboard also has several keys that have changed from a matte to a glossy texture where my fingers strike them (indicative of just how much I use the thing), and the color of the silver palmrest has changed to reveal that of the black plastic beneath, where my palms touch it.
And I should point out here that these machines are used a LOT. I work from home, and I work hard. I also play hard. And most of that work or play takes place on these machines. They're used for easily 10+ hours a day average, 6.5 days a week, if not more.
So no, your Apples don't last longer. As I said, they last the same amount of time, or perhaps a bit less.