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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
...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.)
I got it. I used it for a few months because I support "normal people" and had to learn it. I moved to Windows 7 and never put that scourge back on the laptop ever again. Windows 8 definitely contributed to driving down PC hardware sales.
III. is incorrect. The tech-savvies "coming of age" now have jobs, relationships, kids, responsibilities. Gone are the days of spending a whole day troubleshooting and tweaking video drivers to get the latest game to work. Now it's a matter of "I need it to work and don't have the time to fix it". That's when you realize the phones, tablets and Macs are built to be simple and reliable to use. Perhaps not perfect but reliable. Those who have come-of-age have a little more money than time these days.
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.
Tablets don't have decent keyboards. Smart phone additionally have screens that are too small.
There are a lot of use cases where tablets and smartphones are sufficient. There's a huge number where they aren't. But people will use what they have on hand even if it's poorly adapted to the job.
FWIW, I'm considering getting a smartphone. It has a use-case that makes sense. I can't see ANY case for a tablet...except for things like warehouse worker, or inventory control. The ergonomics of keyboards are bad enough.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
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.
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.
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 ----