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PC Shipments Are Slowly Recovering
mrspoonsi sends this news from TechCrunch:
Over the past two years, the growing popularity of mobile devices has eaten into PC sales. A new report by Gartner, however, shows that shipments may continue to enjoy a very slow but steady uptick this year as tablet sales hit a peak. The research firm found that worldwide PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2014 grew one percent year-over-year, the first increase since 2012. In the U.S., PC shipments increased 13.1 percent year-over-year, the fastest increase in four years, thanks to holiday purchases. Inexpensive laptops (about $200 to $300), thin and light notebooks, and laptops with a detachable screen helped drive growth. Lenovo continued to be the number one PC maker in terms of shipment volume, with a 19.4 percent marketshare.
People got over their abject fear of windows 8, and now they have to replace their XP machines.
The last time I rebuilt my gaming PC was before the Great Recession in 2007. After being out of work for two years (2009-2010), filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011, and having so many short-term jobs in the last few years that I lost count, I'm financially back to where I was before the Great Recession came and went. Replacing the game PC has been a low priority for a great many years.
My estimate on the reasons:
1. People have limited amounts of money for computer gadgets. IE tablet OR new laptop/PC
2. Tablets were the 'new thing', but people who would buy them now already have one(lowering sales of them) and/or have gotten over the 'shiny' and are perhaps now looking for more functionality again. I know I hate typing on mine. What's one of the hotter accessories? Bluetooth keyboard, often built into the case itself.
So people put off buying a new laptop and such in favor of the tablet. Especially with the fun of Windows 8. Now that tablet purchasing is more or less down to routine replacement, people are picking up PCs again.
I don't read AC A human right
IDC saw the worldwide PC market down 2.4 percent.
Which is it Sunshine?
Even though Windows XP support expired a while back, are people just now getting around to actually replacing them?
Very few people have any need to upgrade.
Some do, of course, and sooner or later there will be new breakthrough that will justify upgrades for most people, but a large number of people have all the computer power they need until something actually fails.
This is why software providers are trying to force upgrades for marginally better if not actually inferior versions.
Tablets came out. Many basic users who used to buy a computer figured a tablet was good enough for them now. PC sales rapidly declined and the death of the PC was declared. I'm sure Windows 8 had a part in that too. Now as the tablet market has stabilized, sales numbers should as well.
I think that on the tablet front, even Apple has been aggressively trying to push iPad sales. When I stopped at Minneapolis Airport recently in transit, I was at the Concierge, and was shocked to see every table have 2 iPads, and at the bar, there being a whole row of them. Given that those ain't cheap.
As for PCs, they've been selling like they have to to replace older broken down ones. But Windows 8.1 is still bad, but now the news of Windows 10 improving things may well have gotten confidence back again. Add to that the fact that there are a few Surface Pro 3 like hybrids out there, and that takes away some reason to own a tablet. Here, at least, you have Wintel tablets w/ the usual legacy apps base, vs Android tablets and iPads.
The other reason may be that on the iOS and Android fronts, most of their apps run on phones as well, thereby reducing the need to have tablets to run them. Only place where tablets have the edge over phones has been on the Windows platform, and that's b'cos while there are a gazillion apps for Wintel, there are comparatively next to none for Windows RT or Windows Phone OS. I do think that Windows hybrids could pick once Windows 10 is out. As for tablets, both Apple and Google have to figure out a way to differentiate tablets from phones (in terms of functionality). Since tablets are lousy to type on, and there ain't any good ergonomic bluetooth keyboards that would make it comfortable, they ain't gonna replace laptops or PCs. That leaves them w/ only touch capabilities, which phones have as well, so barring a few applications where a bigger screen helps, I don't see how tablets can hold their own. Maybe if Apple & Google come out w/ ergonomic keyboards for iPads, Nexus and other Android tablets, they could not just make money on them, but also help their tablets sell.
1) Gods help me if have to type anything of substance on a phone or tablet (without a full keyboard) /. crowd so much, I love building/upgrading my own systems, it's fun and cheap.
2) I'm a gamer, enough said,
3) I like a nice big clear monitor to work on, no tablet comes close
4) Though it doesn't apply to people outside of the
5) Processing/GPU power and cost. If you're not worried about physical contraints, as is the case with PCs vs. phones/tablets, you can get SO much more power for less money. Yeah my desktop case is big, but you simply can't get the kind of graphics power I want for gaming in anything else.
I think people are starting to realize the PC is still very, very useful.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Splitting hairs a bit?
I would hardly say that an uptick in Surface et al is a move away from tablets.
Lenovo continued to be the number one PC maker in terms of shipment volume, with a 19.4 percent marketshare.
Does that include Apple PCs?
At last we are entering the post post-PC era and can get back to sensible device design. Though I'm sure some pundits will still say this is the post-PC era, as they have been (incorrectly) saying since Compaq shut its doors in the late 90's.
There's always going to be market for "professionals" that require full blown PCs. The "casual" market is better served by tablets and Chromebooks, or anything that people basically can't screw up. Unfortunately that means "professionals" will pay more because there "casual" users aren't there to subsidized development of the latest CPU/GPU. My friend was shocked a couple weeks ago while customizing his ThinkCentre SFF, ended up being near $1,000 (w/SSD). To quote him "Damn for this kind of price, I could hook up a MacBook Air and call it day. Except I don't buy Apple."
Tablets seem to be peaking. Pretty much anyone that wants one has one (or two) already. For those of us that do actual work on a computer, the tablet is sorely lacking.
With Microsoft basically giving away Windows to manufacturers of lower end PC's, the prices are continuing to fall.
Case in point - at Christmas I got my nephew an HP Stream Notebook. $200 and it has an SSD. It's actually pretty good and a lot more useful than any tablet I have used. Small, light weight, expandable storage, great battery life. And you can type on it.
I think PC gaming went first. So many of the genres I used to play disappeared or got dumbed down. And it was always the latest games that drove my upgrade cycle. Something simple like Minecraft doesn't require this.
If I were in the PC hardware biz, I'd look into owning a game company on the side that focuses on the most beautiful, resource intensive games I could muster.
"I thought I could postpone getting a new computer in favor of a tablet. Guess I was wrong."
Tablets and phone, console, laptop, all pay homage to my bruiser of a desktop... either by syncing, backing up, hosting accounts... desktop rules them all.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The article says "In the U.S., PC shipments increased 13.1 percent year-over-year, the fastest increase in four years, thanks to holiday purchases." but how can holiday purchase be responsible given that the holidays happen every year. That's a non-explanation.
Phones got bigger. Laptops got lighter and faster. Pretty much the only time I use my tablet now is on airplanes, where tiny seats mean typing on a laptop involves elbowing my neighbors.
Source.
it is actually surprising nobody has made a LAN version of OnLive where the video commands are sent to a rendering server, and streamed video is sent back.
That's a feature of SteamOS and NVIDIA Shield products, which can stream Windows games and the Windows desktop. That's also what things like NComputing, RDP, and VNC are supposed to be for, but the cost of Windows licenses makes it not quite as much of a win to lawfully replace Windows desktops with thin clients that still display Windows applications.
That leaves them w/ only touch capabilities, which phones have as well, so barring a few applications where a bigger screen helps, I don't see how tablets can hold their own.
That or for applications that don't need cellular voice or data. A tablet without a data plan can be cheaper than a similarly capable phone without a data plan for two reasons. One is no cellular radio on the BOM, and the other is that in the North American market, a phone is priced for carrier subsidy, not direct sales to end users.
it would be nice if I could *just* buy the screen (albeit it a little larger form-factor) for, you know...less.
Go to any big box electronics chain and look in the TV section. Notice that TV makers charge per square inch because a display panel costs per square inch. It's so much cheaper to make a 1600p-class display at 10" than at 30" that the manufacturer can get away with squeezing a multi-purpose computer into the bill of materials.
If you actually look at the Gartner report the TechCrunch is based upon you'll see TC sort of dropped the ball here. While it's true that worldwide PC sales are up 1% 4Q14 vs 4Q13, year over year sales figures show PC sales total for the year down 0.2%. What the numbers actually say is the PC market would be far worse off if it hadn't been for a slew of super cheap Windows tablets (counted by Gartner as PC sales) and laptops sold around the holidays. These sales have only come from Microsoft and Intel basically subsidizing the PC market to provide some sort of down market competition to Android and iOS tablets.
If you look at IDC's numbers covering the same time period you've got a YoY drop of 2.1% worldwide. IDC does not count things like the HP Stream 7 or the Surface Pro as a PC in their reporting. However IDC counts Chromebooks as PCs where Gartner does not.
No matter what numbers you look at the PC market is seeing declining sales worldwide. Even if you believe the Gartner growth numbers for 4Q14, they're still a full 4% lower than 4Q12. It looks even worse if you compare the numbers to 2011 or 2010.
It's not a story about traditional PCs vs tablets. The real interesting story is smart phones vs everything else. A smart phone (unlike a PC) is useful for pretty much every demographic in mature and emerging markets. They are where the future growth is going to be. That's not to say the PC is going to disappear but I doubt the market will ever see growth like 2000-2010 and likely will never see another peak like that of 2010.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...much of the growth and most of the profits.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Nah, its price cutting, Microsoft has aggressively cut prices of Windows 8 (think $5-$8 per installation), Intel has slash processor costs for its low end chips.
They even explain that in the article, if anybody bothered to read it:
"Inexpensive laptops (about $200 to $300), thin and light notebooks, and laptops with a detachable screen helped drive growth."
They're discounting like crazy to make the volume.
Are you saying Tablets are a fad? I think that's wishful thinking.
The article only briefly mentions the fact that PC prices fell a lot while volumes only increased marginally. In spite of the click bait headline, the PC market still smells like one big load of wither. Oh I forget, Microsoft isn't sharing the pain because they didn't drop their per unit monpoly winnings... for now.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Tablets for Work failed! They are consumer devices.
Now, my Surface Pro 3 on the other hand. It rocks. It is a tablet, every bit as awesome as the iPad or Kindle, yet I can do my work on it too. Sure Microsoft missed the Tablet explosion, but now that it is over, everyone but Microsoft, and hardware manufacturers who put Windows on their devices, is missing the hybrid market.
Upgrading really hasn't made much sense in some time. About the only upgrades that make sense, is if you build your system wrong initially, you *might* be able to upgrade to fix it. i.e. you underestimated RAM usage, or gaming VS video card etc... The problem is players like Intel change their standards every 2-3 years. So if you are trying to upgrade anything beyond that, good luck as it won't be compatible anymore. It will use a different socket, it will use a different DDR, it will use a different power cable, etc... which would force you to replace so many things, you might as well just buy a whole new boxen.
I had my house broken into this past year and was robbed a few months ago. I was only gone from the house for about 4 hours.
They took my 40" LCD TV. They took my Xbox 360 and all my games. Then even took my fscking Kelvin Kline cologne.
The one thing they didn't take? My desktop. It was easily worth more money than anything else I had, and in fact if you added up everything else they took, it wouldn't have equaled what my PC was worth (data and sentiment aside also).
Why? Because A) It is difficult and confusing for idiot robbers. There is a rats nest of cables plugged into everything that all need to be taken apart, and you need all the pieces. B) It is large and unwieldy (mine is even an ITX build!), big components, and multiple things to carry, and C) Ever bought a PC used or second hand? Not much of a market for it, and they are not worth much, particularly if you do not know what is in the guts.
If that was a Laptop, or a Tablet, or a Ultrabook (particularly anything recognizable as Apple) it would have been one of the very first things stolen. Easy to identify, easy to transport, easy to sell, worth money.
So there you go:
6) Theft Deterrent!
I think my next build will either be some super expensive system in a massive full tower case, or I'll find a nice bland beige box circa 1995 to put it in... Call it thievery camouflage...