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Sales Of PCs, Laptops, Tablets Continue to Fall, Hit Lowest Point Since 2011 (canalys.com)
According to the latest numbers provided by marketing research firm Canalys, the shipments of PC devices -- which includes desktops, notebooks, all-in-ones, two-in-ones, and tablets -- amounted to 101 million units in the first quarter of 2016. The number underscores a 13% decline from the same period a year ago, and it is also the lowest volume since the second quarter of 2011. Apple led the chart among PC OEMs, moving 14 million units (suffering 17% fall), followed by Chinese conglomerate Lenovo. HP assumed the third position, with Dell and Samsung closely following it. Tim Coulling, Canalys Senior Analyst said in a press statement: The global PC market had a bad start to 2016 and it is difficult to see any bright spots for vendors in the coming quarters. The tablet boom has faded in the distance and the market is fully mature. Global shipments declines are expected to continue unless vendors bring transformational innovation to the market. Apple and Microsoft are propping up shipments in established markets with their detachables, but price points make them less affordable in low-income countries. Although other vendors are coming to market with cheaper alternatives, they are unlikely to have a big impact on volumes in the short term. The number of people looking to buy their first PC is at an all-time low and 2016 is likely to bring yet more turmoil to global PC vendors.
Why buy a PC when it is saddled with the data harvesting of Windows 10? I do not want Microsoft to be monitoring me and my family via Windows 10.
We really haven't had a lot of advancement in consumer PCs for consumers to get excited about. It was easy to get consumers to want to upgrade in years past but what do they need now? They have the monitor they want, they have enough storage, and their applications all run well. We were able to previously sell them on "new is better" but now the best we can do is sell them on "replace instead of repair". We used to be selling PCs to people who want to run the latest game or the newest office suite. Now most PC time is spent on facebook, which doesn't require much more than the fanciest version of solitaire.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Just because of Windows 8 and now spy-10.
OK, let's.
So as these devices/gadgets stop getting better people don't feel the need to upgrade every 10 minutes. Or for PC's are people just upgrading the component parts (HDD to SSD, Faster graphics/network cards or more Memory)? Seems quite natural to me not sure why anyone's surprised
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I haven't upgraded in 5 years because for building the same price computer I can only get a CPU twice as fast and a graphics card 3 times as fast as 5 years ago. It is a far cry from doubling every single year. It just isn't worth it to upgrade quickly anymore.
Drop the price
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
more people come to their senses and won't buy the latest and greatest hyped up machinery when the current one still works or are ad-blockers the cause ;-)
Moore's law may continue, but the only reason to replace most PC's is that it's cheaper than reloading the OS after a severe malware infestation. The software isn't getting better, and isn't bloating as fast as it used to.
...you are a hardcore gamer or a business needed lots of power, there is no real reason for regular or average computer users to upgrade constantly.
Windows is an awful mess and people are tired of the constant upgrades and changing featuresets/UIs. The computer you bought 3-5 years ago, barring mechanical failure still meets or exceeds your needs for the most part, so why waste the money?
Computers are too common, so the "WOW" factor that tells folks to buy a new one all the time just isn't there. Tablets/Smartphones are starting to hid the same skid.
It's simple... We've hit a performance plateau quite a while ago. Not sure when I bought my Dell XPS 15 L502x. Something like 2010 and it was on sale for 50% of the price. Anyway, that is a Core i7 2630QM (or 2635QM, I need to check) and it came with 4GB RAM (later upgraded to 16GB). There is simply nothing I can throw at it that it can't do with cycles spare.
Five year old machine: totally fine...
So, PC sales are dependent on replacement sales... as most people do not need more performance.
I'd wager to say that the late Core2Duos in the XP days, would be enough performance for most tasks, but I'm sure I'll get the 640kByte is enough quote attributed to Billy
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I need a new laptop too.
Sell me one with a 16:10 screen and windows 7..
Linus Torvalds' request of making 2560x1600 seems better too.
Smartphone sales growth continues to be explosive."
Maybe we should just add smartphones to the definition of "PCs" (a device you can carry in your pocket does seem to be a "personal" device, anyway) and go on with life?
Innovation didn't stagnate, it just is being focused on a new form factor.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Can't afford PC, laptop, or tablet.
I have a 7 year old PC that is still going strong. Sure, I could plop down about $600 bucks to buy one that is twice as fast, but why do that when it works just fine. Now...my 2007 iMac with only 2 GB RAM...that is another story. I would have upgraded a while ago if Apple didn't charge an arm and a leg for their stuff.
Nearly everyone that wants or needs a device has one now and the one they have will last them many more years than they used to since nothing is improving significantly enough to justify upgrading as quickly anymore.
Some official statistics may look decent, but the labor-force participation (a figure not prone to fudging like politically redefined unemployment) is the lowest it has been since 1978.
With over 94 million not even looking for work — and thus not included in the unemployment statistics — we can afford less and less non-necessities.
With the constantly rising food-prices and the incomes of those still working stalling, expect further declines.
Socialism — measured as the part of the GDP spent by government — sucks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The industry just needs to get off its laurels and stop pushing cloud. Since everything is going web application, there is little reason to have a beefy desktop system. The software vendors are pushing leased software that's cloud based, meaning the money hardware vendors would have made is now being spent monthly/annually by the software/cloud vendors.
If the hardware industry decided to standardize and actually push a free OS like Linux and tout the advantages to owning your own data, they would be back in business. Its wishful thinking and the hardware industry as a whole has never been very good about acting in their own best interest, preferring to suck the dick of their sugar daddy Microsoft but we could hope.
I don't want to give all my data to Microsoft and Apple won't let use the computer the way I want to. My five year old computer does everything I want.
As flooded as the PC market is, and the fact that the cost of parts to build computers has dropped to such an affordable degree; a good number people now who consider obtaining a new PC, or an upgraded PC will usually build one from scratch for 1/3 of the cost. There are also a good number sites online where you can purchase cheap barebones systems.
Last summer I refurbished a small manufacturer in the agricultural space (mainly for my own sanity). We tried to buy new and failed.
It was a Windows shop with many legacy XP systems scattered about on the production floor (some used maybe once per month depending on product mix out the door). Not a single long-term employee expressed any love for Windows, so we had buy-in to replace everything on the white collar side with Mac Minis, after one of the employees brought in his own quad-core mini with 16 GB RAM to show off.
Then we went to the Apple store and discovered that in the soldered RAM era, the price point we had approved covered a dual core system with 8 GB of RAM soldered in. By the time we scaled it up to be comparable to the Mini from two years earlier, it became 50% more expensive. Because of the Windows legacy, we expected fairly heavy use of virtualization, making 8 GB a very low ceiling into the near future.
And then the answer came back at the new value point: well, fuck it, we're already getting an armload of HP refurbs for the manufacturing floor, let's just get more refurbished Windows 7 boxes for the office staff, too.
More teeth, smaller apple. Funny how you can now see Apple shrinking all the way from the stock exchange.
For me that's the main reason.
And those somewhat worth it in terms of performance are absurdly expensive. Any good gaming pc for example costs easily upwards of 1.5k and that's way too much.
VR is going to take off at a ridiculous pace, and people will need a powerful PC (or XBox One or PS3...) to use it. So I suspect this trend will reverse either next year, or the year following.
The global economy is battling the Fed and USA Congress cancer.
USA Federal reserve and USA Congress are the primary engines for the weakness, creating inflation and debt that cannot be repaid, pushing a huge part of the rest of the world to weaken their currencies and to get into debt in response to Fed's manipulation.
As far as the eye can see manufacturing and other forms of production and business formation are suffering from complete absence of actual savings and thus capital investments due to destruction of the principle of savings. The leverage created by the chase for the return in a completely manipulated anti-return (anti-savings) centrally planned collectivist market inflated prices for everything in the market, punishing people who have no real money (fiat is not) and whose salaries are not growing anywhere near the growth of prices caused by money printing and borrowing at governmental levels.
Basically people are too broke, that's why sales are falling, and it is not only the computer sales that are down, sales are down on everything that is more expensive.
AFAIC at this point we need a massive financial deleveraging and this will not happen without debt restructuring starting at government levels, starting with the USA dollar and bond holders getting hit.
There needs to be and will be a moment in time, when government bonds will finally be seen for what they are: debt that cannot ever be repaid in any money that is worth something real as opposed to printed paper. For money to be worth something real, a productive base must support it, not just a baseless belief that things will go on forever as they are today.
The consumer is broke because the consumer has no job that pays anywhere near enough what he needs to be able to consume and that job doesn't exist because there is no savings to create that job while there are plenty taxes, rules, laws and regulations that prevent that job from existing.
We will get over this of-course eventually, too bad it has lasted this long and will cause so much pain before it gets any better.
You can't handle the truth.
PC manufacturers are running into a few problems:
- Despite all the bad things about Windows 10, one of the good things is that the OS has been slimmed down somewhat so it runs reasonably well on lower-spec systems. I have a 7 year old PC at home that works great after I added an SSD. This is probably so they can squeeze Win10 onto bare-bones tablets and even smaller devices. By doing this, however, the need for a new PC is less urgent.
- Specs on even low-end PCs are quite impressive and will last most medium-duty users much longer than they used to.
- "Information consumers" don't need PCs anymore. That crowd shifted to phones and tablets long ago. Most people won't watch movies on a desktop PC or even a laptop, so the sale vendors might have gotten from there goes away.
- For every well-built, good vendor supported PC made by HP, Lenovo, Dell or others, those vendors put out a parallel line of garbage desktops and laptops sold for almost zero margin at Best Buy and friends. All of a sudden, that's not such a good strategy anymore.
The PC vendors need to realize that, although the market is shrinking, there's a lot of room for margin in well-made PCs, laptops and workstations. Look how much Apple makes on their devices, and they even get to charge people $300 for an extra, non-upgradable 128 GB of SSD space! Or, look at the workstation vendors -- you can easily spec out a machine for mid 5 figures if you really need two 24 core Xeons, 4 video cards and a terabyte of RAM.
If the vendors stopped making the garbage line of PCs and trying to make a profit off them, they would find success among the crowd who still needs PCs to do real work.
As software companies are forced to write for less horsepower to have good applications on the mobile devices the side-effect is supporting slower, older computers.
Either that or the application is made available only for the mobile device. For example, you can't use Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or many banks' check deposit applications on a webcam-equipped PC; you need either iOS or Android with Google Play. You can't even comment on a Vine or Instagram post if you don't own an iPhone or an Android phone because they require all commenters to have first created an account inside the app.
Seriously, today's PCs are GROTESQUELY overpowered for anything but certain types of games.
I'm running a six year old hex-core CPU (i7 970) with a 2 year old video card (GTX 970) and an SSD boot disk.
I'm not doing 4K gaming. It's primarily a workstation (see WORK) and I do a bit of light gaming on the side.
There's literally no reason I couldn't go another 5 years on this machine.
I also have an older laptop (Thinkpad T61p). It's still fine for web browsing and light gaming as well. RAM is maxed out and it's running off an SSD boot disk too.
It does what I need it to, so I have zero reason to replace it.
Can anyone seriously fault me for not spending another couple grand to refresh these machines?
Honestly, the PC market was in the Moore's Law bubble so long, that it's LONG overdue for this sort of correction.
We'll probably see decreasing sales over the next 5-10 years as people are keeping their workhorse machines longer.
Current equipment will need the time to age out. And, once it does, we should see the sales cycles stepping up again, though never again to the levels they were.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I am not upgrading simply because of Windows. I can probably never install my fully legitimate [no OEM] version of Win7 on a new platform. Well no, I can of course but I don't want the hassle. Hell, just a few days ago I got the hacking thing from MS - with Win update disabled ONE YEAR ago it downloaded Win 10 after start up and gave me the "trick box" - "restart now or restart later" [both options install win10]...fortunately, thanks to /. I was aware of the scam and clicked the X closing button top right.
I will never again use Windows - simply waiting on the system to die on me and moving to Linux [if there is an option to run my beloved very old windows games like Alpha Centauri that I am done] . Then I might buy some new HD [SSD for instance]....
Really, I have stopped shelling almost any money to the SW/content industry. No going to cinema, no cable subscription, no buying of anything new be it HW or SW.
I do not agree at all with the industry models so they can forget about me as a customer...
Other than an SSD, what can a typical user add to a laptop that already has maxed RAM? I imagine most laptops don't support a lot of different CPUs, graphics cards, or internal network cards.
I have 6 desktops, 2 laptops, a MacBook, 2 iPads, 7 or so Android tablets, a Windows tablet.... I guess I should buy some more?
I think sales of things like Tablets will rage when a product genre is new, or finally reaches a tolerable price point, but how many tablets or laptops does a family need? Disclaimer: I'm a developer, and use all the equipment I have, so not typical... and your average family has probably already bought a tablet or laptop that works well enough to read e-mails, browse the webs, or watch cat videos.
Sales are bound to drop off. Most people don't need the latest and greatest technology, and even those who used to, are finding it less urgent to upgrade. What's mostly left is new purchases to replace broken/dead tech items.
When the OS starts costing more than the CPU....
Then it's time to consider whether Debian with apt-get install wine can run your applications or close enough substitutes.
Is five years old, yet it's still smoothly purring along with any task I throw at it. Sans H.264 HD video rendering, and most modern 3D games. Like Elite Dangerous, which is pretty much unplayable on it.
Maybe we should just add smartphones to the definition of "PCs" (a device you can carry in your pocket does seem to be a "personal" device, anyway) and go on with life?
I don't consider a device a fully "personal computer" unless the person who owns it controls what computing is done on it. Because of its cryptographic lockdown, an iPhone or iPad is a "personal computer" only when paired with a Mac on which to run Xcode. An Android device has a better chance of being a personal computer given the existence of AIDE to create apps directly on a tablet, not to mention the ability to build apps on any old hand-me-down desktop or laptop PC.
Since everything is going web application, there is little reason to have a beefy desktop system.
Unless a user wants an application on a laptop to continue to work while the user is riding the bus to or from work and thus away from usable Wi-Fi. The severely limited offline support on a Chromebook was a big part of Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign.
2016 : 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
a good number people now who consider obtaining a new PC, or an upgraded PC will usually build one from scratch for 1/3 of the cost.
Can you give me a good example of a retail laptop and a comparable "barebook" build for one-third the cost, including the price of an operating system compatible with the applications that someone already uses?
Are people just not buying, or are they just finding that their $500-$800 smartphone fulfills all their needs?
1. I would venture to say that over 90% of potential buyers just want a computer to write emails, browse social media, watch TV, and work on office documents. Even 10-year-old PCs are still good enough to do all of the above, although the advent of tablets and smart TVs have probably cut out the desktop's necessity to do everything but office documents (and 10-year-old PCs are definitely still good enough to run Word and Excel).
2. Only programmers and gamers need to buy powerful computers (not counting here the people who need a powerful PC for social-fashion reasons, which are a very small minority). A lot of AAA games suck these days and amateur/indie/retro games are very popular, so a lot of gamers are sticking on their older computers. A lot of programmers these days use uncompiled languages (Javascript, Java, Python, etc.), so a lot of them don't need cutting edge machines anymore.
3. There's a lot of aversion to the newer editions of Windows (8, 10) and OS X (Yosemite, El Capitan). I would imagine a lot of people are gripping to their old computers, even if they need an upgrade, in order to stick to Windows 7 and Mountain Lion/Mavericks.
tl;dr most people don't need PCs anymore, a lot of the people that do need PCs don't need blazing fast ones anymore, and Windows 10 sucks.
For me, games was what kept me upgrading all the time. And to a lesser extent, bloat.
Now it seems like the main thing requiring more computer "horsepower" is malware. Bitcoin mining botnets and so forth.
I will never again use Windows - simply waiting on the system to die on me and moving to Linux [if there is an option to run my beloved very old windows games like Alpha Centauri that I am done] .
Alpha Centauri is rated silver in AppDB. Load Xubuntu on a USB stick, sudo apt-get install wine, and see what you can run.
I think part of it is that software developers now more so than in the past have to conform to existing hardware in order to get approved for the app stores vs. creating software that is more demanding on the hardware platforms in which upgrading your hardware will get you a better experience. The next generation stuff that requires more performance is moving to the cloud where the consumer device is just a thin shell.
I think device sales will continue slump until there is another revolution in UI such as going from flip-phones to touch screens.
That's what I imagine is the reason for this. Probably 95% of everyone doesn't need more computing power than a smartphone (yes, I'm pulling that number out of my butt, I have nothing to back it up with), and smartphones now have (relatively speaking) gigantic screens, and they all have multiple processing cores (even if it's not as much porocessing power as a quad-core desktop); how much processing power do you need to play Angry Birds, though, or screw around on Facebook/Instagam/Twitter/whatever, or watch YouTube? These days you have to have some sort of mobile phone anyway, even if you have a landline. Why bother with anything more if you're not going to use it anyway? That's the reasoning I think is being applied here.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Give me a "headless" fits-in-my-pocket computer, then let me connect it to a very-low-end phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not using a probably(?)-not-yet-developed industry-standard high-bandwidth connection.
This "pocket PC" would handle data storage and whatever data-processing/operating-system-ish tasks that weren't running "in the cloud" ("cloud apps" would run "in the cloud," and "cloud data" would be stored "in the cloud").
The phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not would handle the physical aspects of the user interface and connectivity to the outside world. This would include most graphics processing. Almost no data except device-specific configuration data and possibly data needed to connect and re-connect to "Pocket PCs" would be kept on the phone, laptop, smart-TVs, etc. They would be basically a combination of "terminals" to the PCs and whatever their "stand-alone" function was (a phone without a computer could still make and receive phone calls, a smart-tv without a computer could still do what today's smart-tvs do, etc.).
In a typical scenario, I could
* pop the "pocket PC" into a slot on my phone, laptop, smart-TV, or what-not and get a very high-speed connection
* connect the "pocket PC" to the device using a cable, and enjoy at least HDMI-cable bandwidth
* connect the "pocket PC" to the device using wireless technology, with bandwidth being limited by distance and RF noise (in other words, if the device is in my pocket and the "phone handset" is in my hands, I shouldn't expect full-4K 120Hz video).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The rise in PC quality since 2011 has been slow and generally unimpressive. The cost has been fairly constant.
Maybe we should change the way we look at PC markets and now focus on similarly-priced PCs that boast insane longevity and durability?
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/28/q1-2016-tablet-sales-idc-strategy-analytics/
I think this is a symptom of the ongoing economic issues in the world. People talk about the vicious circle that is expected as American companies offshore good paying jobs overseas for cheaper labour. Newsflash: It's here. Companies make more money at first, but who will be able to afford to buy their products in America? Home computers as much as we like to think them essential, aren't. People can get by without them. They can buy goods at stores, get books from the library (but don't we also complain that people aren't reading as much anymore anyway?), and do many things offline. Some people (me included) think that getting offline more is a good thing. If you are ditching your TV for Netflix, you don't need a powerful computer. Only something enough to run a browser (but heck, most TVs have streaming service clients built into them anyway). Other than games, computers from almost ten years ago are good enough to run a word processor. So who is going to buy a new computer or tablet (for hundreds of dollars) when their job has left for Bangladesh or China and McDonald's is putting in automated kiosks? This is no surprise.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Since current computers are fast enough for 98% of all tasks we throw at them (probably nearing 100% for my mom, maybe a tad lower for you if you're a demanding gamer), there is very little incentive to upgrade quickly or buy a second, third or fourth computer. Instead we buy more storage, a new display, or redirect the money to other tech gadgets.
The economy is shit. Everything is "trending" down. Apple is scared that people will figure out they still need a desktop to actually get things done. Playing Candy Crush will only power the world for so long.
Can't have a Consumer driven economy if Consumers don't have any disposable income.
Your average 1%, being just one person, isn't going to buy as many PCs/laptops/whatever as 1000 middle class families.
You've fundamentally broken your economy.
as bad as 4G coverage is in some places, for most of the population "offline" is happening less and less and the trend will continue.
You appear to assume that "most of the population" that uses a laptop outside home and the office also subscribes to mobile broadband for the laptop, accessed through a USB 4G modem, a mobile hotspot device, or a smartphone with a data plan that includes tethering. Can you show evidence of such subscriptions? If someone (such as myself) currently does not subscribe to mobile broadband, how wise would it be to drop 300 GB/mo home Internet in favor of 5 GB/mo mobile Internet?
we have been led down a path... "we doubled the speed of the Smokin'Board processor, so you need it. notice how slow things are?" and that is because the bloatware providers saw that chip coming, and packed in more delays and non-features to cut your computing speed effectively in half.
everybody knows it. and they're saying "enough. This is fine. Stop."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Seriously, this is about the biggest straw-man argument around. And, it's complete bullshit. .They dont care. It's windows to them! It will run their old programs. They can use it more or less in the same way they are used to.
People who buy computers don't give a single fuck if it's Windows 8 or 7 or 10 or 20
Americans dont fucking care about privacy at all.
Seriously, most of those morons think it's the governments job to spy on everyone and if you do not have something to hide, then there is no need to worry.
I would assume that most folks here build their own machine. Assuming it's not a laptop.
The reason PC sales are declining has fuck all to do with Windows and everything to do with the fact that a computer purchased in 2010 or 2011 works totally fine for modern software and there is no reason at all to upgrade.
I think most people bought a new computer when a new version of Windows came out, or perhaps a year or so AFTER a new version of Windows came out.
With Microsoft offering free upgrades to Windows 10, I think that took a lot of wind out of the PC sales... (see what I did there?)
It is a shame that MS can't find a middle ground between "free" and "$119" for the price of Windows. If they charged $29 to upgrade, some people would pay it, some would not, and some would buy a new computer.
Side note: The days of having just 1 computer for many people are over. The cost to upgrade Windows on multiple computers is nuts for 1 person.
I sub to Office 365 because it gives me 5 installs of Office (really 10, they are pretty flexiable) for $70 a year.
That price also includes 5 OneDrive accounts, Skype minutes, and more...
If they raised the price to $120 a year and let me install Windows onto 5 (or really 10) computers, I'd probably take them up on that. That would be $10 per year, per computer, which I'd be comfortable with if it let me install whatever version of Windows I wanted.
Side note 2: Microsoft, let people install what they want. 99.9% of everyone will take the latest version, but there ARE reasons to have 1 machine on something older.
Any computer made in the last 7 years with 2 gb of memory can run windows 10 at a reasonable speed, basically any computer that can run windows 7 well can run windows 10 well. Even gamers are realizing all they really need to replace for most games is the video card. So computers are getting replaced now when they old computer just dies.
What will start computer sales again? Probably when Oculus-like VR drops from $600 to say $200, maybe some breakthrough in 3d projection. Home robots? Who knows, something that demands more computing power.
If that were true then demand for $600+ smartphones would have declined appreciably as well, which doesn't appear to be the case.
Sounds like you don't get out much. Today's PC (barely a year old) for me noticeably lags during certain photo editing tasks. And don't even ask about significant video processing, I don't even try anymore unless I can let it run overnight.
I suspect the ongoing economic stagnation and the "squeeze on the middle class" is causing the 'correction' as much, if not more, than any 'correction' due to moving out of a "Moore's Law Bubble'. Doubly so since /. has been trumpeting every drop in PC sales for the last twenty years as being caused by "lack of recent performance increases". (When they're not blaming it on Windows while failing to note Apple suffering similar decreases.) There's also the penetration of smartphones, phablets, and tablets to consider - for many people these have entirely replaced the desktop or laptop PC.
I'm running out of space.and use for them. I have a ARM based board I hacked into an internet radio player.
A Raspberry PI in a retro-arcade setup. A 5? year old i7 running Win7 (Why upgrade the CPU? It's the graphics card doing all the work in my rig),
Also I have a cheapo tablet I use for watching Youtube while enjoying a bubble bath.
There's just no point in buying any more or upgrading an entire computer at this point.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
No. The rest of the 99% are still blowing money like there's no tomorrow. They're just not blowing it on PCs any more. The PC market is mature and saturated. It's no longer got any "razzle dazzle".
H*LL, even the tablet market is starting to lose it's luster already...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You obviously haven't followed the latest apple results. Even with smartphone makers trying build in forced obsolescence, sales are declining. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-26/apple-forecasts-another-sales-decline-as-iphone-demand-cools
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
So to summarize: for PCs it's the software that unappealing, while for Macs, it's the hardware is not compelling enough.
Ultimately, the real culprit is that "moore's law" has failed and we haven't seen any significant advances in desktop/laptop computing since the SSD (which likely started to hit mass-market penetration around 2011).
http://www.extremetech.com/com...
Look at the down curve.
I can take a decent SSD and turn an 8 year old machine (e.g. Unibody Aluminum 2008 Macbook) usable. This is a serious damper to sales of new hardware.
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I agree that a poor economy is a big part of the problem. They said the lower income people are deciding they "don't need a tablet" in droves. (This was absolutely NOT the case when the iPad was a new product and cheaper Android tablets were first hitting the scene.) I think this is largely because these people tried buying the devices in the hopes they'd be a worthy substitute for buying a more costly computer system. And after trying that out for a while? They realized that Android or iOS just isn't the same thing as Windows or Mac OS X. Tablets are basically just cellphones without the cellular radio but with oversized display screens. And sure, you can buy bluetooth keyboard cases for them and pens for some of them, but that's even more money to spend to still have something that's "nice, but not quite equivalent to a full blown PC or Mac" - and runs all the same software your smartphone can run. When money is really tight, you're likely to say "Hey... I get the most use out of my smartphone. Let's sell off that used iPad and forget about that thing moving forward. The smartphone has cellular data everywhere I go without paying more for a second data plan (if the tablet is even equipped with cellular) and I'll live with the small screen."
At the same time, my experience has been the people with less money are still looking for computers (laptops for the kids for school, or maybe even a gaming PC for home) - but they're serving as the "used computer recyclers", taking what's discarded by the middle to upper class people as they upgrade. It's a whole demographic soaking up some of the excess "old but still serviceable" gear and not contributing to new PC sales. I just sold a Windows gaming PC to a family like that last week. The kid really wanted a PC at home to use for school and gaming. Dad was too broke to afford anything suitable, but between him and grandma/grandpa, they came up with $350 to put towards something. Obviously, this wasn't happening with anything being sold new .... a good 3D graphics card can set you back that much, by itself! Since I'd already re-purposed a former Litecoin mining rig as a gaming PC for one of our kids, and she wasn't using it much anymore? I told the guy I'd let him have it for $350, complete with the 24" LCD monitor I had attached to it. (I figure hey... it made me a few hundred bucks as a coin miner a couple years ago. And my kid got some use out of it. Why not take the $350 and help pass it on to the next kid who will really enjoy and appreciate it?)
But the other part of the problem is a lack of innovation by the manufacturers. The people who DO have disposable income are only going to get motivated to spend it if you show them something cool and new they didn't think they wanted/needed until they saw it in action. They're all quite familiar with what a Windows PC or a Mac does, and such things as more hard drive space and a faster CPU are meaningless when there's no amazing software out that demands those things as minimum requirements. Apple got a little bit of traction with the whole "Retina display" thing (which the general PC market now hawks as 4K displays). But ultimately? A lot of people just recently bought a 27" screen when prices fell enough so it was a "no brainer" to buy and upgrade from something smaller. They're not chomping at the bit to upgrade displays yet again, in most cases. And on laptops, the super high resolution causes new issues. (My Dell XPS 13's high res display with Win 10 has all sorts of problems displaying older Java apps with fonts too small to read because the JRE didn't know how to scale up. The Surface Pro 4's I've seen require you log off and back on again whenever docking or undocking, so the screen will scale appropriately for the external or built-in display as you switch between them. It's not handled gracefully, "on the fly".)
I feel like GPUs are still weak link with everything. Any mobile graphics processor is slow and weak compared to a desktop counterpart -- mainly because of thermal challenge
By definition, Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The higher the proportion of the nation's spending, that is decided by the nation's government rather than directly by the citizenry, the higher the degree of Socialism there is in the country.
This share for the US has been gradually rising (except for the spike during WW2), inhibiting our standards of living. It is still not as high at some other countries, so we are still richer than they are. I'd rather see the trend towards increased government control reversed, however.
Next time you meet Bernie Sanders, ask him, what would he, given a similar position, do differently from Hugo Chavez...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
that the figures are still much higher than much of history. 68M in Q108 - granted before tablets. IDC said that tablets/slates/detachables were 40M. Add them up 108M vs the more 'accurate' report of 101M. So, the pc/laptop still live on.
I am looking around for an upgrade to my current computer. Had this one about 4 years.
I am also between jobs. Its pretty lean out there folks. If you are pulling 2 jobs to cover an underwater mortgage for a house that will not sell. You probably are not in a big hurry to buy a new computer.
Everyone wants to 'blame' windows 10. That is *hogwash*. I said nothing to any of my family. They all moved to it (about 15 or so). One is currently stuck as the computer will not upgrade for some reason. He *wants* windows 10. They all do. A few swung by for a bit of advice. I said if they are ok with the spying. They were. They all have iPhones are Androids. They *do* *not* *care* about it. They are being practical though. They used to buy 500-1500 dollar computers and it was significantly better than what they had. Now not so much. So given other priorities and rising inflation on many household goods they are not buying new computers. If theirs stops though I am the first stop in 'what should I buy'. They all want windows. None want a mac other those who already have one. A few were rather luke warm on iPads.
Good enough was reached in 2012/13 for phones/tablets.
The majority of us here, there will never truly be good enough.
Most people don't need the complication and headaches of a PC, be it MS or Apple. I realize a significant percentage of people here are gamers, programmers, & IT people, most of the population isn't.
For most people, a smartphone and an "ultra portable" like a Chromebook is all they really need. We are already seeing sales of new iPhone decline, I think because most have gotten a phone as powerful as they are comfortable with now combined with few significant new features. Chromebook sales is the only market segment showing an increase. https://www.abiresearch.com/pr...
Most any laptop or PC sold since 2011 is probably still just fine for even the things people want to do with them.
After all, using Facebook or email or Youtube or porn sites hasn't gotten any more demanding than it was five years ago, and maybe even ten years ago in some cases. Windows 10 generally demands less of a computer than Windows 8 or even 7 did so it actually runs better in many cases that whatever shipped with the computer. So if all you do is Facebook, you have no need for a new PC. Slapping an SSD in the thing would probably be more useful anyway.
For tablets, newer is better in some cases but my aging iPad is just fine. Had a Nexus 7 for a long time and even it still did OK until recently.
Gaming is the only thing demanding new PCs and even THAT has stalled. Maybe the high demands of VR will keep gaming alive, but the VR games still look like gimmicks. Meanwhile I'm still playing games based on DX9 and Unreal Engine 3. My 2015 overclocked i7 gaming computer with 16GBs ram and 4GBs Nvida mobile GPU, SSD, touch screen, etc etc is way more power than the game can even use. Nothing challenges this PC except rendering video. Whatever, I do that like twice a year.
Sig for hire.
I just bought a brand new laptop today... This is my first logon onto it, and first look at Slashdot page since I bought it is a story saying people like me don't exist.
Offshoring is itself a symptom of the larger underlying issue: money manipulation by the government that promises the mob everything for free and the mob expecting it and more. This is the root cause, if we are going to talk about root causes. Offshoring is a symptom of the economic situation where the government destroyed the individual freedoms and money.
You can't handle the truth.
Those were Apple-specific and were the result of a tremendous comps from the iPhone 6/6s replacement cycle. Samsung's sales for their new S7 have been very good.
... this is true. I used to upgrade my computer hardwares every other year with video cards, motherboards, etc. See http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... for my detailed list. As I got older, I gamed a lot less due to busy life and no energy. These days, I use the Internet to read, see, socialize, etc.
I still do play games once in a while like in IRC with Rbot's turn based card games (e.g., Uno and Junkyard). I did briefly play John Romero's classic DOOM maps and those were fun like old times.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Smartphones are heavily subsidized when people sign contracts with carriers. Tablets and computers are not.
Smartphone sales are heavily subsidized when people sign contracts with the carriers. Virtually no one pays $600+ for a smartphone. Tablets and computers are NOT subsidized.
As tablets have larger physical volume, used mostly at homes where charger isn't a big deal, Intel cleverly sponsored Atom powered tablets. They had big batteries, 2A chargers. That was why you were seeing not so bad tablets in very cheap prices.
Now that the Intel gave up competing with ARM and let Atom miss competition, it doesn't make sense that they will continue the "Put Intel inside logo to boot, get CPU free" type scheme.
My newest PC is 4 years old. All run Linux. I'll replace parts when they break, need a new battery in my laptop soon. So, let me know when a new PC does something more.
is that nowadays no one needs a computer except for us nerds/businesses. thanks a lot cell phones.