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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.
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!”
...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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
Inflation? Inflation is too low. They should be printing money right now.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
You are blaming Windows 10 for PC sales not declining as much as Mac sales?
The figures combine PC & tablet sales. I suspect a lot of Apple's falls are due to traditional tablet sales tanking - the PC makers didn't really have appreciable tablet sales to lose. As for Mac/PC sales, Apple & Lenovo started the year ahead because they're mainly in laptops, small-form-factor and all-in-ones, which have been doing better than desktops for the last few years.
Intel probably get a slice of the blame, too, with delays in releasing new chips. The mobile Skylake chips with the higher-spec graphics - which is what Apple needs for any new MacBook Pro - have been slow to appear.
But no, Windows 8/10 and all that isn't the cause - its a symptom - a botched attempt by Microsoft to push into the mobile market and fix that which was not broken. The cause is the maturity of PC technology and the end of the 2-3 year upgrade cycle.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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 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.
You can buy a 'burner' Android phone for $10
Which make and model? I searched Google for 10 dollar android phone and found several results talking about the same $9.82 LG L16 and L15G on TracFone that Walmart sold in November of last year. Among these results was an article warning me that the offer resembled a clearance and thus unlikely to remain available. The starter Android phone recommended in the article was a Posh Orion Mini, which Amazon shows for $50.
never activate or buy time for it
I fear that trying to run one of these apps without cellular service won't get past the app's "please enter the validation code texted to you to confirm that you're a real person" screen.
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?
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.
Companies very much care about the operating system. This is really Microsoft's bread and butter. It always has been. Even home use flowed from the fact that Microsoft dominated business. Even if the OS isn't spying on you, it can break and there's also the usual "let other people test it" burn in period.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Really? Sure it reduces the slowest bottleneck of the PC, the spinny disk, but it does not improve other bits of performance. I can make my PC perform quite well by putting much of /usr/local into /dev/shm during boot. Faster storage is great, but the real factor is where are people using technology now. The only answer for that is much of the facebook crowd use a PC for just facebook and now they're able to do this on their phones there is no need to upgrade the PC when they don't use it.
Why UNIX?