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.

Comments

Saddled with Windows 10

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Re:Saddled with Windows 10

[Tablizer]

I do not want Microsoft to be monitoring me and my family

Yeah, that's Google's job!

Re:Saddled with Windows 10

[danomac]

Yep, computers are "good enough" for most people now. Heck, I'm still running my quad core from 2008. It still works fine and compiles quickly, I see no reason to upgrade. Even if I did, I'd have to deal with EFI and a bunch of other new things so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade. My laptop on the other hand is getting old and slow (it's probably 10 years old now.) However, I don't use it as much as I used to, so again, not in a hurry to replace it. I use my Nexus 7 (2012) still for most things I'd use the laptop for, and even that is starting to get slow. I'll probably have to replace the tablet soon, but the desktop and laptop will still last for a while.

I figure when my main PC dies (which will probably be years from now) I'll upgrade.

Re: Saddled with Windows 10

[saloomy]

I still use my MacBook Pro Mid-2012. Because it was not upgradable I purchased it with at the time 768GB of Solid State Disk, 16GB of Ram, and the higher end graphics options. It still runs El Capitan really well, and aside from generational CPU differences, there is nothing that makes me look at a 2015 MacBook Pro and makes me think it's worth me parting with $2500. There isn't the ability to add more ram that 16GB (which I use primarily for running various VMs I work on to develop), more internal storage (which is leaps and bounds more than 640k, which honestly should be enough for any body), and has the same display and form factor as the current one does. The battery has recently asked to be serviced, and it came in at 5:30 hours of Netflix at full display, still enough for me since I have multiple chargers and Displays as docks. There is nothing today that makes me think I want a newer one.
What I would like to see is a MacBook Pro that has thunderbolt 3, a 4K display, MAYBE MAYBE a keyboard from the new MacBook, which I have tried but I'm still undecided on, and an A10 or A11 coprocessor for running apps on a low power mode sparing the big hunking desktop-class skylake CPU. 64GB of ram as a max would be nice, as would 2TB SSDs. I don't need it thinner, as I can comfortably tote this one around now as is. Just give me as much battery as can be.

Re:Saddled with Windows 10

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You can't chalk all of it up to Microsoft fear/hate, certainly, but that might be one factor.

One of my own small businesses is a clear example. We would have bought a handful of new laptops and desktop workstations for various people at least 2-3 years ago, but the usual complaints about Windows 8 put us off and we were waiting for 10 to fix the problems. Since 10 is a complete non-starter for that business because of the privacy and robustness concerns (dealing with potentially sensitive information = instant compliance violations if we can't fully control our equipment) we're still making do with 5+ year old machines.

That's increasingly painful, because we're talking about laptops that now have sub-2 hour battery life if they're not plugged in, several machines that have small, spinning disk storage, and so on. We would drop thousands on new PC hardware in a heartbeat, if someone would just give us anything close to what we actually need, which is basically modern hardware + Windows 7 + a couple of the updates that newer Windows versions do offer to support that modern hardware (USB3, hi-res screens, etc.).

That doesn't surprise me

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:That doesn't surprise me

[TWX]

Yep. I'm typing this on an Alienware M17x, which came out in 2009 and still does everything I need it to do beautifully as effectively a desktop computer.

One can actually thank the advent of tablets for making the use of older computers with newer software possible, a lot of scaled-down mobile devices use variants of what had been desktop or higher-end laptop components years earlier. 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.

They're trying to counteract that with rules as to what chipsets and processors new OSes will run on, but if they're not careful they'll end up with a fractured market like cell phones.

Re:That doesn't surprise me

[Coisiche]

I think there's also an economic factor at play. This might be due to the frequently referenced "middle class squeeze" where people simply decide to keep what they have a bit longer rather than get a replacement because their disposable income doesn't stretch quite as far as it used to.

Moores law is done?

[SmaryJerry]

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.

Re:Moores law is done?

[MitchDev]

When the OS starts costing more than the CPU....

Unless...

[MitchDev]

...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.

Re:Unless...

[jawtheshark]

I'll image the Windows 7 installation I currently have and move that over to the new system.

Doing this naively is going to fail. Assuming this is a full retail version, because technically you're not allowed to do what you want on a OEM or SystemBuilder version. "Techncially". So I am assuming a full retail version of 7.

What you want is using sysprep to generalize your system before moving the disk/image:

sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown

When it's done with that, image and/or move the disk. You *will* have to activate.

Good luck

Performance Plateau

[jawtheshark]

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

Re:Performance Plateau

[Dadoo]

We've hit a performance plateau quite a while ago.

Man, I'm good: https://slashdot.org/comments....

In other news. . .

[Idou]

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.

Spent $700 On Phone

[zenlessyank]

Can't afford PC, laptop, or tablet.

Not a difficult problem to solve

[geek]

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.

evolution of the Apple logo

[epine]

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.

What did everyone expect?

[Chas]

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.