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PC Shipments Return To Growth In the US (theverge.com)
PC shipments are seeing a welcome growth in the United States. The industry, which has seen a continual decline in the sales in the past few consecutive quarters, is now seemingly gaining some momentum in the United States, according to independent findings by marketing research firms IDC and Gartner. According to IDC, the PC shipments have increased by 4.9%, whereas Gartner says it has observed a 1.4% growth. From a report on The Verge: The estimates differ because Gartner does not count Chromebooks as part of its figures, while IDC cites Google's laptops as a key reason for US growth. [...] Worldwide, PC shipments are still on a decline. Gartner estimates a 5.2 percent drop, and IDC calculates around a 4.5 percent decrease in shipments. Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade comes to an end on July 29th, and IDC believes it may prompt some PC users into buying new machines. Gartner also forecasts a Windows 10 hardware refresh for businesses, that it expects to see "more toward the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017."
Nothing a batch of cheap capacitors can't fix..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When people started to realize that mobiles, iCraps, Nezus 9, PDAs and other monstruosities ain't built for real work (but publicity and companies catalogs), real computers are being sold again.
I finally replaced the nine-year-old system I built for Windows Vista. Went from a quad-core processor, AMD 690 motherboard and 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM, to AMD eight-core processor, AMD 760 motherboard and 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM. Windows 10 had no problem adjusting to the new hardware. I'll probably keep this system for another nine years before I upgrade again.
Same for my desktop, an AMD A8-3860, which was introduced in 07/2011. Does what I need, quickly enough.
Are these machines high end machines now? Absolutely not... However, the time of buying new toys just to have new toys, is over for me. Works for me, means: no reason to upgrade. Many people who are not into tech think that way. A few years ago, I helped a non-tech with her old desktop. It had died: caps gone up in smoke. I said: hey, it's about 5 years old, it had a good run. She: *only* five years? Non-tech people think differently (Ha!) These days I'd be pissed too if my machine died after 5 years of use.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Consoles used to be the budget alternative to PC gaming. Nowadays, the cost/performance ratio is not in console's favor. And consoles are only getting more expensive, while current and last gen PC prices remain pretty steady.
Does Gartner only consider a computer running windows a PC?
Our company is increasingly getting work done in the cloud. A web browser is all most of our employees really need. The nature of office work is changing - and is increasingly less-reliant on windows to get that work done.
On the one hand, Chromebooks are computers that require manufacturing, so perhaps they should. On the other hand, Chromebooks are not really "PCs" as the term is usually used and occupy an entirely different market segment.
Just as importantly, the market has shifted. There is still a stable market for computing and it will continue to exist, but it no longer includes the home/casual user segment. Those people have gone over to tablets and phones (most all of the non-tech folks that I know now have an older laptop sitting dusty on their top closet shelf, unused for years, and don't plan to replace it; only about half have even bothered to get a bluetooth keyboard for their tablet, while the rest are perfectly satisfied with the onscreen keyboard).
Business, tech-oriented people, the self-employed, creatives, and so on will continue to buy full-fledged computing hardware and to upgrade it over time, but this is a much smaller market than once existed for computing, where the market included basically every home and individual in developed societies. So some correction in sales was (and probably remains) inevitable over time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The implication is that people are having to replace PCs due to capacitor plague. Between 1999 and 2003, some Taiwanese electronics manufacturers shipped electrolytic capacitors based on a faulty formula misappropriated from Rubycon, which caused the capacitors to fail much earlier than intended. By 2007, most affected devices should have already failed.
Our company is increasingly getting work done in the cloud.
That's great provided you're willing to pay your employees' cellular data bills so that they can VNC or RDP into your application server while away from a desk. Otherwise, your users will have to stick to Chrome apps specifically designed for offline use. If you have programmers, for example, Google's in-browser NaCl IDE is no perfect substitute for Linux- or Windows-based IDEs. Google warns: "to develop a substantial application for Native Client / Portable Native Client, we recommend you use the Native Client SDK" which is designed for Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux.
Does it count computer parts? Perhaps people who build their own are such an insignificant %, but I really wonder what they use to count it.
If I were trying to count desktop PCs built from parts, I'd use motherboard sales as a proxy. As for laptops built from parts, I see no evidence that barebooks are anything but "an insignificant %".
Perhaps Windows activations?
Counting motherboards would at least be consistent with product activation in recent versions of Windows, which uses the motherboard's identity to determine whether someone attempted to transfer an Windows license to a different computer.
That said, if you're a business running 500+ PCs that users leave powered on 24/7, it is extremely cost effective to
As I understand it, the common case is that each PC is used only by one full-time employee, without different employees sharing it on different shifts. Does leaving the PCs on for only one-fourth of the week (42 hours on, 126 hours hibernating) change the math any?
I don't know how much it matters in other markets but seems to be a lot of interest in 4k gaming lately.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'm just now in the process of replacing PCs in our school. We're buying Dell Micro PC's that you can mount immediately behind your monitor. When we throw in a SSD and fast-booting the BIOS, boot time for Windows 7 is less than 10 seconds.
Now that PCs are smaller and faster, and electronic storage is becoming standard, it doesn't surprise me that they're becoming more appealing again.
For corporations this changes any way: 5 year old gear is amortized and should be replaced, just because the beancounters say so.
However, I doubt you can totally offset the energy savings by purchasing new gear. Assume 500$ for a new machine (Business machines? Hell, you won't get them that cheap, but I'll run with it). I don't know how much my i7 rates, but I know it comes with a 90W powersupply. As such we can assume it uses that as a maximum. Assume a new i5 laptop will use half of that: 45W. So, you save 45W, which means you save 45*24*365 Wh = 394.2kWh over year. Let's assume you live in New York, which means you pay 18.1 cents per kWh (okay, values are from late 2011), which means you pay about 71$ less per year by the replacement. Assuming the 500$ investment, you need 7 years to break even. This is true regardless of scale (1 computer or 10000 computers)
So, yes, energy is a factor, but if it were the only factor, it wouldn't be cost effective. Do, also note that in every assumption I was very very friendly with the "replace" argument: cheap replacement cost, expensive electricity....
Of course, I might have miscalculated and you're right... who knows....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
"The estimates differ because Gartner does not count Chromebooks as part of its figures"
Our remote users already have some sort of remote connectivity - hence the term "remote" user.
If your organization is bigger than one location, it doesn't really matter where your applications and data are hosted. Someone isn't going to be in the same building as your server farm and will need to access those applications and data remotely.
Do it on the computers your school has available for that shit.
Which complicates logistics of the student's ride home if the student has to be picked up from school at a different time of day each day depending on whether he has homework that day.
Even universities provide computers for everyone to do their lab work on.
Universities also allow the student to go to the computer lab as needed between class periods, unlike high schools that enforce truancy law and require the student to be seated in a "study hall" room. In addition, universities tend to pass a much larger cost of required materials onto a student than public high schools. For example, it's more reasonable to expect a university student to afford a laptop, as it's counted against the student loan (or at least it was at the college I attended).
Someone isn't going to be in the same building as your server farm and will need to access those applications and data remotely.
But that doesn't mean said access has to be continuous throughout all hours that an employee is on the clock. Prior to webmail's prevalence, IMAP email clients were popular. These would download email from a server while online, allow the user to read messages and compose replies while offline, and send the replies the next time the user goes online. The same was true of Usenet clients. And the same is true of distributed version control: you can git merge while online, edit and test offline, git commit offline, and then git push once you're online again. But if you're limited to Chrome apps, even "edit and test" may have to happen while using a remote desktop connection.
" Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade comes to an end on July 29th, and IDC believes it may prompt some PC users into buying new machines"
They'll likely buy more machines when M$ removes this malware from them.
Just another day in Paradise