PC Industry Is Now On a Two-Year Downslide (theverge.com)

According to analyst firm Gartner, PC shipments have declined for eight consecutive quarters -- "the longest duration of decline in the history of the PC industry." The company found that worldwide PC shipments totaled 68.9 million units in the third quart of 2016, a 5.7 percent decline from the third quarter of 2015. The Verge reports: The firm cites poor back-to-school sales and lowered demand in emerging markets. But the larger issue, as it has been for quite some time, is more existential than that. "The PC is not a high priority device for the majority of consumers, so they do not feel the need to upgrade their PCs as often as they used to," writes Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa. "Some may never decide to upgrade to a PC again." The threat, of course, comes from smartphones, which have more aggressive upgrade cycles than PCs and have over time grown powerful enough to compete with desktop and laptop computers at performing less intensive tasks. Tablets too have become more capable, with Apple pushing its iPad Pro line as a viable laptop replacement. PC makers are feeling the pressure. HP, Dell, and Asus each had low single-digit growth, but Acer, Apple, and Lenovo all experienced declines, with Apple and Lenovo each suffering double-digit drops. Meanwhile, the rest of the PC market, which collectively ships more units per quarter than any of the big-name brands, is down more than 16 percent. Some good news is that 2-in-1 devices have experienced year-over-year growth. Kitigawa also notes: "While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth."

Comments

$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

Sees, I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40. I suppose that will make up for > 10x standard PCs. I suppose you either need the horsepower, and it's still not enough, or you don't need it at all. I just hope the high end workstations continue to be available; noting Intel stopped their motherboard production.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is CPU stagnation because CPU's hit a frequency wall and multi-core isn't good enough for the future of computing, basically we need a technology that re-enables single threaded performance. That's probably a good 50 years to a century away though.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

I suppose SiGe or GaAs with a liquid N2 heat sink. Then again I suppose as the circuitry get's denser it's gate capacitance and interconnect resistance that keep the clock speeds so slow (compared to transistor speed).

Re:$$$ Workstations

[msauve]

"they do not feel the need to upgrade their PCs as often as they used to"

"I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40."

Microsoft is way ahead of you. They recently came out with Windoze 10, which will suck up all that power just to report your personal life back to the mothership.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[mlts]

Don't forget Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, and other companys' licensing systems that charge fees on every potentially usable core. There are some ways to work around it, such as IBM POWER7's TurboCore mode (where half the cores are shut off, and the enabled cores can use the disabled cores' cache and can run at a higher clock rate.) However, the fact that there is a penalty for more cores is costing the PC industry dearly.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[DivineKnight]

The reality is CPU stagnation because AMD pulled a Pentium-4, and Intel decided to get in touch with its Green side, instead of pushing further in the Hz-race. So, what did we get Bob? Intel selling us the same processor over and over again, each time with more energy-efficient features. And the rest of the industry taking an LSD-inspired trip to nowhere with recycled ideas like 'replacing the x86' but with arm chips this time (the AMD CEO should have stepped down after making that public announcement), and so on.

We have, what, Germanium and Graphite, along with like half a dozen technologies that are 1.) proven to work (got the lab work to prove, IBM's lab work in a few cases), and 2.) need all but a phone call to begin implementing.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

Unfortunately you are correct. I ordered it with Windows Sever 2012, but our IT dept is going to fuck me with Windows 10, after specifically telling me I couldn't use Windows 10 since they didn't support it; only 7. In any case, either is needed to address 512 GB.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[ShanghaiBill]

Sees, I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40.

You must have an interesting use case if buying this much compute power is more cost effective than renting by the minute from AWS. Deep learning? Ray tracing???

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reality is CPU stagnation because AMD pulled a Pentium-4,"

They pulled a Pentium 4 because of the difficulty of designing the god damn things. Let us remember the athlon days where AMD actually released something decent. And pentium 4 was shite, aka the fact that intel pulled a pentium 4 was a sign of major problems ahead for chip design.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

EM simulation of millimeter wave antennas and circuits. The tools will probably never run on the cloud.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

"I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40."
Sh-yeah? But will it play Quake1?
All your base are belong to us.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[JustNiz]

>> I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40

That was stupid, the P100 will be available any moment.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

K40 (@ $2900) .* 4 = 5.72 Tflops. $11600.
P100 (@ $5899) * 2 = 9.4 Tflops $11798
.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[msauve]

"Windows Sever 2012"

Freudian slip?

Re: $$$ Workstations

[maxm]

Exactly this. I used to upgrade every time i could get a machine that was 4x faster. I have not really experience anything like that since my core 2 duo. So the machine i got will keep on running until it breaks.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Another problem in my eyes is the gaming industry, which used to be offer strong incentives to upgrade a PC.
While the CPU industry keeps increasing the performance of their products by adding more processing units, which is fine for a lot of applications, like video editing, encoding, CAD and similar things. But game developers seem to struggle a lot at distributing the world load among multiple threads, making many games terribly CPU bottlenecked.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[swalve]

LAN administrator with a budget surplus.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

Yes, I'm well aware of that, but the P100 wasn't available in FY16 (corporate funding), and the software I use probably won't support it until FY18. I'll take what I can get.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[ArylAkamov]

But game developers seem to struggle a lot at distributing the world load among multiple threads, making many games terribly CPU bottlenecked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The shitty realization that owning an i5 @ 4.5ghz doesn't mean fuck all if the game is locked to one core constantly pegged at 100% usage. At least it was free.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Security. We don't share, period.
'nuff said.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, and other companys' licensing systems that charge fees on every potentially usable core. There are some ways to work around it, such as IBM POWER7's TurboCore mode (where half the cores are shut off, and the enabled cores can use the disabled cores' cache and can run at a higher clock rate.) However, the fact that there is a penalty for more cores is costing the PC industry dearly.

You can turn hyper threading off on Intel systems too, or I don't know, order a system with a fewer core higher clocked processor like an E7-8893 maybe?
Nobody's being forced to buy 20 core processors, Intel still makes a four core version of everything as far as I know.

Those software are not hurting the PC industry... the race to the bottom did.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[ColdWetDog]

Look, on your next round of funding, remember that some of us still play Crysis and don't have the line into the CFO that you seem to have.

Don't Bogart that box, my friend.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

What problems ahead did they have? How do you qualify the P4 as shite?

The P4's 'bad' design was because it was rushed into mass production on an existing and nearly obsolete die scale which led to a cpu that while it ran hot, still performed well. That was more for competitive reasons than technical inability on intel's part. After that came the Core then the Core 2 then i7 with other designs in between. Intel has hit a wall with die size becoming so small enough and clock speeds getting high enough that electron quantum tunneling has prevented pushing those frontiers further.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll smash quake1 but Crysis will still only do about 45fps.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

The video card is actually one of the lower end Nvidia since it must be single slot width, in order to jam in 4 (double width) Tesla cards. Now it will do 2D N-body simulations, where N is a few million, pretty impressively. Actually probably stinks for gaming.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

"What problems ahead did they have? How do you qualify the P4 as shite?"

Heat from power needed to supply those fast switching transistors being the main one. Basically heat can't escape fast enough for the heat generated so your CPU fries. During the Pentium 4 era they were expecting P4's design to scale upwards of 10Ghz and predicting stuff like 30Ghz processors, we are nowhere near that 30Ghz though 10 years later and that was in 2006. They also had problems with non corrupt signals and power getting to every part of the chip that needs it in time for the next clock tick. Then there was issues with electron tunnelling and electrimigration, as well as leakage.

CPU's stopped getting easier to shrink because the power needed to drive transistors increases at smaller geometries because as transistors shrink you paradoxically need more power because of electrical losses at smaller sizes. So basically you're in a catch 22, you need more power to keep the transistors fed at the same time you are putting out more heat in tighter packed spaces with no way to transfer the heat away.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[UnknownSoldier]

> But game developers seem to struggle a lot at distributing the world load among multiple threads, making many games terribly CPU bottlenecked.

There are a few reasons for that:

* Multithreading is not trivial. Most indie games only have a single threaded engine. It takes a lot of work to make something multithreaded. I
* It also doesn't help that MSVC only supports OpenMP 2.0, along with C++ not having a standard thread library until recently.
* Windows context switches are stupid expensive compared to consoles.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[0100010001010011]

At least you got funding.

Everyone around here is drooling over "Cloud", any question about CPU power or storage is answered with "cloud". If you ask my opinion we were shooting ourselves in the foot. We had data analytics stacking up daily and were months away from any sort of NDA agreement with a "cloud" vendor.

I couldn't even talk my boss into a $500 off lease Xeon 2011 to crunch numbers.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 4 1.5tb systems a few months ago. Could this have been done in some sort of 'cloud' service? Probably. However, our use case did not allow it. We had to control the fail overs. We had to get the latency down to a few ns. Which means a local datastore capable of it. Cloud could have done the work but not in that case. Did the system need to be re-engineered? Absolutely. Last I heard they were about half done doing so. At which point they will be required by law to host their own set of 'cloud' servers. Because by law they can not share the data with anyone other than the customer or warrant. Oh and it ran at about 40-60% CPU and a few hundred MB created every hour at 24/7. Yeah that would be cheap... I could buy the HW in a few months. That org usually gets 2-3 years out of its HW before upgrading.

Oh the use case? MSSQL server with replication. Replication consumes a LARGE amount of compute time and memory at the scale they were going. We were breaking replication and having MS onsite ever other month to fix bugs in SQL server. It was one of the reasons they were going to a NoSQL sort of approach. To get rid of MS and have better control of what is going on. So instead of 1 box with a few TB of memory it will be a few hundred with a few TB of memory total.

That K40s are involved I would say and memory he is probably running a local CUDA compute and cloud is not fitting his model.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[ShanghaiBill]

EM simulation of millimeter wave antennas and circuits.

Cool. I envy you.

Well, I have to go. My boss wants me to slightly change the shade of blue behind our company logo on 187 webpages ...

Re: $$$ Workstations

[orlanz]

I think this applies to software development in general. Even the heavy weights like Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc. don't seem to fully multithread across cores. They seem to delineate on software or model boundaries. Such as UI, I/O, and open instances. They don't take MT to the core of the programs such as splitting the shaders themselves or rendering of the present view. These sit in one core consistently becoming the performance bottle neck of the whole user experience.

As you said, it's not easy and probably falls in the same ROI as security-in-mind development.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

either that or we develop a programing methodology that make muti-threaded programs easier.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

That kind of indicates that what is happening in labs and particularly at university basically sucks.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that CPU speeds hit a wall, and people no longer need to replace their desktop PC or laptop PC every year or two or 3 to get faster performance. The performance of a new PC is not appreciably faster than computers that are 3-6 years old now for most people. So called "smart" phones and tablets have had an impact on new PC sales too, though neither one can replace a desktop or laptop PC. The PC market has reached a saturation level, with most having a laptop or desktop PC already. Windows has also had a negative effect on PC sales, as Windows 8 and 10 are disasters compared to windows 7. In these days of economic recession (many would say depression) many are hesitant to spend money that they have saved up for future needs, on a new PC that will be only very marginally faster than their current PC, and will come with Windows 10 pre-installed.

Businesses tend mostly to be slower in replacing computers and Operating Systems as long as their current computers and OS do what they need them to do. Also, there is software that runs on Windows 7, or 8, that won't run under Windows 10, and peripherals like printers that are still working, but have no drivers or poor drivers for Windows 10.

So there is no single reason that PC sales have flattened over the last couple of years. It would be interesting to see sales numbers of used and refurbished PCs.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel sensibly put its cash into lowering the watts on its CPUs because ARM was gobbling up the mobile space.

Less sensibly, Intel began pissing money up the wall on stupid.. like trying to convince embedded device makers to use all intel components. ARM - despite its flaws - were selling designs that manufacturers could turn into SOCs. Intel absolutely refuses to do that.

Intel then moved from using its transistor budget for customer stuff to "security" stuff (scare quotes,. because the stuff it introduced does nothing for the customer. it's about DRM) and adding stuff like the Intel Management Engine.

Oh, and then about 2 years ago, Intel announced to the world it was putting $300 million into diversity initiatives and then announced it was cutting $300 million in actual technology investments.- thereby signalling that it was done as a technology company. You're beginning to see the effects of that now.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Any ideas on possible solutions?
Focussing on vastly improving the performance of a single core in order to offset the bottlenecking, while other cores work more like auxiliary processors? Is something like that feasible?

Because at the moment, the situation doesn't look very good. It's especially bad for AMD with their notorious weak single threaded performance.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[hairyfeet]

The problem is they are reading the data incorrectly, they are taking data from a BUBBLE and trying to claim that was the norm when in reality it was no different than the housing bubble, an anomaly that did not reflect the actual state of the market.

You see the bubble was caused by the "MHz wars" where a PC from a couple year, hell even a year ago at the start of the bubble, simply would not be able to run the latest software because of the insanely quick jumps in MHz. In just one 4 year period during the MHz wars my personal PC went from 400Mhz to 2GHz, 5 times the power in just that small amount of time! The consumer didn't WANT to replace their PCs that often but they did not have a choice because this years software simply ran like ass on last year's machine and probably wouldn't run at all on a PC two years old.

Now compare this to today, what mainstream software is there out there that won't run on a C2D or Phenom II X2 from 2008? I have a C2Q Media Center PC I use at the shop as my desktop and to do analog to digital video conversion...its got 4 cores, 8Gb of RAM, and a 2TB drive...why would I need to replace it? Even video gaming isn't immune to this as there are plenty of videos (and I have plenty of customers who can back this up) of playing the latest and greatest mainstream games on C2Qs and Phenom II X4s and they play at 1080P just fine, no issues.

The simple fact is even grandma has the equivalent of a fire breathing funny car for a PC which is spending a good 90% of its time in idle, so what would be the point of replacing it? Before my father passed away last year I looked into replacing his office PC, it was a 2.3Ghz Phenom I quad and I had a batch of newer systems in, surely he needs more power running his office than a PC from 2006, right? After collecting data for 3 months I found in reality most of the cores were parked most of the time and the system never got above 50% utilization...replacement simply was not needed.

The only reason you are seeing replacement in the ARM space is they are in the middle of their own MHz bubble which I would argue is already coming to an end as they too hit the thermal wall and users find they can't "feel" any difference between that quad core tablet or phone they got 3 years ago and the new octocores sitting on shelves. Bubbles pop folks, what we are seeing is NOT the "end of the PC" but it simply going back to being replaced only when it fails and I have a feeling we will be seeing the popping of the ARM bubble soon and it would have probably already popped if the industry wasn't forcing upgrades by refusing to support their older products.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[byrtolet]

... basically we need a technology that re-enables single threaded performance.

And we need lower prices. Low prices drove the computer boom, not raw power.

In the past, process shrinks led to cheaper CPUs. This is not happening any more.

Tablets/(smart)phones are selling good, because they got cheep. Then their power increased somewhat, and that led two more expensive phones. Beside that, they wear out more quickly and brake more often -- this is what sustains their sales.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[untoreh]

Multi core isn't good enough because software isnt fully multi core yet and maybe it will never be? If you think how much AMD pushed multi core with bulldozer so many years ago it looks really silly now. If multi core will ever reach omnipresence I bet we would see some arm chips with a huge bag of cores which are now relegated to server workloads into desktop PCs too

Re:$$$ Workstations

[GNious]

What if I want proper N-body simulation in my KSP game? ... oh, wait, 2D .. shit ... :)

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not only CPU stagnation. It's also CPU price stagnation!
A lot of people would upgrade their system when prices of more powerful processors would come down to more reasonable levels...

However - for years now the i7 processor system is out of range of people with a modest income. That where the people that would buy a new system when processor prices would drop to an more affordable level. An level that makes a upgrade sensible. Without those price drops there is no need to upgrade. People that could not afford it 2 years ago, can still not afford it. For them it makes absolutely no sense to buy a new system. Why should they?

So - by keeping processor prices high, the sales will stagnate. That sales where driven not by the people that could afford top gear, but by people that could finally upgrade to a better system for a modest price. Now that price dive is gone, the sales got down. Simple...

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anne Thwacks]

Any ideas on possible solutions?

Bin your Python/PHP and write everything in Algol68 - like its 1973 all over again!

Re:$$$ Workstations

[jabuzz]

Doing that on your workstation is frankly as dumb as hell. A compute cluster stuck in a data centre somewhere is a million times more sensible. Oh and before you claim it won't work for you my day job is running a HPC system with thousands of cores and we have users doing exactly what you are doing so try again.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[DivineKnight]

Better hope there's a R2 in there, or you'll be living an interesting life for a while yet.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[RevDisk]

That request used to make me weep. Then I sorted out everything with LESS and now it's update one variable.

Didn't mention that development to anyone tho. I use that time to fix things I badly hacked up when dev was rushed.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[RevDisk]

There are times where it makes sense. If you have existing tools or scripts that are not cloud/cluster compatible, $33k is chump change compared to development costs. Sometimes it indeed makes sense to throw money at the hardware. Not to mention sometimes you CAN'T cloud things for security, liability or just plain licensing reasons.

I get what you're saying, but a decade or so tells you sometimes there are really really really good reasons for seemingly extremely inefficient procedures.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[omnichad]

If you're still on a Core2 Duo, you can easily find a PC that is 4x faster. You can't look at clock speed alone, either, because there are more instructions per clock on newer Core i-series CPUs.

Just using Passmark's web site as a guide, the Core2 Duo has a rating of 2400 at most (single core at ~1300). Assuming this rating number scales accurately, the faster i7 CPUs top a rating of 10,000 with a single core nearly matching the power of your two cores.

Really, though, a more powerful CPU is not nearly the purchase driver that an SSD is. And I found that my hard drive was my main bottleneck for basic computing.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[pigsycyberbully]

Me too HP Workstation Z840 - Xeon and a graphic tablet and it still does not seem enough power. I feel like I've been robbed.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, and other companys' licensing systems that charge fees on every potentially usable core.

Users who still license software are doing it wrong. It's been the 21st century for quite some time now, folks.

You can't credibly claim to have gripes about modern hardware, if your software is still way back in the 1990s. Luddites need to take their heads out of the sand and have a look around.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the workstation/personal supercomputing market. That market is booming, along with gaming PC's.

But the general PC market for people who just want to surf the web to make purchase or send email is deflating. In the mid 1990's, the home PC market rocketed because everyone wanted to get onto the Internet to read Email, surf the web or design their own web page. The only way to do that was through a desktop PC with Windows or Linux. The competition was fierce and that drove down prices to $600 for a basic system. Now there are smartphones, tablets, smart-TV's (taking Youtube viewing). It's quicker to press the Youtube button on the remote control and select a video than it is to set up the PC/web browser/web page.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[JustNiz]

>> Actually probably stinks for gaming.

Well considering its not a video card (no video output hardware or connector), yeah it does.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[ProzacPatient]

This is no longer the 90's and many computers, even ones that are several years old, are good enough for what they do that the cost of a new PC isn't justified.

I think the even bigger problem with this stagnation is that we're rapidly reaching the end of Moore's law where it will be physically impossible to fit any more transistors on the die therefore even if the Hz race was still on there is a practical limit to just how fast the current type of processors can run so I suppose engineers are going to have to start looking at an alternative technology of some type or get they'll have to think outside the box and get really creative.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Why buy a new computer? After a couple of years, my parent's windows machine is bogged down with malware. Just throw it out and replace it...that's how things are done nowadays, right?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[unixisc]

The reality is CPU stagnation because CPU's hit a frequency wall and multi-core isn't good enough for the future of computing, basically we need a technology that re-enables single threaded performance. That's probably a good 50 years to a century away though.

It's not so much CPU stagnation, as much as the fact that there is no personal software that will really exercise a CPU all that much. Ever since NT went mainstream under the hood of XP, and Intel and AMD went multi-core, it was easy to come up w/ CPUs that were incredibly overkill for most applications. Yeah, one can enhance performance by tossing in more RAM, but even there, one sees memory utilization as typically pretty low.

What is needed is technology that enables multi-threaded performance and actually makes use of i7s and SMP systems. If that happens, one might see PCs sell again. B'cos most of the things we typically use PCs for can be achieved w/ tablets, if not phones, so to justify a PC, one has to need software that doesn't run well on mobile devices

Re:$$$ Workstations

[unixisc]

While we may be hitting the limits on Moore's law, like you said, it's no longer the 90s and multi-core CPUs can easily do the extra work that is needed, thereby making it hard to hit full utilization. If that is not reached, there ain't a compelling reason to keep shrinking - not to mention that we've long been way past the point where die shrinks translated into lower costs.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

"The reality is CPU stagnation because CPU's hit a frequency wall and multi-core isn't good enough for the future of computing"

No, the reality is that people aren't taught how to perform parallelization of algorithms that can be split and run more efficiently in smaller timed chunks.

"basically we need a technology that re-enables single threaded performance"

That's not happening with newer games, scientific simulations, and etc. demanding more power and more cores.

"That's probably a good 50 years to a century away though."

It's likely to never happen without a serious fundamental change in computing ideals and a fundamental shift in the understanding of facts regarding multi-core parallel processing.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

"The reality is CPU stagnation because AMD pulled a Pentium-4, and Intel decided to get in touch with its Green side, instead of pushing further in the Hz-race"

Spoken like a true n00b that knows nothing about how CPUs are optimized. The Hertz wars were over in the early 2000s once multiple instruction multiple data became the norm. From there, it became cache+core wars. Now it's energy efficiency (which leads to faster clock speeds and smaller die sizes when everything is designed right.)

Re:$$$ Workstations

[unixisc]

Agree w/ you about the PC story. Besides, once we went from the MHz wars to simply tossing more cores at the problem, PC replacements were simply not needed. I am looking at getting a new Surface at some point, but other than that, I'm happy.

In the ARM space, when you're talking about replacements, are you talking tablets or phones? I just replaced my iPhone 5s w/ an iPhone 7, and that was not due to any MHz or watts, but rather, b'cos I wanted to use some features like Apple Pay, which were not there on the former, and also so that I could pass on the 5s to my niece. I also have a Moto-X and a Lumia 550, which I don't plan to replace, unless they stop working altogether. On the tablet front, I have a Verizon Ellipsis 10 - where the only upgrade I'll try will be an OS upgrade to Marshmallow, which would allow me to upgrade the storage by selecting a 256GB SD as primary storage, and making the remaining 16GB secondary. I also have an iPad Mini, which I will be upgrading Christmas only b'cos the storage on that is just 16GB.

But if it weren't for these things, I wouldn't be replacing my ARMs either

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

"The P4's 'bad' design was because it was rushed into mass production on an existing and nearly obsolete die scale"

Wrong, the long instruction pipeline is what caused most of the energy and performance losses, proven on a smaller die scale later on with the Northwood 64-bit P4 procs (and 'fixed' with microcode and cache updates to bring performance levels around the sub-GHz Tualiatin PIII.) Do you ever bother studying the underlying architecture?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

"During the Pentium 4 era they were expecting P4's design to scale upwards of 10Ghz and predicting stuff like 30Ghz processors, we are nowhere near that 30Ghz though 10 years later and that was in 2006"

We can do 30 GHz easily on analog-based chips (think VGA-era electronics,) the problem lies in keeping things like capacitive and inductive forces down so that such rapid switching speeds are possible with low chance of bit-level errors and bad branching being introduced in 'digital' (aka discrete analog signal) ICs.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

> owning an i5 @ 4.5ghz doesn't mean fuck all if the game is locked to one core constantly

Oh, that means something alright. That means you are running the game as fast as possible, and paid for the least wasted cores. Assuming, of course, it's a pretty modern generation processor. Anyone with an i7 gets the same as you in that case, and pays more, anyone with a Xeon gets less than you in that case and pays way more, et.c

I feel as software, the job is write a ton of multithreaded stuff, because that's the only stuff that will get better for free in the future (and in the case of software that charges per core, the only way to write stuff that will get better merely at the cost of charging the customer more later). I'm sure at some point we'll see a breakthrough on speed again, and despite Intel's sluggish increase on hertz, they continued to slowly increase the instructions per clock.

But you know what's really interesting? The desktop series chips have this onboard "graphic" chip. It's a lot of their wafer size, the cores are smaller and smaller. The total computing power of these chips continues to rise, it is just huge amounts of the gain are in the intel graphic chips.

To a normal PC user, this means that their graphics capability has gone up, and so has their compute ability for the few things that are written to be able to use this graphics chip for useful math. To a gamer, that means nothing, because they plug in a coprocessor ("video card") that blows away that little wafer in total performance. What COULD be happening instead, is that something could be making use of ALL THREE OF: the video card, the on-chip graphics processor, and the x86 cores. If something does that, you would have seen its performance scale at Moore's Law-like rates. Instead the only thing that scales that way is maybe some synthetic benchmark. Every software thing will either have no use for anything but an x86 core, or will use the most powerful coprocessor you give it, *either* the graphics card *or* the onboard, not both.

I don't know how "ready to go with a phonecall" better tech in this dimension is, and I know that as a guy who owns a compiler (gcc comes with every useful OS, for free! And there's other options too!) but not a silicon foundry (those are more expensive), what *I* can do is pthread stuff. Even if we see an increase in speed in the future, there will always be a reasonably cheap way to add cores and increase parallelism, and a theoretical 32 GHz single core processor will be able to run the multithreaded stuff about as fast as a theoretical 8 GHz 4 core processor, so you win either way.

But it is frustrating. I think the real reason we haven't seen aggressive pushes into super high frequencies is because of the risk involved- if you make a 30% faster processor for massive amounts of R&D and then all the phone guys say "fuck it" and use the cheapest shit from some foundry that will eventually copy you, you shoulder all the burden and get nothing out of it. Much safer to probe all the next generation technologies slowly until one seems to be the clear winner, and I think we are seeing that now.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

"Focussing on vastly improving the performance of a single core in order to offset the bottlenecking, while other cores work more like auxiliary processors? Is something like that feasible?"

Quit using languages like Python and Java which have very little optimization for multi-core/multi-thread performance..

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

" In any case, either is needed to address 512 GB."

Funny, I can address that much in Windows Sever 2K3 64-bit mode plus I can do it in Server 2K3 32-bit with PAE. It still runs as my primary gaming OS.

Do you not know how to efficiently utilize your system resources?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

I built that emulation environment like three years ago. It can run on the cloud and then some.

Sadly, my CFO was stupid enough to convince the CEO to sell this tech to another company. Well, what can you expect when your CFO faces jail time and needs money?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

" Oh and before you claim it won't work for you my day job is running a HPC system with thousands of cores and we have users doing exactly what you are doing so try again."

Sounds like your programmers need an education update - we've done similar for ten years just simulating light projections from LEDs.

Come back when you've actually got a grasp of the basics and can do it on 386-class hardware, you n00b.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

For roughly 3X the cost I could get almost 30X the performance.

Try again when you design systems for specific purposes.

(BTW, note this system has a huge memory bottleneck architecturally [if you bothered to read the spec sheet and understand it.])

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Khyber]

No, it doesn't, until you move to Windows server 2012 (aka Windows 8 Server.)

Before that, RemoteFX had some serious performance. Then came 2012, which cut that performance literally in half for 'security measures.'

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

> It takes a lot of work to make something multithreaded.

It takes a lot of work to make a *game* multithreaded. It takes an impossible amount of effort to make certain things multithreaded, and "CS201: Now We Teach Java Here Lewl" to make a large variety of things multithreaded.

Most big games are at the point where they split threads out by function, which is a big start. With SMP you gain a lot by removing tasks from the main thread, which that did admirably. But of course, there's a lot more to go.

One thing is that there's new instructions on intels latest chips that can help with threads that need to sync. Some of this is going to be inherited for free by threading libraries, and that will cause a reduction in drama when threads need to communicate a little. These TSX extensions I am pretty sure don't have an AMD implementation yet, and they had to be patched out of Haswell, and have issues in certain Broadwells as well- but if you purpose-build a machine now, you can have it, and in a few years, it will be reasonable to assume that much of your userbase will be capable of that.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet many things in your user experience would be 4x as fast with a Kabylake on a top end mobo in a few months. Not strictly CPU related, of course. And of course, no matter your core 2 duo, you can get something with way more than 4x the computational horsepower (counting CPU cores) already, and have been able to for years. Remember there have been serious IPC gains, so each clock now is better than a clock back then, on average.

I think the real thing is, you upgraded casually before because you never "needed" the horsepower, until the new machine was so much better it was a vastly better experience for free. And that absolutely did stop.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[cfalcon]

Phones do break more often, but they also aren't quite as much of a commodity as a full PC. That is in part because the market still has so many things that just haven't been done yet, and many of the barriers are still being broken by industry leaders- they are simply a less mature market. Throw in that almost everyone can make use of a phone with superpowers, whereas a sit-down computer requires way more tradeoffs, and it makes perfect sense, to me at least.

But here's another example: Apple's new 7 phone is about twice as fast at most tasks as their 6 phone from two years ago. Android phones haven't had that exact huge boost, but they are still a lot more powerful than 2-4 years ago as well. That is a big gain in performance- both for whatever computing tasks you do on your phone, but also phones are still making huge strides in GUI and responsiveness. PCs mostly hit a wall where everything that could be fast is effectively instant, and everything that is slow is still pretty slow, but marginally faster now. The machine I'm typing this on gives me letters as soon as I press them: so did my machine twenty years ago. My first iPhone did not, it was clearly struggling to do that simple task, and that was just a few years ago. You can easily find games that work amazing on a new phone, decently on an old phone, and not at all on an early phone, and we are talking just the span of a few years. If you, as a game developer, come out with a game that needs a top-end two year old computer, you are ignoring the vast majority of your userbase- no one will fund that idea. But if you had that development model in 1992, it would be defensible, even if not optimal.

So I really think that the power increase drives the market, but not in the sense of "most people want a bigger processing peen", in the sense of "can you make a computer that uses the new power to make me more productive". A GUI does that, a bunch of 3D effects do not (or at least not trivially). An on screen keyboard that is more accurate and faster does, hyperthreading does not. Etc. In the areas where the new tech helps, the new tech has taken off. And phones and tablets have had an open field there.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Type44Q]

And... you don't know what the fuck you're talking about but thanks for playing. ;)

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Type44Q]

Do you not know how to efficiently utilize your system resources?

Pretty sure the word "efficient" doesn't apply to PAE...

Re:$$$ Workstations

[cfalcon]

I spent a bit under 4k on a box this year. Also a dual Xeon, and probably not as saucy as yours. But I because I built mine from parts, it wouldn't even count in the statistics of "shipped PCs". I bought chips offa eBay (don't hate!), and got the components from newegg, amazon, and the local microcenter. That list in there is just the PCs that the guys who ship stuff sell. Going through my *entire life*, and counting the computer my parents bought me as a gift when I went into college, I would count for about four computer sales- one Gateway 2000, and three laptops. But I've certainly BUILT several towers between now and then- they just wouldn't add onto those metrics. I don't care if HP sells enough desktops (and not just because they really sell servers). I don't care if Lenovo has some downturn. As long as the guys making mobos, CPUs, RAM, HDDs, SDDs, etc are making products, I'm good on non-mobile PCs.

I'm not a typical use case, but I'm far from unique, especially in a place like slashdot. Hell, in a few years, it may even be possible to assemble a laptop from components without being a crazy man. The industry is a lot bigger than just full shipped PCs, after all.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[cfalcon]

> You can turn hyper threading off on Intel systems too

You can, and if you are paying by the core, you should. Many instructions aren't actually split per core- the core handling two threads with hyperthreading really can do some instructions from each thread at the same time, but not all of them. The boost was originally very low, like 10%, and is decently higher now (like 40%?), but it is nowhere as good as another physical core.

I'm sure Intel isn't too happy with this pricing model, either. They COULD have found other ways to increase performance instead of hyperthreading, of course- they just figured (correctly) that this would be a good bang for the buck, and maybe didn't consider that it would be used as a bat-to-the-knees on their end users.

> Nobody's being forced to buy 20 core processors

Some people sure are.

> Intel still makes a four core version of everything as far as I know

And you know why that sucks.

Here's the problem with that pricing model: you are paying twice. You pay for the hardware, and then you pay for the software. If games were priced that way, they'd cost more to run on a good graphics card than a bad one. You'd be stuck at 30 fps until you paid a license fee, after you installed your latest nvidia. And as you point out, there's ways around it- there's ways to decrease the TOTAL processing power of your box (buy buying a chip that has less cores, but each core runs faster, for the same money and less total processing power), and then save enough to justify that based on the arbitrary license fee of running on X cores instead of Y cores with the software. It's total shit. It's basically as if the software guy capped the processing at 500 MHz, and charged you more for each increment of 500 MHz your processor runs at- it is just that threads are much easier to control for in software.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[rfengr]

Been there done that. It's because the IT people won't keep the damn tools updated and functioning correctly, and security locks down all the ports, and batch submission to clusters does not work well for getting real-time feedback on convergence. Fuck the cloud.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[dnaumov]

Good luck obtaining "ownership" rights to the OS running on your computer and any and all software running within. FIY: if you are running Linux, you are doing so under a license.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's true that sequential programming is still the primary taught pattern, parrellization is often not naturally intuitive. Also, the problem at hand widely depends on if parallelization is even possible. Often is the case that the problem's known solutions are by nature, sequential, and not due to lack of investigation or understanding for parallel processing options.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody besides gamers and high end users needs to update their PC as often as their smartphone. And that is a good thing. In fact, that is the best thing about PC's. They are more like cars. You want them to be reliable and last a while, possibly with having some bits replaced or updated halfway through their life cycle.
PC's still have their place. The PC industry just needs to adjust and scale down. Some lesser companies may go under, but so be it.

Face it, the average PC user can probably do everything they need on a system from the mid-2000s after they simply update it to the newest Windows. Thus it should come as no surprise that people do not buy new computers as often, when the old ones still work just fine.

I consider myself a PC enthusiast, yet my PC is from 2008. It is pretty embarrassing, but it still does everything I need it for. Sure, it would be nice to be able to play the latest games, but I am not a dedicated enough of a gamer. Actually, my next system will be a silent completely passively cooled 0dB PC. I do not need it, but I have wanted to build one for a while. :)

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Your crazy. It costs hundreds a month for a dedicated VPS with a few cores and ram. Thats 3k per year. If your average server is 20k and can run like 20 cores, its not cheaper to use cloud services. Servers tend to last about 3-5 years around here.

Cloud is OK for some stuff, but not really cost effective when you start desiring dedicated resources.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

I simple program to test the non trivial process of functions to use multiple threads. A CPU based password hasher. aaaaaaa,aaaaaab, ... we can do this in a loop on a single thread. But even this simple algorithm proves quite challenging in practice (not theory). Managing sequencing, managing interruptions, stoppping and continuation. And even dividing up the work before it starts. What is the work for each thread? How did we calculate the work for each thread? Was it just Faster to do the work instead of calculate it? How do we sync up the results?

Just try it with code. A little, simple, easy, one task program. Then now you see why there are just a few of these and why they cost so much.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[JustNiz]

3D gaming over remoteFX even pre-2012? sorry but that would suck balls comapred to a directly connected gaming monitor. Apart from anything else, what about framrates > 60hz, Gsync/Freesync and the unavoidable extra latency?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. For gaming, you do need a somewhat current graphics card, but the gain is in the GPU not the bus bandwidth, so the a modern card works well even on the older MB's. I play games at full max with a Core i7 960 from many years ago and it never even pins a core.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[Howitzer86]

Yep. I do 3D modeling/rendering, VR, and that sort. So I built a new one... but my last PC was a AMD X4 thing with 8GB of ram. It would have been fine if not for that. Computers are always useful, so I stuck it under the TV and use it to play emulated games.

The old computer before the old computer (Dual Core Pentium, 2GB of ram) is stuck in the back of the house, dutifully acting as a DVR for a security camera... but it's still snappy and responsive for pretty much any typical consumer task.

Thinking about it, I may have built my last PC for the next 10 years, the motherboard isn't nearly maxed out on ram yet (32 vs 128), better video cards still come out every year, and when the time comes to start fresh, the market may be completely different. The next system could be some floating image beaming out of a tiny slab connected remotely to a unimaginably fast cloud computer somewhere. I may not even care that the traditional PC market had died.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[thegarbz]

They recently came out with Windoze 10, which will suck up all that power just to report your personal life back to the mothership

While those jokes won't get old, the reality has changed quite a bit. Windows 10 is so far the fastest and leanest post Vista OS.

(makes me wonder how much leaner it would be if it weren't for the telemetry).

Re:$$$ Workstations

[thegarbz]

Doing that on your workstation is frankly as dumb as hell.

Big words for someone who hasn't seen the use case. I was able to do them on my laptop 10 years ago, WTF would you suggest you need a HPC system other than trying in vain to ensure your own job security?

Re:$$$ Workstations

[SEE]

Er, no. The Hz race has not been stalled for a decade because every player in the industry suddenly changed their priorities all at once.

IBM, which you cite for its lab work, would be perfectly happy to be able to deploy substantially faster POWER chips to increase its market share at the expense of x86. But POWER's stagnated on frequency since 2006, too. Similarly, the "rest of the industry" that you say wants to replace x86 with ARM would quite gladly ship 10 GHz ARM parts if they could figure out how; after all, that would greatly help in stealing market share from x86.

No, we're stuck where we are because nobody can yet figure out how to actually move any technique for increasing speed from the lab to an actual mass-manufactured part, even though every single player in the desktop and server spaces has a massive incentive to be the first to do so.

Re: $$$ Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation pls

Re:$$$ Workstations

[AK Marc]

30GHz can't work. At 30 GHz, if you used a speed of light medium (and electrons through copper/silicon aren't quite there), 30 GHz corresponds to 9 mm of travel. You couldn't send the signal in one pin and get it out on the other pin, even under theoretically optimal conditions, let alone practical ones.

Fuzzy logic and such were considered an option, where the clock was no longer a fixed thing, but it never worked as intended. So the physics could never work for 30 GHz. Someone may have extrapolated to that, but it was simply impossible, and always will be (until CPUs are physically smaller and materials improve), or CPUs stop using clocks, at which a 30 GHz clock speed for reference seems silly, like measuring speed in parsecs.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[AK Marc]

I have a computer 10+ years old. 10+ year old RAM, CPU, GPU. I upgraded the drive from PATA to SSD SATA (on MB), and can run current software just fine, even some new games that fall back to very low "low" settings. The drive made a large difference in load times, making it feel much more snappy.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[lsatenstein]

Sees, I just spent $33k for a dual Xeon, 512 GB, and 4 Telsa K40. I suppose that will make up for > 10x standard PCs. I suppose you either need the horsepower, and it's still not enough, or you don't need it at all. I just hope the high end workstations continue to be available; noting Intel stopped their motherboard production.

For me, price is the reason I will not upgrade. I can't see spending $1000 for a desktop cpu that is worth $450 to $500. The CPU chip should not cost more than $100, the motherboard $100, the peripherals 150, and software, perhaps another $50.00

Re:$$$ Workstations

[jgdnavy]

I think the bigger problem is that for the average consumer, the new processor series mean nothing. Before, you could tell by the name of the processor that it was a step forward. 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, etc. (Pentium at least told you it was different) Now, unless you follow architectures, there is nothing to make it obvious that this year's i7 is any different from the ones from 2009. Why should I upgrade? I already have an i7 and the clock speed is essentially the same (and in many cases, lower). While as techies we understand the under-the-hood changes that make the difference, it's difficult for the person that's just grabbing a system for the family to surf on to tell there's anything new to justify spending money on a system. While the processor prices have gone down comparatively, meaning you don't have to get an i7 to get the same performance that you got with earlier i7s, you have to know what the alphabet soup that Intel now uses for model names actually tells you.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[tigersha]

Why? I just upgraded to a dual 14 core Xeon, 256GB Ram and paid 2400. Where do you get 33K from??!!

Re: $$$ Workstations

[NotAPK]

In addition to speed, think about whether your computer use has changed much.

For me, the biggest change in the past five years has been ubiquitous VM use for daily computing. I have dozens of VMs that I pick and choose from based on my daily requirements.

To support this, I need lots of RAM, since I like to keep the VMs spun up (lazy like that) but not doing any actual work. So for me, 32GB of RAM is the minimum and was the primary reason for my latest upgrade (previous laptop motherboard was capped at 16GB).

Second to this, I entirely support switching to SSD. It's the single best upgrade for any typical computer user. I helped a friend with their upgrade just the other day (Samsung 850 EVO 500GB for AUD$240 just walking into a high-street store, no special effort to find anything cheaper because I like to support the local computer shop when I can) and we benchmarked the two drives to show him how significant the improvement was: while raw read/write speeds were clearly 10x faster, the random access times are thousands of times faster and in general use this is what you notice, especially while Win10 is streaming all its telemetry/spying data to the disk for later upload to the mothership.

Re:$$$ Workstations

[toddestan]

Actually, I'd rate Windows 8.1 as the fastest. Windows 10 is noticeably slower, but still faster than Windows 7. Kind of a bummer about the UI though.

Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the market for poorly made crapware infested lenovo machines dropped AND the over priced apple workstations?

well i'll be damned.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

So the market for poorly made crapware infested lenovo machines dropped AND the over priced apple workstations?

well i'll be damned.

I'm buying a new Apple this year, either a full blown iMac, or if the wife lets me, a PowerMac. I want to but a new PC laptop too, but it has to run Win7, because just like W8, I won't own another with shitware on it. Been out looking, but of course, no one local is selling a new laptop with an actual working operating system, like W7.

Wanna watch PC's sell again? Rework Windows 7 into a new and working OS, one that you control the updates on, and one that you control the telemetry.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

A fool and his money i guess

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to but a new PC laptop too, but it has to run Win7, because just like W8, I won't own another with shitware on it. Been out looking, but of course, no one local is selling a new laptop with an actual working operating system, like W7.

If you are a Costco member they are currently selling an HP Envy 15t with an i7 and a 1080p display preloaded with Windows 7. I'd buy one myself but I need a discrete GPU.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

A fool and his money i guess

Nope. A guy who needs uptime. Windows 10 doesn't remotely provide the uptime. I have a Windows 7 system that hasn't had a problem in a year and a half now. I abandoned W10 after it turned computers into a steaming pile of no worky, the third time with the Anniversary update.

The Mac? just works, Not much else I need to say about it. Gets an update and installs it only when I tell it to install it, not when Apple decides to install it like they do with Windows 10

But if you want to think I'm a fool, you just go right ahead, coward, you just go right ahead.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

I want to but a new PC laptop too, but it has to run Win7, because just like W8, I won't own another with shitware on it. Been out looking, but of course, no one local is selling a new laptop with an actual working operating system, like W7.

If you are a Costco member they are currently selling an HP Envy 15t with an i7 and a 1080p display preloaded with Windows 7. I'd buy one myself but I need a discrete GPU.

Cool - thank you,

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

> But if you want to think I'm a fool, you just go right ahead, coward, you just go right ahead.

I'm an AC, too, and I don't think you're a fool. I'm lucky enough to have a W7 PC, but they're deploying W10 all over at work.

Boy, it's just like old times... blue screens everywhere with that worm getting into and out of a hole in eternal circles like a video that won't start. It's just like Vista, with another name and in 2016. I guess we'll have to wait for the next version and hope it works (not better, it will be great if it just works even if badly).

Macs are nice, but too expensive here (3 to 4 times the cost of an equivalent Windows PC). Alas, I wonder which value something which does not work has...

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad they mentioned it didn't include Chromebooks, which have sold like hotcakes. They can't do everything, but can do a lot of what average people need...and they are relatively cheap. It's all I take with me when I go to clients or on vacation...well, that and my smartphone.

I think Windows is the reason why pc sales have slumped...started with Windows 8, continued with 8.1, and continues with 10. Gee, our OS invades our privacy, changes the privacy settings back to spy with the big updates, and people don't trust MS with good reason. (That and the automatic driver borking is enough to slow most sane people from wanting to spend a lot on a new virus prone machine.)

Now, some of us need faster machines, but we can get that by loading Linux on them. (at least if the UEFI isn't stuck on W10 only) In my case, my old i7 was made to feel like a relative speed demon with Linux Mint.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm glad they mentioned it didn't include Chromebooks, which have sold like hotcakes. They can't do everything, but can do a lot of what average people need...and they are relatively cheap. It's all I take with me when I go to clients or on vacation...well, that and my smartphone.

I also have a Chromebook that I take with me when I don't want my expensive computers in harms way. It dual boots Linux as well. Nice little computers. And it has never not worked for me.

The times are changing. This is not the day of escape codes and if you get the computer to print landscape you have been a success. Some of us demand that the device work the next morning when it worked the day before.

And Win10 fails that miserably, and just isn't ready for primetime, or much else. It's the Trabant of operating systems.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Zontar The Mindless]

I don't think you're a fool. Bought my wife a MBP last year. Our home is now Windows-free. No more "Honey, this update is taking forever, can't you do anything about it?" No more Windows Just Crapped Itself And Ate Her Report At 11PM on Sunday (and *of course* she has her semi-monthly department heads meeting at 9 the following morning...). And no more worries about what Windows is trying to pull with her data, and on my network. BLISS!!!

I thought I would resent having to pay too much for hardware that I know full well I can get for half the price. But after a year? Not a bit.

Best damn overpriced kit I ever forked out for, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Damn straight I would.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[GNious]

I No more Windows Just Crapped Itself And Ate Her Report At 11PM on Sunday

macOS Sierra (10.12) does this - Twice recently it has just closed all applications and logged me out, randomly, with no warning.
Last time was during an iMovie export, with ca 15 minutes left - had to re-run the export, after iMovie spent half an hour to check that its "database" is still valid.

Yeah, we use Apple computers too in this house-hold, but it is not problem free, not by a long stretch.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Zontar The Mindless]

I don't use any Apple gear at all, myself--my stuff all runs Linux or Android, no walled garden for me, thanks.

All I know is that the number of times I've had to play support person for her since she made the switch has dropped from an average of 1-2x/day to... zero.

YMMV. But 13 months later, I'm quite satisfied it was the right thing for her. (And me.)

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[GNious]

Oh, moving my wife to OSX was the right choice here too - _almost_ zero complaints, except the hardware is getting old :/

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I want to but a new PC laptop too, but it has to run Win7, because just like W8, I won't own another with shitware on it.

IIRC, Microsoft's policy on selling new PCs with Windows 7 preloaded is changing some time around now to prohibit it. Some manufacturers will supply with Windows 10 preinstalled and support downgrade rights, but it looks like that's as good as we're going to get until MS get the message.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're indeed a fool. You and your boyfriend "macs4all" have been astroturfing quite a lot of pro-Apple garbage recently. Indeed, the Mac just works.... with what little software is actually available for it. And, like your butt-buddy, you also adhere to the misguided belief that having a username on Slashdot proves something. It doesn't. Some of us have been here far longer than you, have contributed more, yet never felt the narcissistic desire to register a username. Your username gives you no advantage except that people can know you're a troll before even reading what you actually posted.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

overpriced apple workstations with shitty chiclet keyboards

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[maynard]

I'm fed up with Apple. Still running a 27" iMac from 2010. Good enough machine with boot SSD and 32GB RAM. But the latest machines are very behind, particularly the MacPro. Also, 5k and 4k panels don't support deep color (10bit). You're better off running AViD, Adobe, DaVinci et all on a PC with Windows. Particularly if you need HDR color. The same for free software creative tools, which also tend to run badly on Mac. Apple just doesn't support power users and creatives any longer.

For the cost of a good 5k iMac you could get two 10 bit 4k panels, a Haswell 5960 or 6850, 32-64GB RAM, and a Pascal GTX card that supports 10 bit. Adobe, et all under Win 8/10 supports 10 bit. And Blender supports 10 bit (really 32bit float color). I think there may be a path to 10 bit on Linux as well... but then you're stuck with free tools.

What are you buying that Mac for? If you're developing iPhone / iPad apps - sure. But as much as I like MacOS under the hood, it's a real PITA to do real work with. And the Pro hardware is generations behind current PCs.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I moved my wife to Linux Mint 3 years ago. In 3 years I've had exactly 2 "support tickets" from her: 1 for printing, 1 for a new power adapter.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Merk42]

I'm buying a new Apple this year, either a full blown iMac, or if the wife lets me, a PowerMac

I hope she doesn't let you. PowerMac has been discontinued for over a decade.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

I don't think you're a fool. Bought my wife a MBP last year. Our home is now Windows-free. No more "Honey, this update is taking forever, can't you do anything about it?" No more Windows Just Crapped Itself And Ate Her Report At 11PM on Sunday (and *of course* she has her semi-monthly department heads meeting at 9 the following morning...). And no more worries about what Windows is trying to pull with her data, and on my network. BLISS!!!

I thought I would resent having to pay too much for hardware that I know full well I can get for half the price. But after a year? Not a bit.

Best damn overpriced kit I ever forked out for, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Damn straight I would.

Having used both Mac and Windows machines since the early 90s - Not so much W 3.1 - My Macs lasted longer between 1.5 and 2 times longer to be precise. The only equipment problem I had was na Xserver that had the leaky cap issue, and Apple overnighted one to me. Also some iMacs were hit by that. But then a lot of Dells were too, so that's a wash. As well, whne performance was taken into account, the PC/Mac price divide got a lot narrower.

Then there was the update process. Pretty ugly on the Windows side. I managed to keep it at bay until W10 gave me no choice other than to defer the day of failure.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

I No more Windows Just Crapped Itself And Ate Her Report At 11PM on Sunday

macOS Sierra (10.12) does this - Twice recently it has just closed all applications and logged me out, randomly, with no warning. Last time was during an iMovie export, with ca 15 minutes left - had to re-run the export, after iMovie spent half an hour to check that its "database" is still valid.

Yeah, we use Apple computers too in this house-hold, but it is not problem free, not by a long stretch.

Sounds like a classic case of thecooling system needing cleaned.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

You're indeed a fool.

Ah, at least you were smart enough to post as the coward you are.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm buying a new Apple this year, either a full blown iMac, or if the wife lets me, a PowerMac

I hope she doesn't let you. PowerMac has been discontinued for over a decade.

Yeah, Mac Pro, not PowerMac

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Kjella]

I thought I would resent having to pay too much for hardware that I know full well I can get for half the price. But after a year? Not a bit. Best damn overpriced kit I ever forked out for, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Damn straight I would.

That's the luxury of having a comfortable economy. You wouldn't do it if money was tight, but if it's bugging you, it can be fixed by money and you have the money just do it. You'll be a lot happier fixing them than you will be for saving the money or trying to compensate the bad with the good, even if objectively it doesn't make much sense. You're doing it for yourself and it's what you feel that matters. If you don't give a shit about Armani suits and don't want to impress anyone who do don't buy one but if you want to eat at a Michelin restaurant go for it. But if you'd rather have a burger and a beer just do that, don't let the price dictate what you're supposed to want. That goes in the negative direction too, you decide how much fixing the problem is worth to you. Not anybody else.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[thegarbz]

No more "Honey, this update is taking forever, can't you do anything about it?" No more Windows Just Crapped Itself And Ate Her Report At 11PM on Sunday (and *of course* she has her semi-monthly department heads meeting at 9 the following morning...).

I would have just replaced the wife.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[tepples]

What are you buying that Mac for? If you're developing iPhone / iPad apps - sure.

Or for testing web applications in Safari for macOS. Chrome is an imperfect proxy because of how much Blink and WebKit have diverged in the three and a half years since the fork.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or for testing web applications in Safari for macOS.

Then you need it.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[vandamme]

My newest PC is a 5 year old laptop. All run Linux, so there's no need to buy new ones unless I want to edit 1080P video (they do 720 fine). Once you age them to shake out the bad components, they'll last a long time (bottom of the bathtub curve). And I run up to date OSes.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

My newest PC is a 5 year old laptop. All run Linux, so there's no need to buy new ones unless I want to edit 1080P video (they do 720 fine). Once you age them to shake out the bad components, they'll last a long time (bottom of the bathtub curve). And I run up to date OSes.

I use Linux on a number of laptops I and my wife have. And they mesh right in with OS X, I can use terminal on each just fine. I'm hoping that Apple brings out a new iMac that will have a little more horsepower, but if not, I'm okay with the slimmer design and less heat generation of the skinny iMacs.

I have one program that I have to run Windows on, as it's a good program, but the producers believe that there is only one operating system, Windows, and get really pissy if you suggest that there is anything else.

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a classic case of thecooling system needing cleaned.

Or it just plain overheated. A lot of Macs simply can't run at 100% CPU for extended periods of time because the inadequate cooling system just can't handle it.

But it's soooo quiet, thin, and shiny!

Re:Lenovo and apple only?

[Ol Olsoc]

Sounds like a classic case of thecooling system needing cleaned.

Or it just plain overheated. A lot of Macs simply can't run at 100% CPU for extended periods of time because the inadequate cooling system just can't handle it.

But it's soooo quiet, thin, and shiny!

I have one of the mid-2011 macs that runs hot. Unless the fanholes get clogged, it functions just fine while hot. It is part of the reason why I'm upgrading soon, as while it's no issue in the winter, in the summer I have to run the office AC harder.

I've had more Windows PC's shut down because of heat - especially HP and Dell.

Note 7 side-effect?

[Tablizer]

Since PC's are not known to catch fire, perhaps their fortunes are about to change...

Re:Note 7 side-effect?

[rfengr]

I've smelt plenty of Chinese shit electrolytic capacitors that probably will catch fire.

Re:Note 7 side-effect?

[Mashiki]

All good mobo makers have long since moved to solid-state caps, it's only the bottom of the barrel pre-manufactured garbage where you have to worry about that problem now. In otherwords, if you're building your own on a Saturday afternoon. Likely no problems. Buy from dell, acer, lenovo, or whatever, you're getting what you pay for...mostly the name.

Re:Note 7 side-effect?

[GNious]

I had one of the "exploding" Dell laptops, with the short-circuiting batteries (Same issue as Samsung claims with the Note 7) - not sure what I'm supposed to be getting from that brand, that I wouldn't be getting from Samsung :)

At least with the service contract, they were able to next-day me a new battery.

Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to wonder if Windows 10 is helping to cause this slump. People don't want Windows 10, but that's all you can really get for an OS unless you're willing to learn something entirely new. Not an option for the majority really. As a result more people will cling to their older PCs for as long as it'll last. If they aren't using it to play games, it's likely still good enough for what they were doing before.

Re:Win10

[Ol Olsoc]

I'd have to wonder if Windows 10 is helping to cause this slump.

Yes. Most people know how the bend over and take ut up the backside updates are screwing their computers up. People have Windows 7 computers that work. Why upgrade to a computer that shits it's pants every update?

Re:Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 isn't a "fun" upgrade. In fact, W7 was the last one that brought useful features for the end user. Windows 10 doesn't really bring anything useful for home users, other than forcing them to do upgrades when the computer feels like it, slurping telemetry data 24/7, and slinging ads on a paid-for OS.

Then you compound it with glitchy cumulative updates. The one from earlier this month had a nasty habit of trying to install, failing, rebooting the machine, then repeating the next day.

The enterprise isn't happy with W10, consumers are not happy with it, nobody really is, except MS. Because people rather cling to W7, this is stunting PC sales, or even getting people to jump to Macs. Heck, I've been seeing SMBs actually using Ubuntu on the desktop with management done by a CM tool. If this is the case, W10 has done more to cause "The Year of the Linux Desktop" than any DE dev has done.

Re:Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Windows 8 and Windows 10 are together responsible of many of us refusing to upgrade their PC for many years. When Microsoft is so hostile against its customers smart people just vote with their wallet.

Re: Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened with Windows 9 and why isnt everyone on Windows 2016 by now?

It was always a shitty and haphazard embrace.

Re:Win10

[Gadget_Guy]

I think Windows 10 is causing the slump, but not because people don't want it - it is because they already have it. There has always been a large segment of people who used a new version of Windows as the excuse to buy a new system; either because the OS needed the extra grunt or it was simply deemed to be the easiest way to upgrade for non-techies.

Along comes Windows 10, which basically threw itself onto everybody's existing systems. All of a sudden, there was no reason to buy new computer. As we all know, recent computer hardware is still fast enough to run average software so the benefit of buying a new system is miniscule.

Re:Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'd like to buy a new computer but like so many others I won't buy Windows 10. And before you make a comment, I have an Apple and it's not a viable alternative.

Re:Win10

[swb]

For all of its reported problems, it's worked fine for me across two laptops, a NUC and a VM.

One of the laptops is an Asus Zenbook which replaced an iPad as my couch computer and IMHO, at least, it's been pretty much as simple to use as the iPad was, with good battery life and actually reliable sleep/hibernate.

I know I'm supposed to get on the anti-Win 10 bus, but with the right settings I don't get Win10 ads or annoyances and I've mostly managed to live with the Win10 start menu without getting too worked up about the changes.

My biggest complaint about it would be the updating environment. I haven't had any problems with updates, but I wish when manually updating a system you were able to pull ALL the updates to the current build level. It seems like the updating, even on a new install, has its own agenda and dribbles updates out.

Re:Win10

[AmiMoJo]

I'd expect Windows 10 to boost sales. A lot of people got unwanted updates that didn't work, and either had to pay to have it fixed or just buy a new computer. People with older machines faced with paying to have them fixed will probably just get a new one.

Like back in the day how people would throw their Windows XP machines away after a few years* because they got slow.

* Who am I kidding, a few weeks more like

Re:Win10

[guacamole]

Windows 10 contributed to the slump BECAUSE it was a free upgrade. Regardless of all the complaints about Windows 10, a whole lot of users see it as an improvement over Windows 8 with it's bizzare tablet user interface. So most people who were sick of Windows 8 preferred a free upgrade, which was cheaper than buying a new PC.

Re:Win10

[guacamole]

I disagree. Windows 10 reduced new PC sales because a whole lot of people who were sick of Windows 8 tablet interface and those who wanted the latest and greatest Microsoft OS, got it with a free upgrade instead of buying a new PC with windows 10 pre-installed.

In the past, PC sales were also driven by the new Windows releases because of the increasing hardware requirements. But in the recent times we have observed the phenomenon, where Windows 10 is leaner and faster than Windows 8, and Windows 8 is leaner and faster than Windows 7, and Windows 7 is leaner and faster than Vista. Windows 10 is the kind of OS that was designed to make sure it can run on a tablet with a humble CPU with no cooling fan and only 2GB of RAM. As a result, I have observed that Windows 10 can run fine on an ancient 8 year old PC that originally shipped with Vista just fine, and in fact a lot better than Vista.

Re: Win10

[omnichad]

What happened with Windows 9

Windows 7 ate 9.

Re:Win10

[Anonymous Coward]

Wife's Win10 machine booted super fast when brand new. It is quite slow booting now. Didn't take long to bloat it, and it still doesn't work that well.

My Win8.1 machine used to boot super fast too. Much slower now, though not as bad as her Win10 machine.

My kid's new laptop is an i7

[rsilvergun]

and she probably coulda kept using her 3 year old i5 but the school gives you grief if the laptops more than a year old. I can't imagine her ever needing a new pc until this one breaks, and with it's overpowered cpu and intel graphics that barely ever get used I'm not expecting it to burn out. Might need a new hard drive in a few years, but that's it.

Haven't really looked at the power jack. Lenovo's hold up really well. This one's a Toshiba so the jack might die. Barring that it's the last one she'll own until she graduates.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[plover]

My year old Lenovo's power circuit on the mobo fried, not the jack. It cost a lot more to fix. So I'm not feelin' the Lenovo love here.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

> [T]he school gives you grief if the laptops more than a year old.

Fuck em. Seriously.

Are they paying you to provide the laptop? No? Fuck em.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered telling said school to "STFU, I are a perfessional?"

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[0100010001010011]

the school gives you grief if the laptops more than a year old.

I'd have sent the kids to school with a DIY PC running FreeBSD and have taught the kids vim and how to launch X. Your IT department's poor decisions are not my fault.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[swalve]

And nobody should need more than 640k.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

You bought a new laptop with a hard drive? There's this thing called SSD....

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[DivineKnight]

Etch-A-Sketch. The ones who figure out that it's not a computer get upgraded to a PIII with 4GB of RAM, and a 27GB HD; when they can make a coherent argument for needing a more modern machine, even if it's unflattering, they will be further upgraded.

If they break, attempt to eat, or otherwise molest the Etch-A-Sketch, they will be immediately upgraded to an Apple iPod of their choosing, restricted to the guest WiFi network, and barred from entering any IT-related area or speaking to any IT person without a correctional officer present.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[drinkypoo]

I'd have sent the kids to school with a DIY PC running FreeBSD and have taught the kids vim and how to launch X. Your IT department's poor decisions are not my fault.

Well, that would teach them that their parent is an asshole who is not to be listened to because of setting them up for failure very early on. Is that your goal? Reduce the calls home?

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

They want to keep everyone with identical software in order to make sure the screenshots of the course tutorials match what the students see on their screens.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

My year old Lenovo's power circuit on the mobo fried, not the jack. It cost a lot more to fix. So I'm not feelin' the Lenovo love here.

Did your warranty expire? It shouuld have been covered under warranty. With Lenovo, you can purchase extended warranties up to 5 years.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a used i5 2500k as an upgrade just a couple years ago. And it's for my gaming PC, which I run at 4k.

Granted, I got lucky and it's running at 5Ghz (watercooled AIO 120mm radiator w/ 2 gentle typhoon fans, push-pull), but for me, it's more than enough. Practically all games show ~50% utilization cross 4 cores (though my GPU bottlenecks it fairly well).

Gamers buy a lot of pricey hardware, but when practically all games target console specs (8 weak CPU threads)... why buy a fancy CPU?

Once they can demonstrate that DX12 yields tangible performance benefits *at high resolutions* due to pushing 8+ threads... you'll at least see gamers spending decent money on CPUs.

I *want* to upgrade... it's fun... I just cant justify it.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[unixisc]

Maybe, but what does the hardware have to do w/ it? Just let everybody have Windows 10, and it'll be identical

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[thegarbz]

but the school gives you grief if the laptops more than a year old.

So why are you not at the PTA meetings asking for the principles head for wasting your money on something that provides your kid with zero educational benefit?

My desktop is a 4 year old i5 and I edit 300mpxl images on it on a daily basis. What possible use case does a school student have for anything better than TI89 with a black and white screen and a typewriter.

I'm a bit jaded, but my wife is a teacher. I used to get daily complaints about the school's decision to require every student to have a iPad. Students were unable to write basic equations, mathematical or chemical (she was science and math teacher) because of the severe limitation that the iPad had which would have been easily overcome with a $50 thrift shop laptop combined with Windows XP and and Word 2006.

After endless bitching from all sides they replaced the iPad requirement with the requirement for a HP Spectre, which HP's own website at the very top lists as a "luxurious laptop". Of course the touchscreens are hair thin and break when you look at them funny and the school tries to bill the parents who are now asking for the school to absorb the costs or for the deputy principle who came up with the idea to step down.

Dumb shit school administrators should be held accountable.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[tepples]

[PC users whose knowledge I have not yet assessed get] a PIII with 4GB of RAM, and a 27GB HD; when they can make a coherent argument for needing a more modern machine, even if it's unflattering, they will be further upgraded.

Would you consider any of the following arguments "coherent"?

• When I edit video from my camcorder, my video editing application takes seconds to react to a click, and my previews are a slideshow. While that's happening, the CPU is pegged at 100%. Would a faster CPU help?
• When I edit video from my camcorder, I keep running out of space for intermediates. Would a larger drive help?
• When I enable web ads, Firefox takes seconds to react to a click. I opened the script console, and I noticed a bunch of hits from ad networks, including many that appear related to real-time bidding. But when I disable web ads, some websites such as WIRED put up a paywall. What's a better idea: a faster CPU or a subscription to each of those websites?
• Where's the 4 GB you promised? All I see is 3.2 GB because the Pentium III can't run a 64-bit operating system. Would a more recent CPU help?
• 4 GB is fine, but every time I start the computer, it still needs to load the operating system from HDD. Would an SSD help?

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[plover]

It was covered, but it took a month to get it fixed.

Re:My kid's new laptop is an i7

[Anonymous Coward]

It just never gets old to some people, does it?

Well, DUH

[93 Escort Wagon]

For a lot of people, they can do everything on their phone that they would've done on a desktop/laptop computer a decade ago. Those folks just don't need a computer, period, nowadays. Heck, even though I work in computing I find myself doing email and web browsing on my phone (or tablet) most of the time when I'm away from my office.

And even those of us who actually do need a computer mostly don't need to keep updating to the latest and greatest hardware anymore. Phil Shiller said it was sad when people are still using five-year-old machines (BTW, Phil, how long has it been since Apple updated a computer? Feels like five years); but in reality the difficulty of the tasks most of us need to do hasn't kept pace with advances in hardware. Swap an SSD into any decent five-year-old laptop and you're probably still golden, unless you're a gamer.

Re:Well, DUH

[future assassin]

I'm the opposite. Only thing I do on my phone is check contact info for say a business or directions. I'd rather wait till get home or to my shop before I do any computing on my desktop. Even my 17 year old would rather do things on his desktop than on his phone.

Re:Well, DUH

[JustNiz]

I'm guessing thats entirely down to the ease of use though, I mean if you could use a keyboard/mouse/monitor with your phone hardware running a proper desktop (Linux or Windows), that would be all you'd need?

Re:Well, DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup and since I do a bit of gaming, about the only other thing I do is upgrade the GPU. I used to upgrade every other GPU generation, but now even that's starting to stretch out to every third generation or more (and my old GPUs trickle down to other PCs in the house).

Re:Well, DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd Gen I3 has 4 gig ram. Runs WIN10 fast beta and VMWare OSX. Serra I am still good. Paid 350 at Frys Electronics Bout 4 years ago.
Asus X501a Ram under MB or I would change it.

I will never buy another Asus because of that.

Re:Well, DUH

[future assassin]

Well that's why I have a laptop in my car (Running Mint) and just set up a hot spot with my phone. I could possibly have some use for a pad but not going to spend money on a system that I have limited control unless I root it.

Re:Well, DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a phone myself, but having used an iPod touch 4 before, I can't imagine using that regularly to browse the Web or to type anything, really. I hate not being able to type anywhere near as well as with a keyboard. I don't really mind whether or not other people use smartphones, but I do hate the fact that so many websites now have default mobile-friendly interfaces that look oversized or just crappy on standard monitors.

Re:Well, DUH

[serviscope_minor]

Well at that point you've kind of blurred the line between a phone and a laptop with a cellular radio.

Either way though, my phone can't drive my 2560x1440 external monitor, and doesn't have large enough screen for much work, doesn't have as much storage, has much slower storage, much less RAM and a slower CPU than even my ageing laptop. So, I'd say that while I could use my phone for more stuff if it ran a full desktop OS (i.e. GNU/Linux) and had a keyboard and mouse, it still would be a bit mediocre.

Re:Well, DUH

[hey!]

Having also worked on the business side of product development I can tell you one of the biggest mistakes you can make (and one that almost everyone makes sooner or later) is to assume that all, most, or even enough customers think like you do.

To some degree you need to approach customers like a xenoanthropologist studying an alien society. You have to expect that a lot of what they do and prefer will make little sense to you until you've spent a few years studying their strange habits.

Re:Well, DUH

[Holi]

I still use a 2010 Mac Pro, upgraded the cpu, but other then that it is stock.

Industry schmindustry

[Marquis231]

You can take my PC from my cold, dead hands. Over my dead body!

Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

"While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth."

How can they claim the overall PC market is down 16% when they've excluded a significant segment that's seen year-over-year growth from that statistic?

hate these studies

[bloodhawk]

I hate these studies, they always seem to neglect the changing face of PC's. PC's require upgrades at far less frequent rates, a 3, 4 or 5 year old machine will work perfectly well for the majority of users, this doesn't mean PC usage has declined or something has superceded it, it simply means the technology in PC's has now far exceeded the needs of the average user allowing them to keep their machine far longer than ever before and hence a decreased annual sales of PC's

Re:hate these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate these studies, they always seem to neglect the changing face of PC's. PC's require upgrades at far less frequent rates, a 3, 4 or 5 year old machine will work perfectly well for the majority of users, this doesn't mean PC usage has declined or something has superceded it, it simply means the technology in PC's has now far exceeded the needs of the average user allowing them to keep their machine far longer than ever before and hence a decreased annual sales of PC's

So... you have an emotional attachment to computers, that's cute and all but the PC industry is not hot any more, period.

Re:hate these studies

[e432776]

This. I am sure smartphones & tablets have had effects on sales of PCs also, but it seems just as important that PCs have been good enough for some time now. There is not the same compelling push to upgrade, as this is now a relatively mature technology. I don't game much, but I wonder if even for that demographic the upgrade cycle has slowed..

Re:hate these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

what is cute is that you don't seem to understand technology or the market. PC market is a 200 million unit plus a year market. This exact same scenario is due to happen with smartphones (and has already happened with tablets), when devices hit a certain functionality and performance point the need for constant upgrades decrease. Perhaps when you move into the real world instead of living with mommy you might learn something about economics, consumers and markets.

Re:hate these studies

[Zontar The Mindless]

So... you don't understand what "market saturation" means. And you're good at the projection thing, apparently.

Re:hate these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

In keeping with tradition I don't read the article and I'm never quite sure what the statistics measure.
My anecdote, for what it's worth: for the last 20 or so years I've always had a PC. The thing is, I don't recall ever buying a PC. Parts, yes. But a "PC", not really.
Currently my power supply is the oldest component I have and it's lasted at least 3 config changes (8 or so years). Processor and video are new, the box was carried over from the last one.

Smartphones have nothing to do with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why upgrade when there's no need? I built a PC four years ago for a modest amount of money. It still does everything I want it to do with lots of room to spare. I expect this to be the case for the next four years as well.

The PC market is slowing down because the pace of observable innovation (from the consumer's perspective) has slowed as well. 15, 20 years ago you couldn't get away with much less than a three-year replacement cycle because the hardware and software were both changing rapidly, and noticeably so. That's just not the case any more.

Re:Smartphones have nothing to do with it

[jonwil]

I upgraded my PC in January from a Core 2 Duo E6400 with 4GB of ram to a Core i5-6500 8GB of ram and if it wasn't for Fallout 4, I would still be on the Core 2 Duo.

Hardware has reached the point where even a nearly 10-year-old CPU can still work for most people for all the things they use their PCs for.

Combine that with the increasing number of people who dont even need or want a PC (and can get away with devices that run iOS or Android or ChromeOS for all their computing needs and its not surprising less people want PCs.

Bring back Windows 7 and sales will pick up

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing that came after it was anything but garbage.

Not surprising...

[XSportSeeker]

PCs have plateaued for a while now, and it lacks an unified marketing strategy, that's why.
You see, for smartphones you either have Android or iOS. iOS is a single platform with a single line of phones that is always planning what's next and has a following that can only be described as rabid right now.
But even Android has a more or less unified upgrade strategy, planned or not. The stuff that came out for Android this year was mid range phones getting high end specs, a mod-like strategy that kinda backfired, making bloated skins less bloated, among a few other things.

PCs on the other hand are a vastly more confusing world with too many brands, too many upgrade strategies, and too many variables to consider. It has gone past the Paradox of Choice thing for years now, in a way that advancements in tech are trampled over by the sheer convenience of having a PC that already does what you want it to do.

But there's a immediate easy path for PC manufacturers to go right now if they want to recover some ground. Improvements on energy efficiency, heat dissipation, graphics cards and a bunch of other things just enabled desktop PCs to be built in smaller packages while keeping most of their power, and laptops to be very close in performance to beefy desktops.

I guess technology could mature a bit more, or to put it in another way, the latest tech could be out there for a little bit longer with prices coming down, and then at least for me personally, it would make perfect sense to upgrade my 3 year old desktop to something smaller and less power hungry.

I've kept it so far because it works for everything I need, it never gave me any trouble, and up 'till last year I didn't see any major improvements that would justify a huge investment in a full upgrade. But with Pascal, cheaper RAM, cheaper SSD, smaller form factors like laptops that looks and feels like ultrabooks while carrying gaming laptop guts, and tabletops or small PCs that can play the latest games... it's becoming interesting again.

PCs could really use a more uniform marketing strategy though. It has always been kinda sluggish. One company tries something different, see if it catches up, and then other companies starts copying the model. This takes months to years to consolidate, and that's the part where smartphones wins.

Re:Not surprising...

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of HORSESHIT. PC's have plateaued due to performance requirements of the end user, it has fucking nothing to do with some mystical unified strategy. Their is no easy path for PC makers to recover ANY ground, most users have a PC that meets their needs, it is not like a smartphone where you must have a new one every year. In fact we have hit the point where you can go for longer than 5 years without replacing a PC. It used to be yearly, then 18 months, 2 years, 3 years. Now we are at a point where Tech has far exceeded user demands, this happened in Tablets as well and will in a few years happen in smartphones too.

Re:Not surprising...

[guacamole]

I am sorry, but you don't need to buy a new smartphone every year or every other year, or even three years.

You see, people stopped replacing PCs every year because both hardware and software have already reached a level of maturity, and further improvements to the OS are not much needed any more.

I think the smartphones are also been reaching this kind of a plateau for a while. For example, using the iPhone 4S I got only something like four years ago is a miserable experience today, it's just too slow, but the smartphone hardware has improved so much in the recent time that by now I think really _need_ to replace my smartphone ONLY when it breaks physically, which is not inconceivable for any mobile device. For example, the LG/Google Nexus 5 which was released in late 2013 and sold for the budget price of well under 400USD is still perfectly adequate smartphone today, and the SoC is actually still better than the one on many entry level or mid-range smartphones.

To contrast with the PC hardware, the Intel CPUs now improve only by 10-15% between the major generations, which is not a whole lot. On the other hand, the smartphone SoCs can continue improving at a much faster pace, but I think this process is now slowing down too, and will slow down even more.

Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[denisbergeron]

in 2012, I bought a ASUS G75VX-DH72 with an Intel core I7 3630QM 16G (±3ghz) 256SSD + 500G 17.3 (full HD) with a NVIDIA GTX 870M Windows 8 for $1,700
I upgrade the HD for 1tb ssd and 2tb hdd 2 years ago (and obviously, I have w10 and Linux on it)

Today, 4.5 year later, I can buy a
ASUS G752VL Intel Core i7 6700HQ (±3ghz) , Windows Home 10 64-Bit, 16GB , 1TB HDD, 17.3" IPS FHD Display, NVIDIA GTX 965M for 1800$

Yeah, right, Why I need a upgrade ?

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[JustNiz]

Gaming and VR. If you don't do those, you don't need an upgrade.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[Doctor_Jest]

I game quite nicely on a Core 2 Quad. Of course I don't really have any desire for VR, though. It's just not my cup of tea. I've not done FPSes since Quake 1. Quake 2 made me nauseous. (Something about that engine that made me want to hurl.) Nothing beats Galactic Civilizations 2 (or Alpha Centauri) for me. :) I like the "new, shiny" Civs, but the old school stuff is just great for me. And couple that with Worms:Armageddon and I'm in turn-based heaven. Still, I don't begrudge people wanting the latest and greatest. I did it for years. I just didn't upgrade after a while and I haven't noticed. (Granted, I run Linux and Windows 7.) I even turn off the eye candy for each.

One day I'll head back to eBay and order myself another 5 year old CPU. (as I stare at my Athlon running XP... heh.) Surprising what you can get for $30 on eBay...

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[JustNiz]

Yeah but you're talking about games that came out in 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2006.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[The-Ixian]

Yeah, I spent around $1200 for an AMD rig in 2012 or so. I have only added an additional monitor and an SSD to it since then. It still runs like a champ and drives my 3 monitors (eyefinity) in all the games I play just fine.

If I do upgrade anything, it will probably just be the video card. Though, the video card I have now was nearly 2/3 the cost of the entire system.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[avandesande]

You don't even need if for gaming. Most new graphics cards work and perform fine in 1x PCIe slots.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[Bob the Super Hamste]

You forget there are other things that require lots of power but they are likely more of an edge case than what you mentioned. For me it is GIS and I could bury the i7 (I think it is a 3770k) I got 4 years ago at the time. Peg all 8 virtual cores and consume 28GB out of 32GB ram for extended periods. At present I could probably use a better machine but I'm not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a machine so instead I am waiting until I can get a box that will accept around 256GB RAM as a higher end consumer box as that is what I usually have done over the years.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[Anonymous Coward]

In what world does the older G75VX-DH72 have better specs? The CPU is less powerful, the secondary HDD is smaller (500GB vs tTB), the RAM is slower (DDR3 vs DDR4), the GPU is over half as powerful, and it weighs a full 1.5lbs more. Not to mention likely improvements to the overall chasis, etc.

So yes, a current top end gaming laptop still costs close to 2k like they have for the last decade, and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[JustNiz]

Totally agree, but like I said in the original post, the people doing that stuff at home on their own PCs are tiny as a percentage of all users.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[JustNiz]

If your primary concerns are really budget and performance, you shouldn't be looking at laptops.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[JustNiz]

I don't know what kinds of games you play but the games I play mostly have heavy 3D graphics and are twitch games that require minimal latency such as FPSs. Then factor in that I have a ultrawide QHD monitor and also do VR gaming (HTC Vive).
I honestly haven't tried a 1x PCIe GPU (because I dont even have one) so can't definitively say you're wrong, but everything I know is telling me that there's zero chance that any 1x PCIe GPU would cut it. Even if the bandwidth provided by 1x PCIe turned out to be sufficient (which I strongly doubt), any GPU that comes on a 1xPCIe format card will be a budget-class chip so by far not enough horsepower.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[citylivin]

Not sure if you just cherry picked those two particular CPUs as they are almost identical in performance:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/co...

But i agree, upgrading from a 4 digit (2nd gen+ core i7 series cpu), to another core series i7 CPU is not going to give you any sort of performance increase. However, the newer chipset with 4x m2 support can drive a high end SSD over 2000MB/s (some over 3k now!). So upgrading from a core 2 quad was a good move for me. Even though the quad really did work fine.

I did manage to skip a whole upgrade to core series around 2012 and waited it out till q1 2016. But the machine i would have bought at the time, a 2600k is still selling for a premium on ebay. CPU is still worth $150 USD last time i looked.

it may be that people need to revise their upgrade schedule to be more like 8 years as opposed to the old model of a 3-4 year cycle, but that doesn't bother me one bit.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[thegarbz]

Yeah, right, Why I need a upgrade ?

YOU don't. You're playing with gaming laptops. The ludicrously high end hasn't changed to much (though the CPU is about 20% faster in your new one on benchmarks). In the middle to low end (the $700-900 range) the performance has changed quite considerably, and even more so has the performance per watt figures.

What used to come with spinning rust and last 3 hours, now has SSDs and lasts the best part of the day which is a huge step-up which most people from back in 2012 won't have (ultra expensive setups excepted).

I'm with you right now though in the desktop department. I could spend a lot for an incremental upgrade, but I won't. I did however just buy a new laptop as using the old one was an exercise in frustration.

Re:Old computer with better spec than the new ones

[toddestan]

Even if you do, all you really need to do is upgrade the GPU and that 2012 machine is good to go in 2016 for almost any game you would want to play.

Though I do realize you are talking about laptops here, where that (usually) isn't an option.

Well, you know

[DivineKnight]

When you've been shipping value PCs for the last 40 quarters with 5400 RPM hard drives, etc., etc., and that costs 2-4 times as much as a tablet which has solid statish memory, you've kind of made the argument against your 'premium' product. We call that penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Re:Well, you know

[btroy]

Agreed - I was looking at an all in one machine just the other day and there is that 5400 RPM drive. Why? Note to PC Executives - get the SSD in the all-in-one and desktop products along with a larger removable hard-drive for storage. Keep the DVD/Blueray to distinguish if from a laptop or tablet. Do that and you'll sell more.

Re:Well, you know

[toddestan]

The reason they do that is because it's something most buyers don't pay attention to or even knows what it means and the difference it will make. PC makers have been skimping by putting slower but higher capacity hard drives in their machines for several decades now. Yes, we geeks know and it makes us cringe, but all most people see is that this one has 1TB and that other one has 256GB so the first one must be better...

Why would most people upgrade?

[JustNiz]

Assuming you're not a gamer and represent the majority who's only use for a home PC is surfing the net, reading emails and opening the odd word document, your 10 year old home PC is still more than fine (as long as you haven't let Microsoft screw you over with automated downgrades), and has probably never even hit more than about 20% CPU and memory utilization..

Really the only significant groups of people who still have a need to keep their hardware at least fairly up to date are gamers and VR users. Those doing other miscellaneous CPU/GPU intensive stuff at home ( SETI, gene folding, AI development, etc.) are probably account for a very tiny percentage of all PC users.

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[ChrisMaple]

Science and engineering will always have applications that require more computing power than is available.In EE, for example, SPICE and Verilog runs can take a day or more for circuits of moderate complexity. 100 times faster computers would merely be an improvement, not a solution, and it seems unlikely that we'll ever see that much of a speed boost.

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by automated downgrades?

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[AHuxley]

DirectX 12, full support for todays games. The ability to fully use one next gen gpu on Windows 10 with a new game.
No more big PSU, 2 hot, loud cards in SLI, hoping for a new beta driver to finally get to full resolution.
For many its just the ability to max out setting on a new must have game and click DirectX 12 in settings.
The next push will be maxed out 4K and VR. Physical reactions to VR long term could be different for a lot of people given the cheap, rushed early games.

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

science and engineering are not groups of significant enough size to matter, sure they are important but they are not enough, neither are gamers which are a larger group. basically the need for the latest and greatest in a PC is a rapidly shrinking niche.

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[guacamole]

I can confirm your claim. Recently, I have helped a friend to install Windows 10 on a PC that originally shipped with Windows Vista and Intel Core Duo. You can imagine how old that is. This PC running Windows 10 is not only adequate for performing office work tasks, but it actually does pretty much every task much faster compared to when it had Windows Vista.

Re:Why would most people upgrade?

[JustNiz]

Look I hear you, (I have an 6700k, Pascal Titan X, and an HTC Vive) but you missed my point. Most people are not hardcore PC gamers.

The article isn't about usage

[rsilvergun]

it's about sales. Sales going down kinda sucks, because it means prices will go up for those who still want a pc.

Re:The article isn't about usage

[Anonymous Coward]

yes sales have gone down, but the research incorrectly jumps to the assumption this is because people are using them less. I am sure some people do replace PC's with phones or mobile devices, most though augment their PC with a mobile device not replace it. While PC sales are down they are a couple of hundred million a year so it isn't likely to significantly affect pricing and if anything will push pricing down in short term as the industry consolidates and tries to sieze market share.

Re:The article isn't about usage

[nnull]

That and there isn't any new ground breaking software that won't run fine on an old PC or laptop, unless you're playing games. You can get an old PC with a nice new screen, runs fine like a new PC.

Re:The article isn't about usage

[myrdos2]

Sales going down kinda sucks, because it means prices will go up for those who still want a pc.

I haven't noticed that. For example, prices on CRT monitors tanked when flatscreens came out.

It could just be bad products...

[dpbsmith]

My wife, who is sort of the idea non-techie user--follow directions, does virus scans, etc. is almost ready to abandon her Windows PC and see how well she can get by with an iPad. She is just totally ticked off at Microsoft. She bought a Windows PC with Windows 8 preinstalled, to avoid any possible upgrade hassles.

She found Windows 8 disturbingly close unusable, but gritted her teeth and started to learn it. Windows 8.1 managed to change enough things to be disorienting, without actually be an improvement. Then her PC was twice rendered unbootable by routine updates--in one case it seemed to be a case of dueling updates between Microsoft and HP, another time it was a faulty update that autoinstalled. (In both cases the "solution" was to boot in safe mode and roll back to the previous checkpoint).

Then came the forced Windows 10 upgrade, which again managed to change enough things to make the system harder for her to use without really improving anything.

Somewhere along the way the bloatware program she used to manage her photo library, which had come preinstalled and automatically associated to jpg files, so she was seduced into using it, stopped being compatible with Windows.

I think 10 to 10.1 has been painless, though.

The whole user experience of moving from Windows 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 has been so badly mismanaged that it is easy to see why anyone who isn't forced to use Windows might abandon it for a tablet.

Re:It could just be bad products...

[Anonymous Coward]

The other thing is that tablets and phones very often have superior resolution, and handle scaling well to make use of it. I love my desktop, but experience reading on a >300ppi tablet has left me infuriated with the persistence of low-resolution desktop-class displays and typical desktop OSs lacking true resolution independence. Parent captured the gist of it; the desktop needs some love, or people will flee from it cursing all the while, if at all possible. If not, they will just curse.

With the stagnation of Intel, and the neglect of desktop operating systems, the situation isn't remotely surprising.

Re:It could just be bad products...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablets and phones have superior resolution .. what?
That doesn't even make sense, if a phone or tablet has higher resolution then the text would be smaller. I suspect you're talking about font scaling which is probably better on tablet or phone because on windows, the font scaling complexity is about 10 years old and dumb.

But desktop displays were the first to have full hi-def, then phones and tablets caught up. Anything higher res' than that would be 4k display and Apple retina which I don't think exists in phone or tablet form.

Re:It could just be bad products...

[swalve]

Have you considered it was the shitty HP driver?

Re:It could just be bad products...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows updates have been borking a percentage of otherwise healthy systems since 2014. I make decent slush-fund money unborking them. Windows 7 and above have all been effected.

The latest was with the anniversary update. About 10% of systems that installed it in the first few days had corrupted system files and required restore point rollback or reinstall.

Re:It could just be bad products...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablets and phones have superior resolution .. what?
That doesn't even make sense, if a phone or tablet has higher resolution then the text would be smaller. I suspect you're talking about font scaling which is probably better on tablet or phone because on windows, the font scaling complexity is about 10 years old and dumb.

But desktop displays were the first to have full hi-def, then phones and tablets caught up. Anything higher res' than that would be 4k display and Apple retina which I don't think exists in phone or tablet form.

PC displays have been downgrading. (So have Windows OS'es.)
Much to my irritation, my 10 year old 17" laptop has higher resolution (1920x1200) than my 3 year old 17" laptop that has (gasp!) FULL HD (1920x1080). Most laptops I have seen are all "Full HD", as if that somehow is a great thing. Most phones seem to be higher than that on a tiny screen. My laptop should be 8k by now! (Video card would die!)

Re:It could just be bad products...

[DreadPiratePizz]

The good thing about being an Mac user is that I haven't had to relearn my OS since 2001. Every version of OS X has largely functioned the exact same way.

Re:It could just be bad products...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter? It's the software that came with the device, that's all that 90% of consumers care about. Whether it's Microsoft's fault or HP's fault means squat - most people just say "It's the computer's fault, so I don't want a computer any more."

I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Because I won't buy pre-made..

I build a beast every 7 years or so. The one I'm using to post is only 6 months old and my first venture into liquid cooling.

But the previous posters sorta made that clear, if you aren't gaming or actually stressing the system - then a ten year old laptop is all you really need for email and reading web pages. I just wish they knew if they went into task scheduler, and stopped all the craptastic stuff M$ was doing on their system that their PC or laptop is actually a lot faster than it seems.

I make some good side cash just getting rid of the tasks and "fixing" peoples older pcs.

Re:I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[Nethead]

I'm lucky, we just did a refresh at work an I have more Core2 and i5 Enterprise HP SFF desktops than I know what to do with. We kept the two dozen or so i7 boxes for ourselves and friends. We gave away to the employees all the Core2 and i5 machines, I still have a two sitting in my car that no one wants. The i7 boxes we loaded with 32GB of RAM and SSD drives to make into ESXi lab boxes.

The Core2 and i5 HP boxes with 12 to 24GB of RAM and Quadro 600 video (that's how we ordered them) are good for another 7 years, at least. But the new corporate overlords wanted us to buy Dell. Put an SSD in any of them (and we did) and you have a box that will load the entire cabin of a 787 in Autocad almost as fast as the Z820 workstaions.

Old boxes are just fine if you put an SSD in them.

Re: I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[Anonymous Coward]

There are companies buying those for reuse for ie. charity.

Re:I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[DarthVain]

Ah. didn't think of that (and didn't RTFA)... They probably don't count component sales into their calculations. So they are basically counting DELL's. Like you I haven't bought a "PC" for a long time, the last was a Dell Dimension 4200 P800Mhz boat anchor back in probably 2000. So that is a bit misleading.

Not really counting any issues arising from smart phone penetration, there are plenty of other unrelated reasons for slow PC sales. First and foremost is that A) many don't require additional power and B) even if they did the difference from cycle to cycle is diminishing anyway. Probably the other most influential factor is the Microsoft Windows debacle since Windows 7, and a reluctance of uses to buy a new PC with who knows what on it. Case in point, most corporate entities lease their PC's on a refresh cycle. I know in many large cases, this being lengthened by a year or two due to frankly a lack of need, and then additionally because of corporate IT support structures scared as hell to move tens of thousands of uses from Windows 7 to 8, or 8.1, and now 10 (and trying to support them all). I know from personal experience trying to mitigate applications that no longer work because of a move off of Windows 7 and onto one of the afore mentioned OS.

Re:I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[The-Ixian]

I bought an old laptop (Dell D630) for $50, threw an SSD I bought off of ebay for $30 into it and it is running Lubuntu like it's a new computer. The thing boots in less than 30 seconds and runs everything I need a laptop to run.

Re:I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm right there with you. I used to buy low end and upgrade every 2 years. Then I did the math and discovered if I buy higher end and hold on to it for 7 years I was way ahead and happier with the results for far longer. I just upgraded my 7 year old computer that cost me $3000 when new. The upgrade is almost mind blowing yet the old machine was still quite usable for most things, just that gaming and compatible upgrades was starting to become an issue.

Re: I confess - I am hurting PC sales

[Nethead]

A lot of them did go to the local animal rescue, enough to completely update the place. I even threw in an i5 / 16GB / 480 SSD laptop.

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not upgraded my computer in years for one simple fact: CPUs have not really gotten faster (only lower power which I really don't give a shit about). And everything since Windows 7 is a clusterfuck.

Once Zen comes out, I'm upgrading. Of course, I'm done using Windows.

Re:Simple

[swalve]

I think benchmarks would disagree. mhz isn't everything.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU's have gotten a LOT faster, most people don't care or don't notice as they already had sufficient performance. a current gen Core i5 will obliterate an i7 from gen 1 or 2.

Re:Simple

[toddestan]

The benchmarks actually agree. Take the higher end desktop "enthusiast" i7 CPU. If it was 2011, you would probably buy a 2600K. Today, five years and 4 generations later, you would probably buy a 6700K. If you look at the benchmarks the 6700K is maybe 30% faster. The main differences is the 6700K is a lot lower power at idle, and the built-in GPU is better if you care about that kind of thing (which if you're getting the 'K' variant chances are you're not).

15-20 years ago, a new processor would completely destroy a 5 year old processor (something like a Coppermine P3 vs. a Pentium MMX). That's no longer the case.

Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm different. I still use a dumbphone (very much on purpose, too. It has talk, text, calendar. That is *all* I need, and I save a bundle on my no-data plan, and if the phone falls in a river, I am out $20 instead of $400-$600).

I remain convinced that people think they need connectivity a whole hell of a lot more than they do. Seriously...most of us work on an internet-connected computer all day and have internet-connected devices (other than the phone) at home too. Those few brief moments during which one is not online should be cherished...like the peaceful eye of an endless storm.

But, like I said, I'm different.

Re:Yep.

[93 Escort Wagon]

I remain convinced that people think they need connectivity a whole hell of a lot more than they do.

I think you're correct, and I've told myself I should make myself regularly spend some of my time "disconnected"... but being always connected is almost like a drug, and I've been unable to break the habit. Kudos to you, sir (Seriously).

Actually I've heard a psychologist speculate that the constant stimulation of the current world might actually be bad for us physically - at least according to her, it's very much like being in fight-or-flight mode all the time.

Re:Yep.

[goarilla]

Actually I've heard a psychologist speculate that the constant stimulation of the current world might actually be bad for us physically - at least according to her, it's very much like being in fight-or-flight mode all the time.

I agree, it's like where all chased and have to constantly perform and be available.

Re:Yep.

[tepples]

I still use a dumbphone (very much on purpose, too. It has talk, text, calendar. That is *all* I need, and I save a bundle on my no-data plan

If the cost of adding data to your cellular service is your main worry, I'm told these steps will work:

1. If you live in the United States, prepare to give up your CDMA2000 network (Verizon or Sprint) in favor of a GSM network (AT&T or T-Mobile).
2. Buy an unlocked low-end Android phone.
3. Connect your Android phone to the Internet using Wi-Fi and disable cellular data in Settings.
4. Buy a voice-only prepaid SIM, such as AT&T GoPhone. Do not insert the SIM.
5. Activate service on your SIM over the Internet using a web browser.
6. Now put the SIM in your phone.

If you don't follow these steps, especially if you insert the SIM before service activation completes, you may get crammed.

and if the phone falls in a river, I am out $20 instead of $400-$600).

If hardware replacement cost is your main worry, there are Android phones under $100.

VR will help --- maybe

[btroy]

If the PC industry gets smart and goes with SSD's in their "powerful" machines and get that video card up to VR ready, you'll see people exchanging out. VR is going to be the next power drive.

Re: VR will help --- maybe

[Graymalkin]

Unfortunately comes with a hardware dongle that's not really advertised. It's a room with enough free space to not break break a limb or get a concussion flailing about in a physical environment that doesn't match the one being presented to your eyes and ears. Kids and pets are also incompatible accessories.

If VR ever gets a non-trivial adoption the Wii-mote and Kinect injuries of yesteryear will seem quaint. We'll look back on the halcyon days before our TBIs from running into furniture or ducking below a virtual missile into the corner of the desk.

Maybe VR injuries will finally get more developers to support button remapping or other accessibility features.

Re: VR will help --- maybe

[duke_cheetah2003]

Need to start investing on developing a serious MMI for VR to go ANYWHERE.

In it's current state, it's at best a novelty.

When I can put on a VR headsit and my body just lounges in a chair while I explore some virtual world, then I'll be interested. This business of hooking up sensors and crap to your hands and feet and flailing about in a room like some fool? No.

When putting on VR headseat makes you appear to go into a coma to everyone around you while you have a grand time, then we're there.

Re:VR will help --- maybe

[avandesande]

VR is going to be the next 3D TV....

What has M$ or someone else done to the BIOS today

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

BECAUSE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers are way over-hyped. Just like the 80's, 90's, and 2000's the average joe never needed a desktop or workstation computer. The average joe web surfs, makes online purchases, watches movies, and listens to music. So an AIO portable devices like a smart phone or tablet is what the average joe needs. And for gaming? Average Joe goes for consoles because he does not give a shit about 1080p or 4k. Desktops, Workstations, Servers are for those who work in the tech field(Software Developers, System Administrators, Engineers) or gamers. Once I'm done working in the tech field I'm getting rid of my desktop and will instead be using tablets and smart phones.

I bought a pc because I am a weirdo.

[EmperorOfCanada]

Weirdos buy PCs. Most people are now able to get most of their computing needs out of their phones or tablets. If they need something more, a 10 year old PC or laptop will do fine. You can surf, watch videos, download, print, and game a bit.

Then there are the "power" users who are doing a bit of video editing who need a newer laptop. But for us few weirdos, we need CUDA, or we need 10TB in hard drives, or we like that we can fix any one part cheaper than if that same part died in a laptop. Oh yeah, there are the gamers, but for the most part anyone at this point who buys a PC is a weirdo like me.

Re:I bought a pc because I am a weirdo.

[Anonymous Coward]

or you don't like having built in web cams and microphones. and if you don't hook up either of the two you have a lot less data spillage than if you were using a laptop.

I'd buy pre made

[rsilvergun]

for a big enough discount. But I take a hit on quality (cheap mobo, cheap ram, cheap power supply) for about the same price. Yeah, that wouldn't be true if I had to buy Windows everytime, but I'm using the same Win7 license for 5 years now. Didn't help they gave me Win10 for free. Or that I can reuse my power supply, Hard Drive & case. It's $400-$500 for a top 'o the line CPU/Board/Ram upgrade or $700 for a good CPU on a meh board.

Re:I'd buy pre made

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought pre-made in '09... had to finally replace my ten-year-old dual 533MHz G4 Power Mac with "Old World" ROMS that could natively boot both OS 9 and X. Replaced it with a "New World" Intel Core2 Duo Mini. Nice machine. Dual-booting OS X and Windows was awesome. But by six years into its life, the hardware was shot. Not just slow and creaky, but genuinely failing. Flaky WiFi radio. Solder gave up on the power switch connector, plus the plastic crumbled, rendering it a paperweight. Why? Cheap materials and Apple's newthink that ran fans too slow so it would stay quiet, while slowly cooking the machine to death. Besides, Apple wants you to buy a new machine every 3 or 4 years. Keeps their sales figures and profits up. My old G4 still fires up and runs flawlessly. It's just old and unsupported.

Construction that will eventually fail isn't unique to Apple or any manufacturer these days. They all know there's no compelling speed upgrades in the pipeline to sell new systems. So they build them good enough to last through the warranty period and then encourage consumers to buy new when an old machine gets unreliable. Pre-made these days just won't have the quality of the past because it risks cannibalizing profits.

My solution is to build my own i7 beast out of all high-grade components that I can keep upgrading with memory, drive space and graphics cards, much like the old G4. Part of me wonders if I can match the G4's 10-year record just because... :)

OK, yeah, now get off my lawn. :P

End of story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers are for geeks.

Re:End of story.

[Anonymous Coward]

And once this philosophy permeates the industry again, we'll be able to get back to more utilitarian OSes.

Smartphone and PCs are too good

[duke_cheetah2003]

I bought this Dell XPS 8300 about 4 or 5 years ago... and it still does everything I ask of it, without issue. I upgraded to SSD, and have gone through a couple GPU's, but the system itself is a rock. Of course you're going to see a decline in sales when systems you buy today aren't really any better than ones we were getting 5 years ago. Feels like we've hit a ceiling or something for desktops. And currently, it's not an issue, cuz what we have is running what we want without issue. Age old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Throw smartphones into this mix, which provides a pretty impressive computer in a very small package, and many 'commoners' find the smartphone does everything they need, in terms of a personal computing device. These people not only don't want desktops, they don't need them. My phone runs some stuff just as fast as my desktop computer does!

I Built My Workstation in 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a 3D artist (rendering is CPU intensive,) and my main workstation was put together in 2011, and I have not had any need to upgrade. Even if I built one now, I could expect a 20% improvement at best. It's simply not worth the money until there is something much faster on the market.

i7 970 (6-core @ 3.4GHz,) OS and main apps on a PCI-E SSD drive, 7+ TB of storage across 5 drives, 12GB DDR3 @ 2.5 GHz, and a GTX 680 (new in 2012.)

Computers simply stopped progressing in speed about 3-5 years ago. They are more power efficient now, but that's not going to get me to buy a whole new system.

Re:I Built My Workstation in 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

someone has been telling you porkies. While an i7 970 is still a great CPU it gets trounced by the equivalent top of the range now, and not by 20%, something like an i7 6850k is going to be closer to 50% faster or more. but you are right it probably isn't a worthwhile upgrade unless you have large batches of rendering jobs to do.

Re:I Built My Workstation in 2010

[omnichad]

But if you're doing a render, a little farm of a few moderate PCs will do a lot better on a much smaller budget.

Re:I Built My Workstation in 2010

[petermgreen]

It seems to vary a lot. Some benchmarks it's as high as 70% while other it's as low as 23%

http://www.anandtech.com/bench...

(Laptop) quality is poor

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd get another laptop but the quality is lacking. I'm using one from 2009 and whilst it's a bit crufty still works fairly well.

Yes, go and tell me Apple is wonderful... but I don't want/like (I had one and gave it away), what's more their keyboards are horrendous as are most now.

Also everyone has one

[Sycraft-fu]

In the US it is getting to the point that nearly everyone has a computer. Even people who are pretty poor usually already have a computer. Probably not a great one, but they have one. There is market saturation. So when everyone has one, and the pace of hardware has slowed so you don't need a new one as often, well ya sales are going to go down. The market is mature. That happens to markets in the long run, they can't grow forever.

I get tired of this attitude that some journalists (and investors) have that the only states are "growth" and "death". No, industries can be mature, stable, lots and lots are. That's what's happening in computers.

Re:Also everyone has one

[bloodhawk]

I think one of the truly interesting things will be when this happens to smartphones in the next couple of years. We are now getting to the point where speed, storage and performance of a smartphone is going to be good enough for several years at least. I wonder if when people move to 2 year or 3 year cycles with phones (which seems inevitable) if these same journalists are going to be yelling about the tragic impending death of smartphones or will they finally pull their head out of their arse and try to understand concepts like market saturation, performance vs needs of users etc etc.

Re:Also everyone has one

[jawtheshark]

I wonder if when people move to 2 year or 3 year cycles with phones

Wait, what? People change phone more often than once per two years. Most people I know, keep them for about two years or longer.

I basically live on the hand-me-down phones from my wife. Why? Because she gets the "everything included" plan which comes with an iPhone (and when we renew each two year, we get a new iPhone). She gets the "everything included" plan because that way she doesn't have to think about anything when using it (Am I on wireless? How much volume do I still have this month? Roaming? Those kind of questions that are hard for non-tech users).
When she gets a new phone, I get her two year old phone and continue to use that on my cheap-ass-phoneless-plan. At this point, I am using a iPhone 5 (just the number) and it works fine. I'm even pondering continuing on using it until Apple stops support, because I'm not keen on getting the bigger iPhone 6 (just the number) my wife currently uses. Refresh is in March next year.

Phones already have a long longevity... I do admit, I went to Mr Minit to get a new battery for the iPhone 5. Cost me something like 50€ and that was worth it.

Re:Also everyone has one

[Anonymous Coward]

in the premium range 2 years tends to be the maximum, many are still on annual cycles. basically smartphones are at the stage PC's were 15 years ago and we should see that replacement period gradually grow in the coming years and result in a corresponding drop in phone sales.

Re:Also everyone has one

[goarilla]

If the screens just wouldn't break that easily.

Re:Also everyone has one

[Anonymous Coward]

The thinner a phone (or anything else) is, the less able it is to resist deformation. There's a reason steel beams are 10 inches deep instead of 2 inches. There will simply be more breakage with these delicate devices, and a greater need to replace them. Problem solved (unless you're an end user).

I'm part of the problem

[Snotnose]

Got divorced a few years ago, when I moved my PC the power supply went nuts and took my motherboard with it. Transferred the contents of the hard drive to my laptop, bought a PS3, and learned to love gaming in my la-z-boy with my cat in my lap. Granted, FPS aren't as good. Granted, there are no strategy turn by turn games out there (beat Civ Revolution couple years ago). I will completely admit gaming on my ps3 is nowhere near as good at it was on my desktop. On the other hand, I'm in a comfy la-z-boy with a content cat in my lap, on a 42" monitor 4 feet away, and that has to count for something.

Re:I'm part of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy console gamer as well, I can't stand to mess around with drivers and patches to get games working, I just want to pop them in and play. Troubleshooting a PC is not fun for me.

Re:I'm part of the problem

[fred6666]

you know you can connect your PC to your 42" TV, right?

Re:I'm part of the problem

[omnichad]

You do know they said their desktop was fried, right?

Re:I'm part of the problem

[fred6666]

Yes. My point was that it's not a console exclusivity to be able to game on couch + TV.

Re:I'm part of the problem

[The-Ixian]

Yeah, but it can be a realy PITA to get a game pad to work with some games.

Example, I love the PS3 version of Diablo III... but the PS3 doesn't belong to me so I bought the PC version... thinking I could use my game pad with it.... newp. You have to use a mouse.... how stupid is that?

Go figure

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother upgrading if you're rolling with an i3-i7 with the usual toppings.

These aren't the 90s

Also not providing the features consumers want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also not providing the features consumers want:
For me those are ECC and user signed firmware (if they want *OPTIONAL* manufacturer signed firmware with it clearly documented so as to be auditable and reproducable, so be it.) at all levels for x86 hardware. As it is, AM3+ is going to be the last generation of AMD hardware I buy, and for cpu performance it is mostly AM3+ boards with AM3 processors (I may bump to 3+ if I need the more advanced virtualization features, but it isn't worth it cpu performance-wise.)

On the ARM/MIPS/other processor side, it is the lack of motherboards with even mini-PCIe slots, nevermind actual desktop formfactor boards with full sized pcie/pci expansion slots. Honestly an x16 slot, an x4/M.2 slot, and a couple PCI slots will cover all affordable expansion card options for the modern system (GIGe on PCI is still the cheapest networking option, as are PCI sound cards, available for under 10-15 USD)

Somehow however there is not enough market for some entrepeneurial company to produce either of those at a price competitive with current 'budget' x86 offerings (under 100-300 dollars for a mobo+cpu) with a design that will allow continuing peripheral upgrades if your cpu/mobo are acceptable enough.

I was hoping to see this happen with ARM chips, then the Loongson MIPS, then the J-series SH knockoffs, then RISC-V, but someone every one of these chips gets made as an inferior SoC without even an external bus capable of interfacing with third party chips at speed (save the Loongson and some of the more expensive ARM chips.) The silliest part about this is that Hypertransport was intended for exactly that. The Loongson even used it to interface with a 760G or similiar chipset to provide a Radeon HD3100 gpu on one of the laptop models (of which a very small number of samples ever made it out of China before they were discontinued.) A common desktop board platform for all of these, even if the bios had to be recompiled/reflashed would be a massive boon for the industry, break the monopoly of x86, and open a door for future industry market increases as more diversity returned to the market, catering to whatever the consumer, or a subset of them needs. As it is today the x86 market is dying because it doesn't CATER to anyone, it sets market segments and targets pricepoints. It is boring and old and doesn't make the consumer who uses it for more than youtube, facebook, and gmail feel confident that it is designed for their productivity or needs.

I don't hold out much hope of seeing a change. It is much like the console industry of the early 80s when Atari fell and before the NES helped give it a second life. The console industry is going much the same direction with the ever increasing PCization of the once purpose-built console.

Re:Also not providing the features consumers want.

[Khyber]

"Somehow however there is not enough market for some entrepeneurial company to produce either of those at a price competitive with current 'budget' x86 offerings (under 100-300 dollars for a mobo+cpu) "

You fail. Pricewatch.com - even Newegg and TigerDirect advertise there and get their prices routinely beaten down.

Fetch my fainting couch

[Graymalkin]

Are declines in PC sales in any way surprising? Frost the past decade and a half a larger and larger portion of PC sales have been laptops. Schools from junior high through college practically (or actually) demand them. The proliferation of WiFi means just about anywhere with a roof is going to offer some internet connectivity. Besides ubiquitous internet access laptops have gotten way more consumer friendly by getting ever cheaper and lighter. For just about everyone a laptop is the form factor to buy.

For most of the past 15-16 years laptops were getting faster CPUs or way better GPUs every two years or so. Battery life didn't improve much but at least the machines got more powerful. The past 5-6 years though the landscape has changed. Fewer laptops ship with discrete GPUs as Intel's have increased in capability. Even low end laptops have SSDs and 8+ gigabytes of RAM. The usable lifespan of laptops has increased significantly. Even a change from an average of two to three years means fewer sales for manufacturers. There's a non-trivial portion of the laptop market that's seeing a replacement cycle of over three years.

In addition the sort of things people needed a laptop for ten years ago can be as effectively or more effectively done on a phone or tablet. Android and iOS tablets beat the shit out of Windows tablets and 2-in-1s because hey aren't saddled with a heavyweight OS that honestly is not designed to turn on and go and then back off just as easily.

Billions of smartphones and many millions of tablets have definitely sucked the oxygen out of the room for traditional PCs. With PCs not "needing" more regular upgrades is choking the PC industry. The PC market is saturated and is not likely to grow again. Emerging markets are not a savior because they don't have the same infrastructure as developed markets. They aren't going through a dial-up landline internet connected to a beige box phase. They're going right to smartphones, tablets, and other highly mobile devices that fit better in their infrastructure.

Re:Fetch my fainting couch

[omnichad]

Basically we're back to the 90's. The Internet drove most of the recent upgrade cycles. But now we're back to the point where once you buy a computer, it's good until it fails for the task you bought it for.

Web page bloat can't get much bigger (OK, it could), but slower smartphones have driven somewhat leaner pages. Security patches added some slowness to some large software, but that's now the standard baseline as well.

Industry has much to learn

[orlanz]

PCs and laptops are a commodity. Either the industry doesn't know this or doesn't understand the meaning of it. I am talking about the general market, not the DCs, gaming rigs, or cloud computing. Commodities don't fund your expansions, setup new factories, nor pump your stock price up. They keep the lights on, employees paid+benefits, factories humming at an efficient pace, and fund regular dividends. In a commodity situation you make money from volume, brand, services, and driving internal costs down!

The industry players need to figure this out, especially the last part! Stop trying to be the BMW of laptops. Try to think like Toyota, but really you should be thinking like toothbrush makers. Think about the value BMWs would have if the engine, chaissis, interior design, breaks, tires, and electronics systems were all developed by single industry wide suppliers. BMW would design the exterior look, the headlights, and stick that circle on there. That is basically the PC market!

And yet, each of these idiots spend tons of money redesigning the look and feel of the laptops at least every 3 years. They take standard interfaces, rearrange them to make prior peripherals obsolete. That means money for R&D, QA, factory retooling, replacement parts inventory management, new end user HowTos, support retraining, redoing logistics & sourcing, present model inventory write offs, peripheral redesign, marketing, and sales training.

All that is a massive internal cost that can be completely avoided if they just stuck to a conservative design philosophy where they continued to just improve what they have. This will also help with aftermarket resale, which is a good thing in terms of customer loyalty. Think how old the Toyota automatic window opener is. That small part has been around for a good 15 years! Think how long the power button has been around on the Lenova's!!

That is the level of cost cutting these providers need to follow. They need to become like toothbrush makers. They need to switch from macro design changes to micro ones. Such things as heat flow management, battery life, port placement, standard peripherals, serviceability, etc.

Till then they will continue to lament the shrinking market and wonder how to stay afloat.

Re:Industry has much to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

The industry realises this just fine. Don't mistake the morons that write these reports for the industry. What they are fighting for at the moment is market share at the premium end. There are plenty of commodity incrementally increasing laptops and PC's but it tends to be the bling that wins mindshare with geeks and consumers which in turn tends to translate into higher market share in the commodity market.

Re:Industry has much to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

... stuck to a conservative design philosophy where they continued to just improve ...

You're missing the big difference between laptops and desktops: Laptops can't be upgraded. That conservative design will be dated by the time the last unit sells, next year. In 4 years, that laptop will have obsolete technology and be struggling to run the latest software, which will be installed because the pre-installed crap-ware and everything else, auto-updated.

They need to switch from macro design changes to micro ones.

Why can't they do that now? This article was complaining about desktop demand. I'm guessing laptop demand is stable and laptop manufacturers don't need anything better than the latest CPU and OS to sell units.

Re:Industry has much to learn

[avandesande]

Wish Microsoft took the hint... WIN 7 is their commodity OS

Also, lack of money

[master_p]

Perhaps not valid for the US, but here in Southern Europe the economic situation is such that it makes it very difficult to buy new PCs. We do want to upgrade, we just do not have the money.

still waiting on intel...

[jip_janneke1901]

Still waiting after > 5 years for the next Intel Chip worth its money (still have a 2600K). They complain people don't buy, but they don't offer something that useful and much faster. If I need to buy a new CPU that is more green, but need 15 years before I got my money back in energy costs. Every 2 years I bought a new PC, I really noticed it becoming much faster. I don't need a better intel GPU, I just use a cheap NVIDIA it's probably much faster anyway...

Industry is at fault.

[John Allsup]

At present, I could not recommend a new pc over a refurbished ex pro Windows 7 machine from 5 years ago for things other than gaming, unless the person has a _lot_ to spend, so that Windows 10 will be useable. That Microsoft insisted on ramming so much into the Windows interface without the option of a lean, clean, simple OS that only does what I need to, more so than Windows 7, means you need to spend a lot to get an enjoyable user experience if you're someone who enjoys actually getting stuff done, rather than going 'wow! Shiny thing!'. The way manufacturers differentiate themselves with incompatible crapware that most people don't have (so there is no longer a shared experience with friends who have PCs). 1000s of companies are all trying to get a niche monopoly cash cow that they control, and in doing so we have ended up with a Balkanised industry of companies all concerned primarily with defending their territory, and the users needs are an afterthought. The potential of modern computing has gone from optimistic dream to a nightmare of annoyance, and users are tired of this. The fault is with the industry, and they have earned this downturn by taking the market and their customers for granted, preferring to structure things to chase short term profit. Users then must do the same, picking and choosing from a bad bunch of options, knowing how industry behaves. A weird kind of quasi-Nash-equilibrium that serves almost nobody that well.

Multi-core is wasted

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi-core: Yes, multi-threaded is overrated. It adds a lot of complexity to the software to use it, but even with Quad-code (and most people only have dual-core) it isn't worth the effort. But give me a CPU with 64 cores though and you will have my attention. Until then, yawn.

Hyperthreading is a joke. Like a car salesman selling you two cars for the price of one-and-half-cars, but you can only ever drive one of them at a time.

Extra memory doesn't pay off: It makes programmers lazier. Look at browser bloat: Firefox and Chrome consume upwards on 64Mb just to open a single web page? Android Studio now needs 4Gb and is as slow as molasses, for a glorified text editor and compiler!

Windows 10 = A Bore. Unless you want Microsoft's spyware on your system, no compelling reason to upgrade.

What you've got is good enough: Browse the web. Watch Netflix. Ummm... type? Unless you're a hardcore gamer, PCs that are years old are good enough.

I'm using an old, old laptop and it does the trick. No compelling reason to upgrade I'll make laptop manufacturers an offer though: give me a decent keyboard (lose Steve Job's Island shit and replace with Cherry MX) and I'll upgrade. Otherwise I'll still be using this in 50 years.

Re: Multi-core is wasted

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't be using that laptop in 5 years, the screen hinges with have disintegrated, taking out the screen bezel or data cable with it.

Re:Multi-core is wasted

[Khyber]

"Yes, multi-threaded is overrated"

Not when you're running multiple virtual worlds that need coherence between instances, like I'm doing with my 2D Second Life alternative project.

"Hyperthreading is a joke."

Only because you're incompetent at making such things work.

"Extra memory doesn't pay off: It makes programmers lazier"

Yet my 2D SL-alternative runs in under 4 megs of RAM minus the loading for music and sprites.

"Windows 10 = A Bore"

Thank goodness my stuff runs on 2000/XP without fail.

"What you've got is good enough: Browse the web. Watch Netflix. Ummm... type? Unless you're a hardcore gamer, PCs that are years old are good enough."

You obviously don't make programs.

Re: Multi-core is wasted

[Khyber]

That's HP laptops. (I worked for them at Solectron Global) specifically the DV9000 models. No other model in that year range from any other maker had that problem. (I was a former HP lead repair tech on business and consumer laptops.)

Re: Multi-core is wasted

[Anonymous Coward]

You != normal consumer.

Get off your fucking high horse and look at the bigger picture for once.

Re:Multi-core is wasted

[unixisc]

Hyperthreading would be a car salesman selling me 2 cars for the price of 1.5, and then my wife using one car while I use another. Obviously, it will be of no use to me if I'm single. Similarly, hyperthreading benefits only multi-threaded apps

Re: Multi-core is wasted

[stridebird]

You == new here

Re:Multi-core is wasted

[NotAPK]

It really depends on the use case.

Recently I was optimising some simulation code. Each job ran as a separate single-thread process with its own workload, with no inter-process communication, meaning that it parallelizes trivially. I compared performance on a range of CPUs, but what struck me the most was that the HT CPUs really did keep up with the non-HT CPUs. I expected total performance (measured as total work performed by all processes against wall time) of the HT CPUs to start dropping off once the "real" cores were full of work. However, the peak total performance for the HT CPUs occurred at N-1 processes, where N=number of logical cores in the CPU. Compare this to the non-HT CPUs, which showed (exactly as expected) peak performance at N processes. This was a surprise and showed that HT isn't just some marketing BS.

Of course, this calculation was not RAM or IO intensive, and as predominantly a floating point cruncher. The CPUs were all Intel from the past five years.

But of course everything I've posted here is only for one workload. The scaling will vary enormously depending on what you're doing.

PC, where is your iMac?

[HetMes]

I didn't get good headphones. I got decent bluetooth headphones that look good too. And finally no more cable mess!

I didn't get a big TV. I got a modest one with a good screen that you don't really see when I'm not using it. It's not the trophy possession of my household.

I don't care so much about iWatches, but I'm not getting one until they stop looking so dorky.

Walkmans were pig disgusting to look at, but they embodied a freedom to listen to you own music. It's selling point was functionality. That's what made them beautiful!

For the first time in history a 5 year PC old still performs really well in everyday things. For computing at home, I just want something quiet and neat-looking.

Re:PC, where is your iMac?

[Baloo Uriza]

I don't care so much about iWatches, but I'm not getting one until they stop looking so dorky.

As the owner of a calculator watch, I'm clearly unconcerned about fashionability of the device if it provides the function that I need. But you know what the great thing about that old Casio calculator watch was? I could buy one battery for it and it would get me through a year and a half or two years of daily use easily. And the odds of it deciding to explode after something as likely as crashing on a bicycle or getting caught in a car door are basically nil so long as it's not being used as a bomb timer. I'm holding out on smart watches until smart watches are that affordable, that durable and have that kind of battery life. Bad enough my phone barely has more battery life than my laptop.

Post Windows 7 OS M$ Is shipping almost by 2 years

[Anonymous Coward]

So the market for poorly made crapware infested lenovo machines dropped AND the over priced apple workstations?

well i'll be damned.

I'm buying a new Apple this year, either a full blown iMac, or if the wife lets me, a PowerMac. I want to but a new PC laptop too, but it has to run Win7, because just like W8, I won't own another with shitware on it. Been out looking, but of course, no one local is selling a new laptop with an actual working operating system, like W7.

Wanna watch PC's sell again? Rework Windows 7 into a new and working OS, one that you control the updates on, and one that you control the telemetry.

Bad OS from the market PC's leader M$ such as W8 and W9 Make only buy used or Custom Built PCs to go work with, coupled with poor performance gain in hardware, a wrong segmentation of the market with too fast obsolescence of the investment do the rest.
the pc is no more something around everything industrial could be made, you have DRM and other blocking sistems that take resources and don't give back anything.
Also Linux is disappointing nowadays a lot of developers go for whistle and bells (how many graphics desktop do we have to support ? (KDE,Lxde, Mint, Cinnamon,Gnome ,nothing else? a yea dis Unity) and not for the raw power maybe as Andrew TanenBaum said it's real the time 4 a Modular kernel. By the way how long did'nt U compile it.
I go on SlackWare and when nont needed SlaX I used to Buy Corel 4 Workstation and Caldera But they have been Bloown up by big money Market leaders in a way or another

Cloudy with a chance of outsourced meatballs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Amazon sells classified cloud services to fedgov too. https://aws.amazon.com/federal... https://aws.amazon.com/securit... http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-c...

If they can outsource their intelligence and analysis, of course they can outsource their data processing!!! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

CIA Chief Information Security Officer Sherrill Nicely: "“Cloud has been a godsend for folks trying to implement systems quickly and for us to secure workloads better. Our agency and other [intelligence community] components are busily working to move their workloads into the cloud, and off legacy and into the new.”

Unless $30K workstation guy is playing the ancient game of 'convince my boss to buy me cool shit I don't really need but want to play around with it'. That I can understand :-)

Re: Cloudy with a chance of outsourced meatballs

[Anonymous Coward]

He's an engineer, not an IT guy. People like that still exist, though fewer and fewer of them on Slashdot.

Re: Cloudy with a chance of outsourced meatballs

[Khyber]

He's not an engineer - his explanation would be about 4x more verbose.

Blame the lack of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC I built 7 years ago is going strong! You couldn't say that in decades prior. I paid a pretty penny for a Core i7 965 Extreme, 12GB of RAM, a GTX 295 video card, and a 300GB WD velociraptor. It has three monitors. The box has seen a few upgrades. SSD, GTX 1080, but at this moment, there is no compelling reason for me to shell out any $$$ to upgrade the CPU and Motherboard. Broadwell-E was a sorry disappointment, and the price was "money for nothing". 1k for 8 cores, and an additional 700 bucks for two more cores; Come on!

The only thing that has me looking at new hardware is the improved speeds between the PCI (M.2) attached NVM SSD's and the motherboards.

My dad's PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my dad a 499€ PC last week and it's going to last at least 8 years before I need to replace the HDD to something else. And my 2010 Macbook Pro is still good enough to work with 12 hours per day. Not going to change it for a while...

Who cares about PC "makers"?

[Anonymous Coward]

PC isn't dying, the people selling you overpriced boxes are just having a hard time selling you overpriced boxes.
 

Elephants

[Hognoxious]

The elephants in the room: systemd & win 10.

It's the jack

[Anonymous Coward]

If PC makers would find their courage and remove all the headphone jacks, that would drive sales through the roof.

Salary

[DarthVain]

Bean counters. I've had this argument for years now with corporate (while not as extreme as yours). Most corporate assets I've seen are leases, so you only really look at annual cost. Compare that to what your salary is. If that is your primary tool to do your job, what is a couple thousand dollars extra if it increases your productivity by even 5%, hell if it even make you a slightly happier less frustrated employee? Never mind when say you are supporting many millions of dollars worth of systems and data. But, hey never mind lets make you use this 5$ wrench, so we'll save a few bucks, that makes sense.

PC's are still awesome

[gatkinso]

They should be the center piece for any device lover.

I still maintain

[Anonymous Coward]

That if it weren't for the fact that a PC used to be a requirement to access the www, they never would have risen in the first place. A great many people are not mathematically or technically inclined, (and no amount of hype or nudging will change that) - it was more or less the same situation when PCs first hit the scene decades ago, people dreaded using them, for a great many years. I would call this a self-adjustment (also proves that Microsoft didn't succeed on it's 'genius', expertise, or vision but rather good timing. Cough. Facebook. A-Cough).

why upgrade?

[romco]

Im using a 5 year old i7 with windows 7/Linux on it. Why would I change before it breaks? A new i7 will be ~$1000 and only be 5% faster.

Before this computer I used to upgrade every year.

Re:why upgrade?

[cfalcon]

I'm pretty damned sure we can beat 5% with a new i7. You have some Sandy Bridge era processor, and the current ones are Skylake. Your processor runs at 2-3.5 GHz (or faster if you OC, but I'll ignore that- you can OC a new one too). New ones run from 2.5 to 4GHz, so you are getting an increase there, and it could easily be your 5%. But there's also been moderate instructions-per-clock gains across those generations- easily all by itself worth 5% of CPU performance.

Five years doesn't buy you what it used to, but man, it trivially gets you way over 5%.

Chintziness gets you nowhere

[Baloo Uriza]

Probably not helping is that the focus on mobile platforms like tablets and phones has really made for a rather unappealing market for PC hardware. Lenovo's a good example of fucking up a good thing, as we all know, with the ThinkPad fiasco, which is something that they seem to have finally come to Jesus on. So old hardware's been soldiering on longer than necessary largely out of a lack of compelling upgrades.

Yep...Everyone in our house has one...and more

[gosand]

All 3 of my kids (ages 7-11) have a computer. They were all hand-me-downs from friends/family who decided to upgrade. One is an i5, one is a decent dual-core, and the other is I think an i3 laptop. My wife has an i3 laptop. They all run Win7, and run just fine for homework, Minecraft, HumbleBundle games, etc. I have an older intel quad-core that I built probably 6 years ago that runs Mint18XFCE. I have a couple of other older systems that I have been trying to sell for really cheap that nobody wants.

Unless you have specific applications or needs (like gaming), you don't need to upgrade. I run XFCE, which I run because I like it not due to needing 'minimal resources'. There are times I would like some more horsepower (like when ripping/converting DVDs to mp4 for our media server) but for the most part it just runs great. I never get over 1/2 memory use, I have plenty of storage. I even run mine as a media server, it's on 24/7.

I don't see tablets or phones (or even laptops) taking the place of my home computer any time soon.
It's funny because at work I have a new i7 vPro laptop running Win10, and with all the corporate junk on it for scanning and stuff, it runs about as fast as any other work computer I have had. Still with freezes, crashes, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hyperthreading and multicore is useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperthreading (along with out of order execution) allows different computation units within the CPU to execute on the same pipeline of instructions, maximizing simultaneous utilization (and power consumption) of on-die computing resources. Even in the Pentium 4 days, hyperthreading had a substantial positive impact on media encoding and decoding due to the nature of those operations. More cores also make a big difference in encoding as well. If you doubt this, try transcoding H.264 to HEVC and look at published benchmarks.

We need a new Moore's Law: Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

The next logical step in computer architecture with the speed of processors reaching a limit and the number of cores not exploding like they should be in desktop processors (although they are in GPUS) is memory. What if memory (RAM) was doubling every year and a half in computers and what that would do to architecture and software design; being a computer engineer I can see plenty of challenges that would come from that type of stretching of computer capabilities. Currently the 16GB standard is too tight and RAM is cheap. Let's start building these machines out and see what we can do with all the extra room.

It's the economy stupid

[micahraleigh]

... as James Carville once said.

Overall retail sales are in a big decline:
https://goo.gl/images/Yiyhn9

We need a new Moore's Law for Memory

[kruhft]

The next logical step in computer architecture with the speed of processors reaching a limit and the number of cores not exploding like they should be in desktop processors (although they are in GPUS) is memory. What if memory (RAM) was doubling every year and a half in computers and what that would do to architecture and software design; being a computer engineer I can see plenty of challenges that would come from that type of stretching of computer capabilities. Currently the 16GB standard is too tight and RAM is cheap. Let's start building these machines out and see what we can do with all the extra room.

PCs will stop supporting Chrome Apps

[tepples]

How can they claim the overall PC market is down 16% when they've excluded a significant segment that's seen year-over-year growth from that statistic?

Because devices in said "significant segment that's seen year-over-year growth from that statistic" are less useful for PC-only applications, particularly high school programming homework.

Furthermore, Google has announced a plan to remove support for Chrome Apps from the Google Chrome browser on traditional PC operating systems (Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux). After the Chrome Apps switchoff, developers can't target Chrome and get both traditional PC and Chromebook support; they have to choose one or the other. This means a lot of developers of applications for devices with a keyboard are likely to give up on Chrome OS in favor of exclusively targeting traditional PCs.

Doesn't Make Sense

[nateman1352]

This Gartner report seems to tell a very different story than Intel's announcement that Q3 revenue would $700 million better than expected. To quote Intel's press release:

The increase in revenue is primarily driven by replenishment of PC supply chain inventory. The company is also seeing some signs of improving PC demand.

Intel can get in big legal trouble with the SEC for lying on these type of financial announcements, so I tend to give a little more cred to regulated stuff like this than just some random analyst.

Re:Doesn't Make Sense

[Areyoukiddingme]

Intel can get in big legal trouble with the SEC for lying on these type of financial announcements, so I tend to give a little more cred to regulated stuff like this than just some random analyst.

They're both right. I built a new PC this year. So did no less than three of my coworkers. We all finally felt it was time. And we all bought Intel CPUs, because let's face it, AMD can't seem to get their heads above water. But not one of us gave any money to the companies this analyst is talking about. We all built machines, not bought machines. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is considerably more common than it once was. Not everybody can build a PC, but practically everybody knows somebody who can, and when they ask that somebody, "How do I get a new PC without Windows 10?" that's the answer: build it yourself.

So that's what's happening. PC component sales are enjoying a resurgence. Each generation of upgrade for the past 8 years has indeed been a small percentage increment in performance, but it's been like compounding interest. At the end of four or five generations of 5-10% faster than the previous generation, a completely current machine is actually quite damn fast compared to your old desktop that was doing everything you wanted and seemed ok after an SSD upgrade.

Today, you build a 6 core i7 with 32 GB of RAM, an nVME 4X storage device, and a GeForce 1070 or 1080 and the difference between that and your 8 year old machine is kind of tremendous. Meanwhile you can't get a pre-built system at all with those specifications from many builders, and for the rare few who will do it, they want to charge you 3X to 4X retail on the components and still try to stick you with Windows 10. So yeah, they're losing sales. And since we haven't paid for a new machine in nearly a decade, and since we're expecting our new systems to last another decade, we're willing to spend like it's 1995 again, so we're buying high end components.

Ergo, PC sales are down, parts sales are up.