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

[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

[rfengr]

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

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

[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]

"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

[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

[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

[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

[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:Note 7 side-effect?

[rfengr]

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

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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 ?

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.