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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."
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.
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.
#DeleteChrome
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
> [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.