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PC Market Shows Signs of Recovery (betanews.com)
PC shipments will continue to decline in 2016, according to a new IDC forecast, but the drop will be slightly lower than previously expected. What's more, things will improve even more in 2017. BetaNews adds: IDC expects PC vendors to ship a total of 258.2 million units this year, a figure which would be 6.4 percent lower than last year. The previous estimate was a 7.2 percent fall, which IDC announced in August. Growth will still be negative in 2017, but shipments are expected to decrease by just 2.6 percent compared to this year. IDC believes that commercial shipments of notebooks will grow this year, while desktops should stay flat in terms of growth. The pressure from mobile devices is said to decrease as the markets mature. The tablet market, in particular, is not as big of a concern or threat as it sees declining shipments as well. "The PC market continues to perform close to expectations", says IDC Worldwide Tracker Forecasting and PC research vice president Loren Loverde. "Some volatility in emerging regions is being offset by incremental gains in larger mature markets while the interaction with tablets and phones is stabilizing. We continue to see steady progression toward smaller desktops and notebooks as replacement buying helps stabilize overall shipments in the coming years".
2017 will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop! :)
Linux zeal... err, I mean advocates have assured me, repeatedly, that the desktop (or Wintel, as they called it) is dead. Everyone is switching to Android based phones and tablets. What gives?
Now is a great time for OS development. Hardware is becoming more standardized and we don't have to worry about people doing boring stuff like reverse engineering drivers.
does anyone have any suggestions for which factors might be responsible for this? Some new feature in PCs that is making new ones interesting again? Simple turn-over (5-8 yr old machines failing and being decomissioned/replaced)? Other?
Oh, who am I kidding?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot: THE PC IS DEAD. in its wake we find tablets, fablets, e-readers and cellphones have entirely supplanted what was once a monolithic waste of time of no value at all.
Also Slashdot: THE PC MARKET, which was once dismissed as entirely extinct, is now on suicide watch/life support recovery as we've learned people sometimes use the device to accomplish work outside of twitter, tumblr, instagram, facebook, and snapchat. at this time, a single computer has been sold.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'd switch to Linux if it could play {game of the year}. Until it plays that game without much Wine hassle, I can't see myself switching.
So I know a lot of people do Facebook, Twitter etc but for those of us that work doing any form of content creation of value desktops beat out most of the competition. For example... I am writing a white paper at the minute and doing so on a desktop. With a decent amount of grunt, good keyboard and dual monitors I can do stuff so much quicker than any other device, esp for media intensive ops.
There will always be a place for desktops.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Moore's Law is dead. Lone gone and buried. There is no compelling reason to replace your PC at this point.
I'm just glad the tablet meme is finally winding down.
The only reason there are less drivers is because there is less competition. We have at most 3 players in any particular market segment, and for most of them it is essentially two.
Of those, all of them are moving towards LESS user control by using signing mechanisms that obscure ownership and modifiability of operating parameters, something that may be needed now or in the future to ensure the security of said hardware to the end-user's benefit.
We are by far reaching one of the low points of this era. The high point having been around the 2009-2012 period, where coreboot was making strides in reverse engineering and gaining access to documentation. Nowadays there is far less documentation being given out. Management at the formerly 'open source friendly' companies is pulling back their support, or intentionally included obfuscated components in new designs. Furthermore all the 'upstart' hardware projects are being designed as toys or for embedded applications. Nothing is being produced even up to Raspberry Pi level in a non-proprietary openly documented format, even for 10x the cost. The closest counter example would be the Talos workstation (Which thankfully has dropped to about HALF of the last reported price, while still being twice the 'expected' price when the option of running a crowdsourcing campaign was first made.), which itself has a number of proprietary components without open documentation available on them. They claim they are all safe and secure behind the IOMMU and nothing that could misoperate, but if you don't have the documentation necessary to examine or attempt to break them, how can you be sure?
captcha was 'preacher'... how apt.
2007 we all will achieve Zen.
...MS-Linux on the desktop!
apple app store only needs to go / the Censorship issues are big. At least have an adults only room for stuff that is to hot for the main app store.
And why can't we have emulators where it's easy to load a rom, iso, disk image, have a real HDD image, etc? you can do side loading but it's not as easy as it is on android.
PC shipments will continue to decline in 2016, according to a new IDC forecast, but the drop will be slightly lower than previously expected
One of the most imaginative definitions of 'recovery' that I've ever seen. It's like a kid who went from an A to a C in one term, and C to a D in the next, and claims that he's 'improved' b'cos he didn't go from C to an F.
Almost like how in Washington DC, baseline budgeting is done. If you are spending $100M on something and a proposal is made to raise it to $125M, but instead, the expense is only raised to $115M, then it's called a 'cut'. Nobody defines numerical shifts that way, excepting people in government... and market analysts
Humans are happy or sad based on expectations. Predictions just lead to expectations.
Let's predict PCs will never be sold again after today. Then tomorrow we can all be happy because poof, they are selling like hotcakes in relation to our expectations based on our predictions~~~!!!
And it's all thanks to a single game: No Man's Sky!
First of all, I sell custom desktops and this is absolutely true. Second, ORLY?!?! People are finally finding out that tablets are slow, unreliable, unrepairable garbage that you can't type on and have self-destructing batteries and the TCO is higher than a desktop over 7 years? I NEVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED! By that I mean I never would have guessed that people would pull their heads out of their asses, not that tablets suck. I always knew tablets sucked.
Believe it or not, Android works fairly well with a mouse except for games and apps designed around swiping exclusively.
That and the fact that most devices haven't been upgraded to Android 7 "Nougat", the first version to incorporate tiling window management as a standard feature, as opposed to the maximized paradigm that smartphone-derived GUIs tend to impose.
And to others, PC means a way to get work done while riding transit. This means a laptop. How many people actually build a laptop from a "barebook" kit?