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PC Shipments Hit the Lowest Level In a Decade (cnbc.com)
PC shipments are at the lowest levels since 2007. From a report: Gartner said this week that the PC market declined 4.3 percent during the second quarter. The research company said that shipments were at the "lowest quarter volume since 2007," noting the market dropped for the 11th quarter in a row. The report is in stark contrast to another from IDC in April which said that the PC market grew for the first time in five years. Gartner said HP has the largest global market share with 20.8 percent of the market. HP is trailed by Lenovo which has a 19.9 percent share, with shipments down a substantial 8.4 percent since last year. Dell, Apple and Asus finish out the top five players. In the U.S., Gartner suggests Apple's shipments were down 9.6 percent from last year. The research firm didn't give an explanation for why that might have occurred, though Apple was late to refresh its computers with the latest Intel processors. Upgraded Macs just hit the market last month.
Windows 10 did it.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Virtualized infrastructure is finally going full bore with several open source competitors, the biggest namely Linux KVM which battles against the vSphere. AWS/EC2, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace. Nobody needs to buy desktop systems anymore because they can buy thin or zero clients. Why buy new hardware when you can pickup a single server and expand?
When experts say PC Sales are down, they mean the need to buy desktops from PC Makers is over. However, if anything, with the proliferation of streaming, PC and desktop usage and availability is up. Crappy shitboxes from HP are no longer good enough, people are buying their own Ryzen or i7 Kaby Lake components to build systems suitable for twitch streaming and reusing old systems for streaming assistants.
Gartner's studies are inherently flawed and only give a window into market reality.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gartner producing this funded report to artificially drop stock prices only for them to write another report to say sales are up at the end of the year after Thanksgiving to boost stock prices.
People. Are. Broke.
Typing this on a custom-built PC, I know how much the components can costs. Most people aren't gaming on PCs like they used to and it becomes harder to justify the gaming quality if you have to drop a couple grand to get it. Most people are surfing the internet or for work. It also doesn't help that consoles are eating into gaming market, so the PC is looking more and more like a simple utility than a luxury item, but they still sell for luxury prices.
"Companies exist purely to make as much money as possible."
What kind of greedy bastard coined that expression? Why would a company necessarily need to exist ONLY for that reason? Why can't the reason be to allow its founder, as well as people close to him or whoever he likes, to live comfortably while doing something honest and decent that improves this rotten world slightly? I'm not saying that they should deliberately make bad business decisions -- simply that there is nothing whatsoever that DICTATES that they MUST "cut corners" and constantly expand and push lies and do all sorts of evil acts for the pure sake of increasing profits.
I will never understand it. I honestly believe that I wouldn't become that greedy if I ever managed to build up a company. In fact, I would make it a hallmark of my business to NOT be like the others, while also not coming up with nonsense such as donating money to charities in the company's name. I'd simply sell a honest product or service and never cut corners.
There is zero reason that any company needs to expand all the time, beyond a certain startup point. No universal "law" exists other than pure greed and evil. I couldn't go to sleep at night knowing my company is doing evil things under my management. It's both sickening and baffling that this is just accepted.
Most consumers are probably happy with their current PC's. They edit the odd document, use email, browse the web and that's it. A 12 year old Windows XP machine can do that very well still. Unless the machine actually dies, buying a new one is not on their mind or in their budget plans.
Even for companies, the current hardware they have works well enough for probably 90% of their employees. Upgrading hardware is not going to give them any increase in productivity so why buy anything new unless the old machine dies.
PC's are alive and well in business, but shrinking at home. They are too expensive and too much trouble to maintain for consumers, in part because Windows is a POC.
The younger generation can type on virtual (mobile) keyboards as fast as most PC typers such that they don't need a PC for email etc.; and tablets can have plug-in keyboards.
Table-ized A.I.
Samsung Galaxy s7 fortold in PROPHECY !
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
TFA does not link to the original data, and it is referring to results of only the last quarter.
Does it count only brand-name PCs or the industry as a whole? Are they counting revenue, turnover or number of units sold?
It does not say. Therefore you can't really infer anything from it.
The gaming PC community is the one most willing to spend a lot of money on new computers. That community is thriving.
While a good gaming PC today costs about the same as a gaming PC did twenty years ago, low-end PCs for office work have gone down in price considerably and there is little incentive to upgrade.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Look, there's no reason to freak.
Ask yourself about the CPU and GPU sales instead. How many motherboards are shipping?
Boxes don't matter. There's no value added anymore.
Besides, where I am we're all just rolling blade servers. PCs are for last decade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have found without autocorrect enabled, not only does the touch keyboard respond faster, but oftentimes it has better correcting capabilities than with it on. This has been true since Swype was a thing, and holds across both old and new phones (I'm still using an Android 2 phone from the late '00s with a damaged touchscreen, as long as the orientation is outside of the deadzone the keyboard works perfectly and I can type as fast as people with a modern phone like a G5 or S7. Furthermore, thanks to its much smaller screen size, I can comfortably hold it for hours at a time while typing texts.)
Remind me, when was Ryzen released? In earnest, I mean. PC sector is undergoing some switches.
Additionally, it appears that some of the larger OEMs have finally gotten the message that SSDs for the system mount / OS drive is mandatory, and that going with larger SSDs is better; although, it may be some time before you see a Samsung 960 PRO NVMe of an appropriate minimum size (1TB+) standard on anything.
Now if they can offer better networking (10GBe, or even 5GBe would do), better audio (never use integrated audio, save on a laptop, and even then...; sticking the SoundBlaster logo on something meant more 20 years ago, there are other contenders, perhaps HT Omega? that might be worth looking into...). And a shift away from iGPUs, which are great if you like using a terminal all day, but will have trouble handling 1080p streams from Crunchyroll (well, Flash may be to blame as well, and compiling in the background...but a dGPU used on the same setup seems to alleviate these problems).
And RAM is cheap, even the good stuff, especially in bulk. No reason not to load up the system with something decent, and take sales away from your competitors.
A dual core box from 10 years ago is still plenty of power for what most people are doing. It still browses fine and plays YouTube without any problems as well. No big shocker there. Sure we have cores into double digits but clock speeds aren't any faster. Software has become bloated at the same pace. Go back 20 years to 1997. Your browser renders pages as quickly today as it did back then.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Why should busiensses and power users upgrade their PCs if Windows 7 is not avalible any more. Most users don't want telemetry and like the aero interface over the metro theme and Windows 7 gives them a superior experience. As time goes on and Windows 7 hardware becomes scarce expect more reverse engineering of drivers and ebay prices going up as people stick with seven. The same thing is happening with XP. XP's market share is nearly 3 times as much as Linux meaning people would rather deal with XP sercurity holes than the desktop Linux experience.
Well AMD is going to be disappointing to hear this with their new hardware coming up. Makes their battle to get AMD computers on the shelves much harder.
I cringe every time I read one of these stories. It's not the 1990s anymore. The market for PCs is fully saturated, and any purchases are generally for replacement. Specs no longer double every 18-24 months, so replacement is needed only when something breaks or the GPU is no longer supported by the OS. I owned my last PC for seven years, and the current one will easily last that long.
This has been a trend for quite some time. And the causes are the same: Lackluster jumps in performance in the last 10 years, and the rise of the Portable Personal Computer (PPC, Smartphone.)
Naturally no one is going to bother to buy a new PC when all their current one needs is a memory and GPU upgrade.
I've spoken with people still running Core2's for their gaming rig, just slap a nice GPU in there and enough memory, and for gaming.. it's plenty.
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingly difficult now. How do you talk someone into investing in this big clunky box when their PPC does everything the big clunky box does?
PC manufacturers needs to take a good hard look at the SoC and SBC offerings and make them into very tiny personal computers to replace the clunky boxes we have now. The only reason a PC case needs space anymore is for extra drives and a GPU. SSD's are making HDD's obsolete in a hurry, and integrated GPU's are getting pretty competitive now.
With privacy dead (thank you In Ess Eh), there's no reason to buy a new spy machine because the old one seems to be working just fine for the gov't.
My 7 (8?) year old 64-bit Athlon X2 3.1 GHz 8 GB RAM BYO PC is just fine running Windows 10.
:-)
Admittedly it just had its 3rd video card upgrade. Everything else is "original".
We should be tracking video card sales
Yeah, yeah, more laptops these days.
When year after year most processors top out at around 3.5 gigahertz, it's hard to get excited to upgrade. Yes more cores, more instructions per cycle but really only incremental improvements. For many (most?) users there isn't anything that compelling to prompt an upgrade.
My home office has an i7 950 clocked at 3.5 GHz (4 cores, 8 threads). Sure I'd like something a little more current but I don't see anything that offers earth shattering improvement. My bucks have been going to better drives and better video.
See subject - I'll go w/ that (good point I didn't even think about & yes, I am a 7 fan bigtime, can't stand anything after it (VISTA/10 etc.)) to a BIG extent in addition to this:
I'll also go w/ what a local PC repair shop owner told me (he's no joke, RIT grad, worked in Fortune 500 etc.)...
He told me that the PC is dying for another reason - devices like smartphones & tablets (which I understand are now being made "un-self-repairable" ala IF you attempt to open them, soldered shut or whatever, they self-destroy).
I "get that".
Why?
Well... MOST folks imo, just want a device that works (not to "hotrod" it, that's for PC enthusiasts & MOST folks? Aren't... just as they aren't automotive hotrodders).
I don't like "speaking for everyone" (as I am not all of them) but I just see what I see, & hear what I hear. Makes sense.
As far as Linux? It's good now but apps are lacking vs. Windows (device support too). THAT is what hurts it on desktop PC use imo.
APK
P.S.=> I am a PC person - though I can code for other platforms (e.g. smartphones)? I no longer have a need for them (on the job I did, I am retired for the most part for a decade++ now) OR the added bills they incur (what good's a smartphone minus paying for service to a phone company in other words) so, I keep a landline (thru cable internet now, wasn't that way until a year or so back).
It's good enough for me in combination w/ a desktop PC (no laptop for me, it's not good enough - why? An old saying says it for me "OLD Chevies never die - they just get FASTER" & it's how I view a tower PC - it can be upgraded as needed, by component (when a PC breaks, it's not "enmasse total fail", it's usually a ramchip, disk (hdd/ssd), or mobo in my experience, both fairly cheap/replaceable))... apk
At my shop I got a 6+ year old Dell XPS 9000 i7 920 which I used for my personal computer then then about 5.5 years ago I set it up as my POS system at my shop. Works just fine...
I got a Dell Inspirion 1710 Laptop that is 10 years old and all I needed was to add a SSD drive to it and its work perfectly at the kitchen table for browsing the internet.
At home I got an AMD 10 5800 which is about 3-4 years old and still doing what I need it to like photo/video editing/and playing games. If it wasn't for Ryzen I'd probably keep it for a few more years but it'll be set up as a HTPC.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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What does Netcraft say? Which did they confirm?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
...people who never wanted a full-blown PC in the first place continue not buying PCs, while people who do want full-blown PCs continue to see life cycles lengthen.
No one seems to want desktops these days, but for laptops -- go back to 4:3 screen resolutions. The 16:9 resolutions SUCK PERIOD.
I have no intention of buying any brand new laptop until screen ratios get back to what it was.
It's not just the RAM soldered to the motherboard...
On the Touchbar MacBook "Pro" the SDD is s soldered in too. It's nuts.
I decided to by a Dell XPS15 because of this. Just about the same "thinness" but still has socketed RAM, SSD and also WiFi.
They don't, and that's part of the problem: it requires too much babysitting and preventative work to keep running right.
Malware is a big problem, especially when the PC is not configured properly or people visit too many shady sites or install shady software. PC vendors put all kinds of crap-ware on them and if you don't remove it, bleep often happens down the road.
About a year ago my Windows 7 PC couldn't get Windows updates; a bad update file jammed further updates. It took me several hours of trouble-shooting to finally resolve it. If I had ignored the problem, like most consumers would, security patches wouldn't come through and it would probably get breached within a few months.
There's other oddities I won't go into here.
Table-ized A.I.
Why I haven't upgraded:
Conclusion: Unless you're a gamer your old PC is fine.
> The older ones that still run Windows 7 are better than the newest ones that are stuck with Windows 10
Exactly
Unless you want to spend big money, the run of the mill computers in the stores are too slow and underpowered, and standard laptop screens are too low res. I'd never buy any of them until the price of more powerful computers comes down.
Let's see, Intel and AMD's offerings have been complete shit until very recently. your 10 year old i7 is absolutely fast enough and in some instances as fast as a i7 computer from 6 months ago.
Only recently did both chip makers get off their asses and offer any kind of a performance boost that will make a difference and get people interested in buying a PC.
Watch sales to double in the next 12 months.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...a current phone can do more than the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ rig I built in 2007?
Is the IBM PC still being sold? Is this like hearing every so often that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is still on the top 100 sales list after all these years.
The IBM PC has maybe 512 MB of memory and an 8086 processor so of course sales are going to be slipping over 30 years later.
Jeez
You've just described why I pay the Apple Tax. The lack of tech support for family members alone is worth every cent. Every time I have to help out someone with a PC it takes hours to load updates, remove malware or PUPs, and restart...restart...crap clean...malware bytes...scan...restart... I blame the idiots around the world attacking the system, but the overall experience sucks. We have one windows machine, in full Quad Core glory with a huge graphics card for gaming. Bought it off the seconds rack at Microcenter, resolved the wifi problem that got it returned, and now get 60 fps at 1080 lines...which is sufficient. I don't have to maintain that one....
This last PC, I spent roughly $2K, but I built it from parts I bought from a variety of online sites. Now I have an absolute beast of a machine with top of the line parts, but those purchases aren't going to show up in the statistics.
I'm sick of paying for OEM installed Windows OS, and paying way too much for computers from vendors. It was VERY worth building it from parts, even though it took me 2-3 hours (I'm not experienced).
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The high-end of the PC market is still growing in terms of both TAM and number of units shipped. No one is bothering to replace crappy low-end machines anymore as there haven't been any software innovations targeted at encouraging those users to upgrade since the early days of Windows 7. There are many reasons for this but I'd blame lack of competition in the internet service provider market keeping residential internet speeds too low to support HDR media streaming as being a key contributor.
Ajit Pai should go f*ck himself.
Too many (serious) bugs in x86 processors the last few years.
I still ended up with "Diagnostics Tracking Service" on both machines. Granted, it's easy to disable but it means it's marked as an "important update" and cannot be avoided.
Unless you disabled that service, you *are* being tracked... assuming it's the only one that does. We don't know for certain.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
My current PC has seen quite a few upgrades in the past 8 years (SSD, 4K monitor w/1080 GTX video card). However, the RAM, CPU, and Motherboard are the sames ones I bought back in 2008. In the 1990's a nine year old PC (no matter how much you upgraded it) would be a dinosaur. Intel's glacial pace of performance increases is to blame.
in the past few years, i've bought a bloomfield, a haswell, and two kaby lakes. i also inherited a westmere-based laptop from work that i'm pretty sure they paid for. sure, if the pc market started making 80 core cpus that run at 8ghz (without resorting to the server market), i would probably have bought more, but i'm happy with my purchases.
I was about to order a laptop from them. Their website for my country is bugged, so that I cannot order it. They did not answer the ticket I raised, and their call center give a middle finger. I will not fight further to spend 2k...
I've been looking around for a new "laptop".
the problem i am running into is that alot of models are missing a ethernet port.
most that do have a ethernet port also have a DVD drive.
the DVD drive is a (mostly) empty space inside the "laptop" that might help with heat management
but just makes the whole package unnecessarily big.
it is vital that i have a built-in network card that can PXE boot. the DVD is not as important because
they can be had for 40 bucks and connect just fine to a usb port.
The slow removal of the network card soldered to the mainboard is a slow erosion of the computer being able
to be "infected" by a OS over the network.
For example, its possible to have a OS installed on the internal HDD/SSD but then boat a OS over the network without touching the ...
installed OS
As far as i can tell, USB-dogle-type network "cards" don't have the functionality to PXE-boot. This is what microsoft wants!
The network card is a tiny chip with a tiny price. there's no real reason to remove it!
Also (real) battery life of 8 hours and a resolution to match the screen size. i don't need 4k on a 7" display.
these figures only cover pre-built computers, such as HP/Dell/Apple. This does not take into account home PC users that build their own computers from parts. Granted the DIY market has suffered past couple months due to crypto-mining eating up all the midrange video cards, as well as newer technology being released, which has caused some folks to "hold off" buying
The past monthI had to buy a new laptop. I ended up buying an used T450 on e-bay, instead of a new T470, because the model from two years ago was more than enough for my needs, and it was almost $1k cheaper. I've been a serial buyer of PCs since the concept existed, and, being on the power user end of the spectrum, it's the first time that such a thing has happened to me. Always I had to have the new whatever, be it 16Mb RAM, or a color screen, or USB... This time that would be M.2 NVMe SSD (the acronyms are starting to pile up), and USB 3.1. But you know, the difference is not so big in daily use, for a laptop at least. I can live with SATA SSD and USB 3.0. And in a couple of years, get the novelties at a reduced price.
Also my wife wanted a sexy extremely light ultrabook like the Zen, but she has ended up with my old laptop. Another unrealized sale.
What I mean is that those are two purchases that don't appear in the statistics, simply because good enough keeps being good enough for longer.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingly difficult now. How do you talk someone into investing in this big clunky box when their PPC does everything the big clunky box does?
Four words: Advanced Placement Computer Science. Phones traditionally haven't been very useful for learning programming. Even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI monitor, their security models are hostile to compilers.
Would you prefer an 8:9 aspect ratio, 12% taller than it is wide? If so, take your 16:9 display and snap a window to fill half of it. That's one advantage of a laptop over a tablet: split screen is a standard window management feature.
I have bought a few commercially built computers over the years, like the Commodore 64 and the Kaypro II, but mostly I build my own computers. Since I've made my living working with computers (analog and digital), starting in 1974, it's only natural that I prefer to build my own.
Today it's an even split... I have a laptop from the 90's (running FreeDOS) and a Raspberry Pi (running FreeBSD) sitting next to my two home built desktops (running Win7 and PCLinuxOS).
Some might consider it curious, or even Luddite, but I refuse to have a "smart" phone, if I must have a cell I prefer flip phones, and have only considered a tablet of some kind but never bothered to purchase one. I do have an old PalmPilot that I still use, mostly because my favorite paper system (Geodex) died during the PDA revolution and the PalmPilot is still useful.
Now get off my damn lawn! 8^)
--
Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)
I do not have the ability nor the inclination to get more advanced computer power until some breakthrough point is reached. For example Libra Office does a wonderful job. Chess on computer is so strong it can be discouraging. I have unlimited high sped net so surfing the net is not going to be better. i'm not into games so i don't need that type of gear. All in all if a PC dies on me i can get a good, used replacement under $200. so the industry needs to drop the next really big thing in front of me to cause me to buy stronger computing hardware.
I bought a seriously good PC from Dell, about 5 years ago, for my wife's bookkeeping business. Also got one of their 27" widescreen monitors at the same time, so put a reasonable graphics card in the PC, and increased the RAM to the max at the time (24GB). Hard drives are standard spinning drives, but really large, and with some redundancy factor as it also contains a RAID card and an extra drive for backup.
She's still happier than hell with it. Lots of serious horsepower (accounting programs and large spreadsheets is what she works with) to handle anything. Fantastic "no tired eyes" screen resolution back then, and still a good performer now.
What is a newer computer going to give us that we don't have now?
Why did I post this? Ask me now!
Windows Update crapping out likely is the biggest threat, or when the antivirus disables itself and asks for literal protection money (there can be an non ovious workaround to unlock it again, unless it's old deprecated shit that also protects itself against being uninstalled)
BUT some Windows installations go on forever, I know of a Vista one that still got all its automagic updates.
We're transitioning or have transitioned to situations where PC are long lived and reliable, except the hard disk drive WILL fail.
Modern 128GB SSD? We don't know, but it might well last 20 years because well, some of the electronics stuff lasts. (laptop PSU might be awful. but you can get a laptop with a fanless CPU and the PSU might be reliable because the computer uses so little power)
So the first thread switches to Windows EOL then. (already a major threat even if you have a PC with HDD, like that Vista machine. Vista was current in 2008 and 2009!)
But then : Windows 10 might "solve" that EOL problem, though that's like Subway switching to healthier food by selling turd sandwiches. Ugh!
I'll look into CentOS 8 when it's out, could make for a "short term" (only 10 years or less) laptop/desktop OS. Might be good for "grandma" and "joe" set ups. Even though I don't care at all about Red Hat, Gnome, KDE, rpm.
Hardly need a PC with what phones can do today :-)