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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.
That is part of it. Offerings are pointless these days as there is no compelling reason to get a new computer. They aren't much faster than that of five years ago from a user perspective, and as you pointed out killall the common OS offering is dismal. Macs just keep humming along, and it isn't like they were high performance to begin with. If you are a OSX user you have become accustomed to crappy graphics and you aren't about to drop thousands upon thousands to get something a hair better only to never be able to upgrade your video. So, screw it. Get a set top game box for your gaming and hang on to your old system. It likely already does everything you need, and will likely continue to meet your needs for the foreseeable future.
We're running Dells we bought in 2009 or thereabouts, upgraded to Windows 10 (I know I know). Other than the odd PSU or hard drive blowing up, the machines seem to be working fine for what they are; workstations dedicated to word processing, email and a bit of browsing. I wouldn't want to open really large spread sheets on them, but other than that, they do the job. Every year that we don't have to buy replacement hardware is basically money in the bank for us, and we have a replacement budget in place for total failures like the motherboard. I would expect that in the next year or two these units may begin to fail, so we're looking at new purchases in 2018-19, at which point they'll be ten years old.
And when we talk about replacements, we're not likely talking about new desktops, but rather going to PCs-on-a-stick like the Lenovo Ideacenters. Again, for many of these computers, we're really talking about wordprocessing, email and browsing, and the advantage of these units is there almost disposable, and providing they last three or four years (we've had some test units running without issue 24 hours a day running videos and slideshows on large flat screen monitors for over a year now), we'd still be ahead of the game on the hardware side.
So our medium and long term strategies don't involve replacing $400-$600 desktops with similar models. We'll still be buying laptops for the road warriors and certain departments, like finance, where a bit more muscle is needed to run spreadsheets, will still see traditional PCs, but our days of buying a bunch of $500 Dell or HP desktops or towers on a regular refresh are pretty much done, and really, I would expect by the time we do do our big upgrades in 2019, small form inexpensive PCs will probably be a helluva lot more capable. Who knows, maybe in four or five years maybe we won't be buying Windows machines at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You forgot dropping the magsafe power connector, the overpriced SSDs and the reliance on dongles to connect anything. And don't forget the insane price: even if you were to overlook all the other shortcomings, a fully-kitted MBP 15" clicks in at nearly $5,000; that's insane, even for an Apple product.
I've been in the market for a new MBP for a couple of years, but all those shortcomings leave me happy that my 2010 model has been upgradable to some degree.