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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
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.
My custom build from 2012 still tears through most things. I could build a new one, but why?
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! --
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
People may be, but the big drivers of PC sales, particularly in the over $500 range or businesses, and in particular the enterprise, and quite frankly the extra cycles and RAM that come with newer desktops don't really confer much advantage for many applications. It's one thing if it's the guys in the engineering department who need hefty workstations, or the guys editing videos or running financial simulations, but the bulk of most offices are people churning out documents, emailing and working on fairly modest spreadsheets, and most of the hardware put out in five or six years ago (or even longer, as I can attest), can do that without issue. Even if you're making money hand over fist, why would you replace perfectly good hardware? Not replacing hardware means you make even more money.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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!
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.
the biggest namely Linux KVM which battles against the vSphere. AWS/EC2, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace.
are you confusing kvm and qemu?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
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.
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....
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I was in the market for a Skylake chip when MS announced their forced windows 10 scheme. I quickly went out and bought a Devil's Canyon i7. It's running windows 7, and I'm going to have this computer for a long, long, long time.
Most likely yes...
Your 6400+ was cutting edge in 2007, but it's several generations behind and 10 years old... Modern mobile processors are likely more powerful while using a fraction of the power. There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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)
How is a 16-bit CPU going to address that amount of memory, even with segmentation to 20-bit... ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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...
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
There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
Other than that emulation of an x86 executable on an ARM processor is slower than running it natively on an x86-64 processor.
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 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!
Hardly need a PC with what phones can do today :-)