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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
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.
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
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.
Why I haven't upgraded:
Conclusion: Unless you're a gamer your old PC is fine.