Traditional PC Sales Continue To Slide (zdnet.com)

Sales of traditional PCs continue to decline, although the overall PC market is likely to grow slightly next year. From a report: Traditional PC shipments are forecast to drop by nearly eight percent this year, and another 4.4 percent in 2018, predicts analyst firm Gartner. Which means that, by 2019, 16 million fewer traditional PCs and notebooks will be sold than were shipped this year. However, much of this will be offset by the rise in spending on high-end notebooks like Microsoft's Surface and Apple's MacBook, so that the overall PC market will by 2019 be at pretty much the same level it was last year. Tablets -- defined by Gartner as basic and utility ultramobile devices -- will also decline over the period to 2019.

Comments

longer lifetime

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people are keeping their machines for longer and longer as time goes on.

Re:longer lifetime

[Headw1nd]

This is most likely the case. Twenty years ago, a six year old computer was basically worthless. Now unless it's for high-end gaming, a six year old home computer is fine.

Re:longer lifetime

[ZorinLynx]

Systems are not becoming obsolete as quickly as they used to.

I remember how back in 1995, a computer from 1991 was considered slow as hell and could hardly run any current software.

Now in 2017, a computer from 2013 is still perfectly usable and fast. The rate of performance increase has slowed to an utter crawl. The biggest advancements in recent years have been reduced power consumption and increasing density in solid state storage, and the latter can be an upgrade to your old machine.

Re:longer lifetime

[darkain]

It isn't so much that performance has not continued to increase. It is that we've hit the point of diminishing returns for 99% of applications. a single-core 1GHz processor will run Microsoft Word about the same as a 10+ core 3+GHz CPU. And with even low end budget GPUs nowadays offering hardware decoding of 4k h.264, the rest of the computational power of the CPU and GPU isn't really meaningful for the majority of consumers.

Gamers, content producers, and scientific researchers are really the only fields left to push the boundaries of computational power.

Re:Builders vs Buyers

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to build my own computers to try to wring every last ounce of performance out of well selected components; nowadays the technology is so fast it just isn't worth it. I'll buy mass market commodity machines for dirt cheap the run circles around even the most ambitious builds I used to do.

It's a dying art.

Re:This trend will destroy Firefox.

[Bert64]

The decline of desktops is more to do with average users realising that a complex computer complete with maintenance requirements and malware risks is not the best choice for someone who just wants to read facebook. These people are better off with an ipad, and they are also the sort of people who will just use whatever browser the machine came with not realising anything else exists.

Not exactly

[rsilvergun]

Dell & HP often skip the full sized PCI-E slot for graphics entirely. When they do include it they've been known to use boards that can't deliver enough power on the slot. Finally their power supplies often lack the extra plug needed for most video cards. Asus & Acer are a little better, but it's not a sure bet.

The major manufacturers all sell 'gaming' pcs and they'll be damned if you're going to buy an i5 equipped PC on sale for $400, stuff a $200 graphics card in it and get 95% of the performance of their $1200 gaming rigs. They figured that out trick out in the late 90s/early 2000s.