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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.
Based on the traffic at places like Microcenter I'd offer this: more people have the basic skills now to build a computer on their own rather then buy one. I haven't met a single person in over 10 years that bought a computer, everyone built their own. Corporations are buying laptops for telecommuters and staff versus bulky PCs that are easier to transport, deploy, and use less power for the workloads they deal with.
I think people are keeping their machines for longer and longer as time goes on.
Except for GPUs, those are still gaining processing capabilities at an exponential rate.
I wonder how much of this is related to Intel's ~7 competition-free years in the desktop processor market. I, for one, have not yet felt compelled to upgrade beyond Sandy/Ivy Bridge. Still not quite there yet, as I just don't need more than 6 cores at 4GHz+; the power consumption improvements are looking pretty enticing though.
Does anyone out there keep statistics specific to 'enthusiast' platform (LGA2011, TR4) sales? I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that those have spiked a bit.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
People never liked the x86 PC, but had to have them to use the Internet's content consumption aspects.
But the issue I have is this: I currently have a Lineage OS Running Phone, and a DD-WRT Router that I have to re-flash to fix a terrible security vulnerability. (KRACK) and due to the design of these things, the update could possibly soft brick them. I neevr had this issue with my x86 PCs
But if you are not hard-core gaming then most people are fine with computer made years ago and are somewhat okay with tablets.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Forrester says they doubled in the last month and will increase hundredfold by the end of the year.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Despite the market sales sliding from mobile sales, I think this can also be attributed to older PCs having a good lifespan. I donâ(TM)t think the average user can tell the difference in performance between an i5 2500K and an i5 7600K. So why upgrade? A vast majority of people I see donâ(TM)t upgrade desktops/laptops because their old one still does the job well. The average person I know is happily using a PC from the 2012-2015 dates. Iâ(TM)d say the only benefit to upgrade is SSDs and for laptops, better battery life
>> gaining processing capabilities at an exponential rate ...I do not think you know what it means.
Buy 4x the amount of ram people buy, be good for 10 years.
and? your point? you still have a pc and still contribute to sales numbers every few years.
and oh, btw.. your current laptop will get replaced sooner than you think it will. they are simply no longer designed to last past the warranty or typical lease periods... like that old thinkpad or latitude that would go for 10 years, easy.
anything past 1 year is lucky, past 3 years is a god damn miracle.
(on mobile, quote) "on high-end notebooks like Microsoft's Surface and Apple's MacBook" and Google's Pixelbook. ?
I opted to just install an SSD rather than upgrade our PCs at home, and definitely got a few extra years out of them. However, the SSDs are maxing out the data rate of the SATA ports, and now they're coming out the NVMe drives that are 4 times faster than SSDs but you need an M.2 port (as I understand it a direct connection into your PCI bus). For these you typically need a new motherboard. So whereas the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD was very simple and easy, taking the next step means a new motherboard, so if you were already delaying buying a new PC because you did the SSD thing, you're almost certainly going to buy a new PC next time. There's a lot more incentive now.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Used to we had to get new computers to run the latest software and to keep up. If your computer was five years old in 1995 you were working on a joke.
I have an 11 year old computer in my computer as an HTPC - it supports plentiful RAM, has four cores and plenty of storage room with room for upgrade. I've got a computer that's about eight years old that I'm using for gaming - and I don't have to stick with just ancient stuff, even most modern games that aren't boundary pushing first person shooters run fine on it. In fact I just ordered a used but more powerful than what it already has video card for the HTPC.
I can buy brand new computers that are NOT as powerful as either of those systems. Sure they'll use less electricity and probably in a smaller form factor, but I can still buy ones that aren't as powerful. That speaks volumes.
It's time to start building "heritage class" computers that are meant to work for decades instead of cast asides. Instead of a visit to Geek Squad so they can try to build you a new computer it's time to visit something more akin to a jewelry store to keep PCs running and doing smaller long term upgrades.
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In other news, sales of full sized family wagons have declined for the last 20 years.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Firefox died years ago when they stopped listening to the requests of their users (memory leaks) and started pushing crap nobody asked for including cloning the look and feel of Chrome and I knew it was all over when Mozilla started doing wasteful crap like changing their logo to Moz://a
#DeleteFacebook
I have an AMD A8-7600 and it runs a lot of games very respectably. I tried out the Destiny2 Beta and it only got like 20 fps, but that game is pretty amazing. I can run Unreal 4 on it without much problems with lag. For a computer without a dedicated graphics card it actually runs a lot of games.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Oh no... Firefox doesn't run on Pre-Pentium 4 or Pre-Athlon 64 CPU's from 15+ years ago?
You're talking Pentium 3/Celeron of the age and Athlon XP's
While I agree mostly with this, I think I've lucked out. I purchased my Acer Aspire One back in 2012, and still going perfectly strong!
also... "We need Microsoft to invest a crap-ton of money to further enhance their old software, for no extra money, to support it after the time they said they would when you bought it."
Good one.
apple lack of new hardware on the desktop then the imac. Both the mini and pro are very out of date at high prices.
The imac pro is going to have down clocked cpu's due to the it being thin.
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Have they forgotten Windows 7 is near EOL soon. I would surely hope they don't count on IT departments waiting until the last minute to migrate like they did during XP.
I know bank of America has already started their migration early this year and is replacing their fleet of aged hardware as they go on
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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.
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Windows 7 is 8 years old near EOL and quite dated. It's not energy efficient and lacks touch, extra security, and mobile apps like Hulu, Netflix and office 365 add ons like planner, Dynamics, etc.
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Why would you buy a new machine? You can get a $60 refurbished C2D that will meet a regular user's needs comfortably. Or you can get a $150 i5, just add a $150 video card, et voila, a solid gaming rig for the same price as a current console. Some people may want something more high-end, but that's a bit of a niche.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm getting ready to put together a monster water-cooled gaming PC build in the next month or so when I start seeing sales on components. Will that count as a "PC sale" or does that only apply to people who go to the Wal-Mart and buy whatever horseshit is sitting on the shelves?
You know what? Maybe I'll just go to that iBuyPower place and order me up some sick Intel Ultimate Pantyripper Black Box Edition and let them do the heavy lifting. This way I won't have to nick up my hands digging around the sharp edges inside a full tower case.
Either way, it's going to be sweet. And I really don't give a fuck if "traditional PC sales" are down or not. I'm gonna get mine, and the rest of you can fiddle with your iWatches and eTablets like the fruits that you are.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And Windows 10 is a glitchy mess with a butt-ugly interface. Is it a surprise that people cling to the old alternative that actually works better?
Oh, and Windows is a desktop operating system. No one gives a fuck about those retarded mobile apps.
Circumcision is child abuse.
While it is true that home built desktops are a big thing (like my home PCs), and don't show up in metrics unless you clock motherboard stats, with those counted being that somebody buys an OEM OS for them, the next big thing is going to be wearable computers.
We have the tech to do this already. Basically, you wear the computer. It might be a belt, or part of a jacket, and the sleeve of your pants or jacket might be the keyboard or one uses a holographic input. The power supply has been the main constraint, but we're getting much improved battery tech and we can use incidental Wi-Fi for power charges.
It won't replace your gaming computer yet, but it's coming.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
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a mid range SSD is fast enough for just about any game I can think of. Maybe huge maps on Ashes of the Singularity will bottleneck but nothing else will. If you're a pro video editor maybe, but there aren't enough of those to drive new PC Sales.
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Maybe that is why you were downvoted?
Sounds like you bought a $500 computer about nine years ago. One that would have been hard pressed to run Vista, and lucky to have a dual core.
My rig was $300 about 9 years ago, but I did get some components gifted to me to upgrade it shortly after purchase. (Dell Inspiron i530, single core Celeron, 2GB RAM, Vista Basic). Gifted part was a Core 2 Duo E7500 2.9ghz, which is more than adequate for anything but video games. Later I upgraded to 4GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD, and a $50 Geforce GT 240. Think it now qualifies as a high end rig from the 2009 era.
Unless you are a serious gamer, you should be able to put together a really fast machine for WAY less than $1500.
On that high of a budget, you should be able to run a Core i7, a GTX 1080, a really nice power supply, an SSD and a mechanical HD, etc. etc. That's not moderate, that's a f'in hotrod right there.
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Considering that Ryzen has pushed the PC industry for the first time in close to ten years, and the resulting excitement for people to buy or build their first new system in over six years, I doubt that the PC market is slowing down. The pre-built PC market may be slowing, due to a lack of Ryzen based systems by the large OEMs, and that means people are building their own systems. On the low end, you don't see the new chips showing up in large numbers yet as well, though that will improve in the next few months. If you include laptops, AMD Raven Ridge isn't out yet, and 8th generation Intel won't show up in large numbers for a few months.
So, the market is heating up, but the big names like HP and Dell may not have seen it yet, due to being slow to market with products people would actually care about.
First of all, the table that ZDNet has in TFA is outdated from the newest table available on Gartner's actual website:
https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3560517
The PC numbers on Gartner's website look more rosy for the PC than the ones in ZDNet's article. Also, here is an important snippet from Gartner's website that ZDNet conveniently did not include in their screenshot:
Note: The Ultramobile (Premium) category includes devices such as Microsoft Windows 10 Intel x86 products and Apple MacBook Air.
The Ultramobile (Premium) category is growing 11% this year. I would count x86 devices running Win10 or macOS as part of the PC market. Combine the "Traditional PC" category with the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category and suddenly the PC market looks flat in total volume shipments year over year. Combine that with the fact that the average selling price for the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category is probably higher than the stuff they count as "Traditional PC" and 2017 is actually looking like a pretty good year for PC OEMs.
A better headline would be "Cheap glossy plastic laptops decline, thin and light metal body laptops on the rise."
Same here I used to buy a new PC every 2 or 3 years, when the next generation of much quicker processor and graphic card came.... Now It usually take 5+ years and most of the time I just switch off Anti Aliasing and I am fine (and since I am short sighted I don't care a yota about AA).
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Energy efficency is good enough considering the underlying hardware, touch is not important, those mobile apps are mostly a consumer thing and companies that have switched from XP not too many years ago aren't going to move away from 7 any time soon.
A lot of modern smartphones and tablets have HDMI output, so you can carry them around in your pocket and plug them in to a big screen plus a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Of course, then you're stuck with a somewhat underpowered device with a UI that's designed for a 5" screen and doesn't scale well to a larger display.
That said, I'd love for someone to resurrect the Samsung research project from about 10 years ago that did partial migration with Xen. They had a demo where they ran a VM on a phone, then plugged it into a big computer and used the OS hotplug facilities to make it think that it now had more cores, more RAM, and some extra peripherals, in a NUMA arrangement: memory pages were automatically faulted across between the machines by the hypervisor and if the scheduler moved a process to the fast CPUs it would eventually move over. The only real problem was that everything broke horribly if you unplugged the phone before migrating everything back, but that could be solved by providing a dock that doesn't release the phone until it's either powered off or everything is migrated back. This arrangement let you use a small mobile device for everyday computing, but move large workloads transparently to more powerful compute resources when you needed them.
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They do gain, compared to CPUs at least, but what for? Unless you're mining Bitcoins, do you need the additional horse power? What resolution at what Hz do you really need? Where is the limit of "good enough"?
Sure, you can get more out of a 10xx than a 9xx. Does it warrant the price difference, that is the question. Does it warrant upgrading?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fine, charge me a (sensible!) annual fee to continue using Win7 and we're good.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have a nice, new Surface Pro 4. It has 1 USB 3 port, plus 4 more if I use the docking station. I'm trying to make it my ham radio station computer. Right now, my $300 Gateway desktop computer, one of those little things with no expandability at all, is an easier machine to work with. Why? The little Gateway has I/O. It has about 8 native USB-2 ports. It has traditional sound connectivity of speaker, mic, and line in. Attempting to connect the radio with digital communications means, for the Surface Pro, an external sound card run thru USB. For a full-sized keyboard and mouse, I use a wireless system with USB dongle. For controlling the radio directly there's a USB to RS-232 converter, and for sending digital signals out over the shortwave bands there's RS-232 control to a Rigblaster Pro that requires another USB to RS-232 converter. For the Surface Pro to load some software that comes on CDs, there's another USB requirement for the external CD/DVD/BluRay drive and burner. Then of course if I want to store more than the internal 500 Gb., and especially if I want to have it portable, there's the 1 Tb USB-3 pocket-sized hard drive that is powered thru the USB-3 connection alone.
For all that, I have the docking station and a 10-station USB-3 hub. Surprise, don't plug the keyboard / mouse dongle into the hub, because there's so much traffic on it that it makes the mouse movements jerky. You have to plug it into the lone side port USB on the Surface Pro itself, then it works fine, except for the mouse wheel which was inexplicably DOA - and since I bought the keyboard and mouse a couple years ago when building my Core i7 tower computer and didn't use it, I'll likely have to buy a new wireless keyboard and mouse to recover that functionality if it's that important. So far it isn't.
Future expansion that might require yet more I/O would be if I connected up both the SteppIr 4-element antenna's adjustments for frequency automatically from the computer, and connected up the antenna rotator for pointing the antenna automatically from the computer. Not being quite as intensely real-time as the keyboard and mouse, I'm sure they would do fine being plugged into the 10-station USB-3 hub.
But if you want to do a lot of I/O, its easier with even a really, really basic PC for $300 than it is with an I/0 limited, but otherwise golly-gee-whiz ultra-portable $3000 Surface Pro 4 laptop / tablet with its detachable keyboard. Love the Surface Pro, am amazed by the accuracy of the touchscreen and the touch panel, etc., its an outstanding machine, but... it can't be absolutely everything to everyone. Sometimes a desktop is just what is needed.
The GT 240 was a peach. 80% of the performance of the 250 for something like 50% of the power consumption. A C2D is still a surprisingly peppy machine, I have one here at 1.86 GHz and with 4GB which I so far haven't been able to part with. Cute little Lenovo ThinkCentre. I paid $50 for it with a 2TB disk.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am running a Core 2 Quad Core, and it is perfectly fine. I built it probably 8 years ago.
My kids all have Core2 Duo machines, and the only thing I've had to upgrade is their video cards. They are all hand-me-downs that people we knew were giving away.
My wife has an i3 laptop we bought from Dell small business 5 or 6 years ago. Still doing just fine.
I think the computer market just finally got saturated. As it's always been, only the geeks know what is in their computer. If people still use them, instead of phones or tablets, they shop on Amazon or burn time on FB, maybe read email, and pay bills. Why get a new one if the old one still works?
Besides, they have to save up their money to buy a $500 phone every couple of years.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
And it has Windows, which for all its faults is still a real OS (unlike what you get on Chromebooks, e.g.).
As wierd_w explained to me at length, you can put a real OS on a Chromebook. First enable developer mode, enable legacy boot from within developer mode, and disable developer mode. Then you can dual-boot Chrome OS on the internal drive with Gallium, a real OS based on Xubuntu, on a flash drive that fits in your Chromebook's USB port. Just press Ctrl+L at startup when you want to boot from the external drive.
Linux is much better at using RAM for disk cache, and no matter how slow my hard drive is and no matter how fast your SSD is, my RAM is still faster than your SSD.
You still get a ton of compulsory misses when you restart the computer after a security update to Linux or other sufficiently low-level components. You also see capacity misses if your PC's motherboard doesn't take more than 2 or 4 GB of RAM, which I still see on laptops sold in 2017. An SSD substantially reduces the penalty for these misses.
In addition, though caches help with reads, they don't help quite as much with writes. Many applications call sync after a write to allow new information to hit oxide even in case of subsequent power loss. This forces the disk cache to behave as write-through instead of write-back, for which RAM won't help much. You see this, for example, when running sudo apt upgrade to install security updates.
What fraction of your assembly orders involve laptops as opposed to desktops? I know barebone laptops exist, but I'm curious how common they are.
They probably have at least one computer or laptop in the house if they really need to type up a paper, but after school most people only have to do that sort of thing at work.
If you work from home, you need to type things up at home.
Gamers, content producers, and scientific researchers are really the only fields left to push the boundaries of computational power.
Your use of the term "content producers" causes me a bit of anxiety. Why isn't everyone a participant in our shared culture, or a "content producer" as you call it?
Most of us already know that gaming engines are compiled and optimized for the most common processor out there. An that is a quad core intel based system.
Since when? I thought the AMD Jaguar processor in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which is about the same as a pair of Athlon 5150s, was the most common current-generation x86-64 video gaming processor.
my parents got a new laptop only because their last desktop died and only for certain things. They use their tablets/phones for things like checking mail and reading news.
I don't seem to understand the use case for using a phone for those things. To me, checking mail involves replying to mail, and reading news involves commenting on news, as we are doing right now. Using a tablet or phone for that is painful, especially without a Bluetooth keyboard.
People never liked the x86 PC, but had to have them to use the Internet's content consumption aspects.
A creative work isn't "content" to fill a box, nor is it "consumed" by viewing it. With that out of the way, assuming "content consumption" refers to viewing works made by others:
Once someone finishes viewing works, what device should he use to create other works, such as replying to mail, commenting on news, or drawing his own art? Or perhaps by "content consumption", you were implying that people are content to view works created by others rather than participating in creation. If so, why does this remain the case?
The 1974 vehicle you cite is also from the last model year prior to the introduction of government-imposed corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. So is the decline of station wagons based on lack of demand, or is it based on CAFE forcing automakers to redesignate their larger family vehicles as "trucks", leading to the SUV fad?
Good luck doing any substantial programming on a pocket BSD machine.
for a paragraph or two, a phone is fine.
When I compose a paragraph such as this one, I don't necessarily enter the words in the order that I intend them to be read. I go back and forth, using Ctrl+left and Ctrl+right to move backward and forward in what I'm writing. I have found moving the insertion point with Android's touch screen input to be an exercise in frustration. I also find it frustrating with Android's touch screen input to select text to copy for an inline quotation and place the insertion point to paste them. Having the parts of an HTML or BBCode closing tag such as </em> or [/quote] spread across three different pages of the on-screen keyboard is also painful, as well as turning href into great or beef when I'm trying to enter an <a> element because autocorrect can't tell markup from prose.
Work emails sometimes involve longer responses and when I have to use a laptop I do.
You are correct that I had work email in mind, be it my day job or free software projects' mailing lists, not noreply@ things like purchase receipts.
Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean are far easier to input for some people using a finger as opposed to a keyboard system.
I can see your point for logographic languages like Chinese and Japanese. But Korean hangul is an alphabet, theoretically just as amenable to keyboard entry as the Latin letters in which English is written.