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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.
Buy 4x the amount of ram people buy, be good for 10 years.
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
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.
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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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.
People never liked the x86 PC
No. Back in the day a few hackers and engineers didn't like the x86 PC. I wasn't a big fan of it back then ether. I liked the 68K line.
Then and now most people didn't give a shit what processor their PC was running as long as it did the job. I'm willing to bet that most of the people out there don't know what processor their phone is running. I bet even less of them realize that their smart phone is a really just a mini computer they can carry.
Now today most hackers and engineers embrace the x86 PC because it is the best game in town. Sure the ARM processors are doing a good job and have the phone/tablet in the box, but the world runs on x86 processors.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
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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People never liked the x86 PC
No. Back in the day a few hackers and engineers didn't like the x86 PC. I wasn't a big fan of it back then ether. I liked the 68K line.
Then and now most people didn't give a shit what processor their PC was running as long as it did the job.
I don't think they mentioned x86 because they thought people didn't like the x86. I think they mentioned it because all those other things were also personal computers, and they wanted to differentiate. It was true, too; until about the Windows 95 era, a PC was considered by many if not most people both inside and outside of the industry to be the lame but affordable option. If you were in the industry, you were comparing it to "real" computers like ones from Sun, or even other machines from IBM; if you weren't, you compared it to a Mac, or even an Amiga or Atari (both of which offered much more functionality for less money.) Remember, while the dominant word processor on the PC was still WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, everyone else was using WYSIWYG with onscreen graphics and scalable fonts. People would drop right back into DOS out of Windows 3.1 to run WP, making Windows a glorified task launcher.
Anyway, until it sprouted a PCI bus, the x86 PC was a pathetic joke to almost everyone. Before that there were only occasional efforts to build "real" machines around x86 chips, all of which were economic failures. There was an 8-way 486 which would run SunOS, for example, and Sun's own 386-based i86pc. There was the brief flirtation with the EISA bus, and the less brief but more restricted to IBM MCA bus, but these were both crap without even the style of other personal computer buses like Zorro (Amiga) or NuBus (Macintosh) which offered autoconfiguration without floppy disks. VLB was also garbage; in theory you could use two bus-mastering, DMA-transferring devices on the same PC, but in practice this was usually problematic and required extensive troubleshooting to make work if it would in fact work at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was a die-hard m68k fan... but in retrospect, that's because back in the early 90s (right before DOS4GW), writing programs in anything besides realmode assembly was damn-near impossible.
I remember how I discovered (sometime around 1992 when I was in college) that every x86 from the 386dx onwards HAD orthogonal registers & could do flat addressing... then went in literal circles for MONTHS trying to find anything that resembled documentation or development tools.
To this day, I have no idea whether published books about the topic even EXISTED circa 1992, or whether MASM circa '92 could actually DO protected mode. I basically gave up after someone on Usenet disillusioned me... basically, protected-mode (circa '92) meant no BIOS calls (DOS extenders didn't quite exist yet). No BIOS calls meant you couldn't even output characters to the screen without knowing more about the inner workings of a VGA card's CRTC than any 18 year old could have hoped to know at that point (the first meaty books explaining videocard programming weren't readily available yet... they technically existed, but if you didn't already KNOW their titles & author names, your likelihood of discovering them was basically "nil" unless you were rich enough to blindly order expensive books from B. Dalton's or Waldenbooks sight-unseen based on their titles alone... and wait 6-8 weeks for them to arrive. Information-wise, it really WAS the Dark Ages compared to now.
Pre-Google, finding stuff about esoteric subjects was *hard* -- even as an undergrad at a major research university that HAD internet access... you'd post to Usenet, but if you missed seeing a reply, it was *gone* forever (as far as you were concerned) a few weeks later (from what I recall, the university's admins purged Usenet posts after ~1-4 weeks... 1 week for alt.binaries.*, 4 weeks for comp.sys.*). The library had computerized indices, of course... but you still had to try and FIND the bound journal. Half the time, it was missing. The other half of the time, it was in limbo (the journals for that year pulled from the shelf for hard-binding, but not actually BOUND yet). And if you weren't a professor or grad student, the library staff had zero interest in tracking missing resources down for you.
Come to think about it, the "good old days" actually sucked pretty badly.
I would agree that it was around windows 2000 where the PC as we know it was born. That was when most Linux people I know abandoned Linux and moved to windows.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
When I first saw windows xp I thought "what is this crap?" The interface reminded me of AmigaOS 1.3. After about a month I had figured out how to disable all that theme crap and had XP looking like Windows 2000. Once you got rid of that XP wasn't really that bad of a OS.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
We romanticize them because when you solved a significant problem you were a goddamned hero. It's much calmer and safer to live in an age which does not require heroism, but compared to nostalgia it seems boring.
Can't argue with you here. Back in the "dark ages" I remember how happy I was to have set up a usenet and email on my Amiga 500 and it actually worked the first time. Hero time.
We tend to forget the times when we almost burn down our apartment trying to resurrect a toaster oven we pulled out of the dumpster. Just saying....
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
While you may have a point the discussion is geared toward gaming PC's.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.