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

Builders vs Buyers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Builders vs Buyers

[ZorinLynx]

Yeah, it's sad but true.

Even with gaming systems, unless you're the sort who wants a flashy LED-lit clear-side case that looks like a spaceship, you can build a top-performing system just by buying a mass market machine and selecting the video card you want to put into it.

The enthusiast market is still there, but it's mostly for people who want their computer to look like it belongs on the set of Star Trek. I (sadly?) outgrew that once I was out of my 20s.

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:longer lifetime

[jwhyche]

It isn't "most like" the case. It is the case. Fifteen years ago I was changing out processors or memory every 6 months. Now I design my personal workstations with a 5 year lifespan. I have a friend that did the same thing. Now he has a 5th generation i7 that is almost 3 years old. He said he has no intention of upgrading anything till something fails or some radical advancement in technology comes out.

I'm in the same boat. I have a i7-6700K which is a 6th generation processor. Intel just announced they are about to release the 8th generation i7. From looking at what is being release I see no real performance gain over my 6th generation.

My linux server is a centos 6 running on a AMD 8350. As a server it has different requirements than my workstation. Its my file/plex server. It's been doing that role since 2013. It is entering its 5th year in that role and I see no reason to update it for the next 3 or 4 years.

As for your mundane computer users, the PC used to be a oddity. Now they treat a PC more like an appliance than a oddity. Its more like a refrigerator than a computer. You don't upgrade your refrigerator every year or so. This is even if they have a PC. Most now have laptops and treat them the same way.

Re:longer lifetime

[jwhyche]

You can blame that on Intel and their sandbagging

No you can't. I doubt that Intel is sandbagging anything. If they where then AMD would be running away with clockspeeds. But if you look at AMD processors you will see they are running at the same clock speeds as Intel.

The reason processors are not going any faster is we have hit the limit of what can be done with the current technology. Over the next few years we might see a increase in a few hundred mhz here and there. But there will never be another leap of 2 or 3 ghz again. Not with what we have.

To go any faster it will take a radical shift in the basic process of comptuer. Quantum processors maybe.

NVMe and M.2 ports will likely boost PC sales

[RobinH]

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.

Re:NVMe and M.2 ports will likely boost PC sales

[Kjella]

Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards and you can go nuts with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.

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.