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PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years (venturebeat.com)
From a report: Gartner found PC shipments were up globally in Q2 2018, the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that's largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.
You mean when there is real competition, lower prices, and innovation there is more interest in PC market the market grows... Who'd a thunk it?
No good deed goes unpunished.
The average person replaces their PC on average every 5-6 years, i've had my desktop toaster for 8 now and am gonna replace it next year or year after.
Wish i'd replaced it before bitcoin miners fucked up the GPU prices, but what can you do.
All those machines from 6 years ago, they're finally wearing out. I didn't think this would ever end!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The issue is, for a lot of people their Phones and Tablets have been more then good enough for their computing use. The people who do real work on their computers actually have been taking advantage to the fact companies like Microsoft, and Apple and the others have been working dilgantly trying to get their bloated apps optimized for mobile devices, that the PC applications have been getting updates which work faster then before, saving us from getting an upgrade.
However we are reaching a point now where things are catching up and our 6 - 8 year old computers are starting to show their age and are due for an upgrade.
However as I have ranted many times before, We are no longer really looking for a PC, but a Workstation. The PC Functions have fallen to our mobile devices, were real work and processing is more of Workstation thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Who wants to bet that the industry finds similar vulnerabilities to fix on a regular basis from now on? In the same way that Apple "fixes" their older phones.
So the "OMG all ur PCz has spectres and meltdownz" bit is working?
The business has become cyclical for just those reasons.
We'll see this year and maybe next of increased sales and then sales will decline. And when those machines wear out or whatever, people will start buying machines again.
Markets are only so big and they all eventually get saturated.
I can't imagine how people can get anything done without support for many multiple screens. Two external units are my bare minimum. Most laptops however, either support only one or make you turn off your built-in LCD when you connect the second one because they can't handle the total resolution. For me, a professional programmer, desktop is the only viable choice.
On a different note, I'd be inclined to risk a statement that the PC market growth has something to do with the declining price of bitcoins and GPU prices reaching sane(r) levels again.
Could it be the effect of AMD Ryzen? Lots of people, myself included, were using 5-7 year old machines while something that disrupted the scene appeared, Intel is pushing out the same microarchitecture for years now, and this was the first new offering. Maybe AMD fans jumped in, Intel fans too, and if they didn't, maybe went with newer Intel CPUs just to show some love. I'm using a Ryzen 5 1600X now, was using an Intel Core i5 laptop before that for some years.
I just bought a new computer, seems to be good economy....
PC sales are up because Microsoft no longer supports XP and Vista. Plus many old PCs can't handle the Fall and Spring Creators update. So it's a choice between paying some geeks $200 to fix an old computer vs $300-400 on a new PC. PC makers should thank Microsoft.
PC sales began leveling off in the late 1990s, more steeply after 2000. Long before smartphones and tablets.
What happened was Intel and AMD ran headfirst into physics. Prior to 2000, CPU clock speeds had been doubling roughly every 18 months. But the power a processor needs increases non-linearly with frequency. Past about 3 GHz (roughly 2002), CPUs began to require exorbitant amounts of additional power for little gains in clock speed.
Consequently, the rate of clock speed increases nearly stalled after 2002 (at a bit above 3 GHz). Before 2000, each new gen of Intel CPU roughly doubled performance. Today, each new gen only nets about a 5%-15% performance improvement, and most of that has been due to improvements in parallel processing (more cores, speculative execution, hyperthreading, all the goodies which made the news last year as avenues for new exploits).
Up til about 20002, software makers had been counting on increased CPU performance to support the new features they were adding. They relied on people upgrading their PCs to be able to run the latest version of their software. Now that an upgraded PC was barely faster than the PC it replaced, software makers were forced to do something they'd given little thought to in the past - optimize.
Isn't this the same firm that was declaring the PC market dead about 6 months ago. It is like the 7th day Adventists, if you predict the death of something every other week, and growth the weeks in between, eventually one or the other will happen.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
A lot of journalists attribute this to Windows 10.
I'm not so sure but what I'm sure of is that PCs just don't run forever and probably we're close to the stage when a large mass of older PCs have finally been deprecated in favor of new purchases. Secondly, the number of people on this planet is still growing, so that should have happened sooner or later.
My computer is six years old, but I'm not running into any issues that are frustrating enough to actively try to solve.
My six year old GPU still runs today's games, can handle my three monitors.
My six year old SSD still handles files fine.
My six year old CPU still handles the workload.
The 32GB RAM limit of my MOBO is starting to be a bit irksome, but not really a big issue.
So maybe if I wait a few more years CPU manufacturers will handle their security issues, their process shrink issues.
GPU manufacturers will return to pre-crypto-bubble prices.
Maybe that whole non-volatile-memory Xpoint thing will mature into a viable option.
Maybe, and this is a long shot, Microsoft will sort the whole Windows 10 situation out.
Don't worry. We'll see way more sales once all of spectre generation flaws have caused firmware/microcode updates to cripple current gen CPU's.
A decade ago, it was compiling OpenOffice on Gentoo that moved me to Q6600, then Sandy Bridge, then Ivy Bridge. Now it's the Chromium and Webkit build times that are moving me to Ryzen/Threadripper, provided my HVAC can handle the load. What else would you use a computer for?
You don't do coin mining on a laptop and not everyone can afford a server/GPU rack so ...
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I could eat ramen and shit better haikus than that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."