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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.
All those machines from 6 years ago, they're finally wearing out. I didn't think this would ever end!
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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.
No. The reports state that the sales increase was due to business refreshes.
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.
The PC upgrade cycle has also became longer then before too.
1989 8088
1993 486DX 50 MHZ
1997 Pentium 200 MHZ
2001 Pentium 3 1ghz (Technically I switch to a powerbook at the time, but that would be the competing processor)
2006 Core II Duo
2012 Core I7 3rd gen Sandy Bridge
That is where I am at now The 8th Gen Chips seems nice, but I will probably upgrade next year..
But before when upgrading after every 4 years I have gotten a noticeable improvement in the computer. Then by 2008 With the great recession, and also the popularity of mobile systems, While they are still keeping up with mores law, the usefulness of old systems seems to be lasting much better now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There will be the 2020 bump with the end of Windows 7 as well.
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.
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.