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Tech Shoppers in the UK Ditch Desktop PCs and DVD Players (ofcom.org.uk)
Brits are ditching DVD players and desktop PCs and are increasingly turning to newer technology such as smart TVs and smart watches, Ofcom research has found. From the research: Shoppers in the UK are predicted to spend billions of pounds again this year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and much of that is expected to be spent buying tech online. So, Ofcom has crunched the numbers on which tech devices people have been buying in recent years, and which ones they're getting rid of.
Ownership of digital devices such as smart TVs, smart watches and smartphones has grown significantly in recent years, as more people need a constant connection to the internet -- internet users say they spend an average of 24 hours a week online. By contrast, MP3 players, DVD players and desktop computers seem to be falling out of favour as smartphone use continues to grow, particularly for browsing and streaming. Meanwhile, the popularity of tablets and e-readers seems to have peaked. Ownership of both is significantly higher than it was seven years ago, but has levelled out in the last few years.
Ownership of digital devices such as smart TVs, smart watches and smartphones has grown significantly in recent years, as more people need a constant connection to the internet -- internet users say they spend an average of 24 hours a week online. By contrast, MP3 players, DVD players and desktop computers seem to be falling out of favour as smartphone use continues to grow, particularly for browsing and streaming. Meanwhile, the popularity of tablets and e-readers seems to have peaked. Ownership of both is significantly higher than it was seven years ago, but has levelled out in the last few years.
Where have I heard this before? Ahh yes, when it was going to be completely "replaced" by the tablet...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because nowadays, there's barely a point in replacing them.
A 6 year old PC can still play modern games. And games used to be the only thing left that required non-professionals to follow the expensive upgrade cycle.
PCs just are what they always were: A tool for universal data processing.
It's not their fault they were wasted on useless consumer blobs running fixed-function modules ("app[lication]s") to waste their lives.
But of course the money media must keep up the state that anything but by-definition-unsustainable exponentially exponential growing growth is the devil, and the stable balance of infinitely recycling resources that all surviving things in the universe have in common literally means literal death for being Literally Hitler(TM). Literally. ... /s
As that's the only way they can keep leeching on society, by making us work, without working themselves.
The "Bang for buck" ratio has deteriorated.
ie:
8086 -> 80286 -> good BFBR "Bang For Buck Ratio"
80286 -> 80386 -> good BFBR
80386 -> 80486 -> excellent BFBR [ VESA local bus, faster ram ]
80486 -> pentium -> good BFBR [ pci bus, more ram, much faster speeds, MMX ]
Pentium -> Pentium 4 -> good BFBR [ pcie, more ram, much faster speeds, better video cards, etc ]
Pentium 4 - > Quad Core or Core2 - > excellent BFBR [ pcie, next gen, DDR3/DDR2 memory, much better cores, and more of them ]
Now, we are in the era where we:
-Add slightly faster ram, at the cost of latency - shitty BFBR
-Add slightly faster video cards, at a very large cost - shitty BFBR
-Add slightly faster CPUs, at an obscence cost -- very shitty BFBR
so the BFBR has decreased, where you can spend another $1000, to get 10-15% better performance, measured in "seconds" for most tasks, or less, or a few more FPS, which anything above 30 would be unnoticeable.
spend $100, get an SSD, and make it feel like a new system.
Spend $1000, get a slight performance boost.
I'm still using a 2600k, with 16gb, with a 7770HD video card, I see no reason to upgrade.
a resurgence in PC gaming has helped mask that a bit, fueled mostly by the insane popularity of Fortnight and PUBG, but folks are buying less and PCs. They'll buy one or two for Junior to do the homework on but they don't usually upgrade them much.
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When Ryzen came out I thought it was time to upgrade and throw AMD a bone. So I bought a new computer system. Motherboard, CPU, but then... the DRAM and NAND were expensive like heck and the GPU prices were ludicrous because of those god damned coin miners. So I put an old GPU card on it and got lower end memory and NAND products.
I ended up with a M.2 NAND drive which was not any larger than the SATA one I had in my old PC and cost about as much if not more... A couple months passed then Meltdown and Spectre came around. So basically I've left it in another floor collecting dust while I'm still working on my old PC. I can't feel assed about transferring the file systems and applications from my "old" PC to the new one. Oh and the case they got me had no 5 1/4" frontal drive bays whatsoever for my legacy discs so I had to buy an external reader. At one point I thought I was better off with a laptop.
I blame the memory cartel pricing, obscene GPU prices which are like 2x what they should be right now, and the CPU manufacturers for a) screwing it up b) Intel keeps spinning new revisions of the same shit over and over and calls it a new product.
So it is little wonder few people want to upgrade. Also 4K just made everything more expensive and it is useless for gaming.
Everything has this cycle, where it gets to the point that what you already have is good enough, and further small tweaks do not justify the cost of replacing.
We don't.
Shops have been trying to make it a thing, for about 2-3 years now.
After some footage of Black Friday Walmart rampages a few years back on the news, suddenly shops decided they wanted that and tried to induce it.
Pretty much nobody cares. To us, it's just a pre-Christmas sale when you spend most of December Christmas shopping anyway. And the price reductions are even more fake than other sales. At least "January sales" actually happen as shops sell off leftover stock. Not everywhere, but they do.
Black Friday is also not just a "day"... it's a week and they're trying to make it a month. Nobody really cares. It's all hype and rubbish. There's literally no increase in sales over what you'd expect before Christmas.
It's not like the US where you effectively get two holidays in short succession. We get Christmas, and that's it. So nobody is going to splash out in November because everyone who was going to buy you gifts for Christmas will do the old "Oh, no, don't buy that, leave it for later (because I've already decided to buy it for you and I have no other ideas!)".