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Gartner and IDC Agree: Global PC Shipments Fell To Exactly 58.5 Million in Q1 2019 (venturebeat.com)
The PC market is still in decline, according to research firms Gartner and IDC. That's nothing new for the duo to agree on, but coincidentally they also (for the first time?) estimated the exact same number of PC shipments: 58.5 million in Q1 2019. From a report: Gartner and IDC also both found PC shipments were down globally year-over-year. So far, 2019 looks like more of the same. After six years of quarterly PC shipment declines, 2018 brought a positive Q2, a flat Q3 ... and then a negative Q4. Gartner and IDC analysts have pointed to CPU shortages as contributing to this past quarter's decline. But that just seems to be an excuse for reality: The PC simply isn't as in-demand as it once was. The top six vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Asus, and Acer, per Gartner.
They aren't in as much demand, but there is s significant demand. But a combination of slow innovation, and being split with virtual machines, laptops, cell phones and tablets has put their demand in check.
I wont give mine up, but i don't have 6 of them anymore either, and only upgrade every 3-4 years.
No, I'm not trying to be ignorant in my question. It's rather valid when you consider TFA has pictures of a tablet, a more traditional laptop, and then what appears to be a Surface with a detachable keyboard.
So, I'll ask again, what is considered a "PC" these days? Tablets? Phablets? Touch-screen enabled laptops? Detachable vs. attached keyboards?
And since we now do all the same shit on smarthphones that we do on other computing devices, are smartphones considered Personal Computers? If not, why? (You really can't get any more personal than the computer you carry in your pocket all day)
A shift in form factors is what we're really talking about here, so let's cut through the usual hype/bullshit reporting and understand definitions before labeling it a "decline" in sales.
Not going to do any real work on a Cell Phone.
Facebook and Twitter are not Work.
I used to buy a very small PC to watch media with. Since HECV became popular the price of a build went from $150 to $450 so now it makes a lot more sense to just buy an Android box.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You don't get to say "exactly" with an estimation counting whole objects and truncating your number 5 orders of magnitude above the units mark.
Exactly 58,500,000 units? Amazing. It's like that moment you watch your odometer roll over 100,000 miles.
Every time an article like this comes out with yet more bad news for the whitebox PC market, people who desperately hope that isn't true come out of the woodwork to say "but it's just that PCs are good enough and people are only replacing them when they break now."
Problem: that isn't true. People are not replacing them. The average person gets by just fine with a phone to handle all their computing needs in a way that is about 1000X easier for them than a generic PC, not to mention, they can carry it around in their pocket and use it from Starbucks.
That is all fine and well, except that if the PC market shrinks enough, it's going to mean problems for people who want an open computing device rather than a locked down device beholden to an ad agency. It's easy to deny reality here, because many of us do not want to see the death of the consumer PC, but there is a lot at stake: the ability to control your own computing devices. The average person doesn't want to do that, so the market is catering to them.
And I trust I don't have to point out yet again why the "but autocad!!!" argument is horse manure.
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
58,500,000 not one more. Not one less. No grounding up or down.
Or exactly does mean something different.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So, I'll ask again, what is considered a "PC" these days?
I personally define a personal computer based on lack of certain restrictions on the operating system's part. A PC is a device such that the person who owns it controls what computing is done on it. By this definition, an Android device is a PC, as it can run Termux. So is a Chromebook capable of running Crostini. Some devices require an additional purchase to turn them into PCs: an iPad needs a Mac, and a Nintendo Entertainment System needs an EverDrive and a PC capable of mounting SD or USB storage.
Gartner and IDC methodologies differ from mine. To them, PCs are desktops (including workstations), plus notebooks (including Chromebook) whose keyboard is permanently attached. Handhelds, servers, tablets, and detachable notebooks are not part of what they consider the "PC" market segment.
Standard physical interfaces? So I'm assuming Gartner and IDC aren't counting any modern Apple laptops then.
USB 3 over C-type connector is a standard physical interface defined by USB IF.
Tablets and Netbooks are capable of "integrating with a third-party hardware and peripheral devices via standard physical interfaces."
On a pre-2013 netbook, I could edit and compile a program to run on the same netbook. The same is true of a Chromebook that supports Crostini or an Android tablet that runs AIDE or Termux or GNURoot. It's not quite as true of an iOS device; I've read that programs built in Swift Playgrounds can't integrate with iOS the same way as App Store apps, and I haven't read about a counterpart to the iPad-only Swift Playgrounds for even an AirPlay-docked iPhone. (Correct me if I'm wrong though.)
In addition, the Lightning connector isn't quite as "standard" as USB C in the sense of being a format maintained by a multi-vendor body and licensed royalty-free or uniform-royalty.
The average person gets by just fine with a phone to handle all their computing needs in a way that is about 1000X easier for them than a generic PC
Does "the average person" never write a long email or blog post or forum post? Or does "the average person" prefer to pair a Bluetooth keyboard to a phone?
they can carry it around in their pocket and use it from Starbucks.
That's one reason why I carry a compact laptop: to get work done while waiting for someone in Starbucks.
The author conveniently forgot to mention that the number fell from 61.3M which in relative terms is less than 5%.
It's been nearly 35 years since I started using a computer for routine tasks. There simply aren't many new routines to computerize. For that reason, and I'm happy to say for that reason alone, computers will last longer and longer.
Routine one was numbers, think spreadsheets. I managed my elementary-school baseball pool in lotus 1-2-3. Yes, today's spreadsheets are "better", but they don't address any new routines. Once we had charts and graphs, that was it. Don't cry to me about pivot tables that no one uses.
Routine two was writing, think word processing. I put it second to numbers only because numbers needed computers, where writing didn't. But fast writing did. My essays were done in Wordstar for the longest time. By the time fancy fonts came around, we were done. Again, don't cry to me about tables and pictures, that's next.
Routine three was publishing & layout. I used PrintShop -- yeah, I'm calling ten-foot-long birthday banners layout. What of it?
E-mail (desperately trying to remember my first client, really can't, probably compuserve), web browser (duh, ncsa mosaic), music (winamp, still), graphics (jasc paintshop pro), audio (audacity), video (not me), programming (ultraedit since the dawn of our careers).
Add various messengers (ICQ) as the dawn of social media if you will, and newsfeeds (pointcast) as the now-dead origins of podcast directories.
The point is that with the singular exception of "MORE GRAPHICS", be it larger video, more 3d, raytracing, and bigger and bigger games, I think we're finding that there aren't any more parts of life to computerize.
Considering your life five years ago, compared with today, I doubt most people will find any significant routine that is computerizable today, that wasn't five years ago -- leading to the conclusion that a five-year old computer would be just fine.
There was a time when last year's technology was completely useless. Burn a music CD in an hour, but need three to get through failed attempts, or burn a CD in five minutes with ease. Last year's machine couldn't play a single new game, and would never be able to ever again. Can browse the internet, or can't. Could print in colour or black and white only.
We ain't there no more. Windows Vista needed near-brand-new hardware. Windows 10 could run on twenty-year old hardware. The vast majority of businesses today, that existed twenty years ago, don't need anything different than they had twenty years ago. It's hideous, but my local lumber yard uses machines and software from my Wordstar days. They sell wood just the same.
My local hydroponics store still uses carbon paper. I bet you can guess why.
I have questions about the data in the report:
1. does this include small systems such as Raspberry PI et al?
2. does this consider people building machines from parts?
Personally, I think people who want or need access to more robust workstation systems for gaming, number crunching, etc, will be able to buy or build the systems they need, for the foreseeable furture because:
1. Business runs on white box systems - including the services behind all of those hand held devices at the other end of the network connection.
2. E-Sports is not just about consoles - and we're talking $billions there.
Your average person who could care less will be fine, and so will those of us who work in the field, play video games, or need to be able to number crunch. Will how people doe these things change? Certainly, but maybe for the better in some ways - particularly for people who may need one of those functions infrequently - they don't have to invest in expensive equipment to leverage cloud based resources through their phone. For the geeks remaining - we'll all be fine.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Whitebox systems are used extensively in cloud computing...so the fear that the manufacturers are simply going to stop building systems that form the backbone of the services provided to those billions of cell phone users is ludicrous.
Now are things evolving? Certainly - as systems become more efficient over time, the numbers required drops - this is planned on purpose to make running those data centers cost effective. Which also means that the evolution and development of CPUs and the technologies surrounding will also continue - and as long as there are people willing to pay - there will be manufacturers building them, and people writing software to take advantage of it.
That being said, does that mean you'll be able to go down to your local BestBuy - and pick up a fully integrated/built gaming rig? Maybe not at some point, but you'll certainly be able to find the parts to build your own. With E-Sports going gangbusters - there is still demand for tweaked gaming rigs.
Finally - when all those youngsters get old, they are not going to want to be squinting at a tiny little screen through their bifocals...which may move some of them back towards stand alone systems - perhaps in a bit of a different form, but the idea is the same - and someone will be building those systems for that market.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
There was literally an article posted last week that claimed the same thing, the PC's are dieing.
I said it before and I'll say it again. The PC market isn't dead, its mature. At this point the majority of new sales are to replace attrition. A PC from 2019 is not a big enough improvement over one from 2018 to justify the year over year sales growth the industry became accustomed to seeing. Now you are looking at closer to a 4-5 year replacement cycle. And depending on usecase you don't even need that.
It used to be that the new shit was so much more capable than the year before that not only did it make sense to rapidly upgrade but it was often necessary to do so. It hasn't been that was since about 2012.
There is no longer compelling reason for most people to buy a new PC every 4 years
In my experience, the most compelling reason to replace a laptop or tablet PC after several years is that the manufacturer is no longer making replacement rechargeable batteries for the old model, or a new rechargeable battery would cost almost as much as a new PC.
With Intel having manufacturing problems and retailers being stupid and not offering many Ryzen based machines, it is no wonder that sales numbers are seen as going down. Ryzen 3rd generation is a couple of months away from release, which is going to cause many to wait for the new generation. Custom builds and computers from smaller vendors are probably up. Also, there has been very little advertising to inform the general public that consumer grade desktop machines can now have 8 core processors in them, and if people have a dual core processor in their computer, they will get a BIG upgrade in performance by going to a 4, 6, or 8 core processor in their next computer.
Won't it *always* be exactly something -- or do vendors sell PCs in fractions now?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And will continue to be around for a long, long time. These numbers are high enough to support a number of mainboard and component makers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not disagreeing at all. Great summary, actually.
I'd just put programming at the very beginning of that list, for obvious reasons.
And 3D games at its end.
Full, indistinguishable-from-reality raytracing will probably the last bastion.
That's the only thing still driving hardware sales for home PCs.
On the professional and semi-pro front it's quite a different picture.
Because it has gotten far easier, thanks to YouTube tutorials and better software, a lot more people want to do semi-pro things now. Like cut video, compose and master audio for YouTube, make games in Godot (or Unity3D if you like the chainsaw in the ass) , design 3D things in Blender for it, or even dabble in computer-aided design/machining.
Hell, my dad started to learn AfterEffects at 72.
And with those types of real work, you can still eat ALL of your computer's resources easily.
One thing I think might bring the next generation of PC sales, is all the things computerizable with neural nets, genetic algorithms, and similar trainable or even learning functionality.
(Fuck the term "AI"! We have no such thing! Not by a looong shot! Hell, our neural nets are a complete joke of oversimplification, compared to the real biological ones.)
If they are so hungry that they require actually specialized hardware. If.
Gartner = A fucking joke
I'm not buying new ones, because all the new hardware is backdoored and much of it is obfuscated or undocumented to a level making it seem like the PC clone revolution never happened.
While I need more memory for many applications, the hardware providing the needed memory capacities is purchasable in older 2010 era hardware for a few hundred for server grade, with registered memory, eliminating rowhammer while still being susceptible to Spectre attacks (which honestly covers all modern x86 hardware STILL. Leaving you with in-order or mitigation friendly out of order ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, or if you could find it, MIPS as your 'securer' processor platforms.) Most of them are either prohibitively expensive for their CPU power, power hungry, or lacking the firmware support needed for boot time hard disk, usb, or video display capabilities.
What was actually needed was improved storage technology.
Faster CD Drivers, Better GPU, Faster HDD/SSD, More Memory, Higher throughput USB/Ethernet.
You know what the big lie about those are? That you need a new computer, even within the past decade to be able to do all those. PCIe came out in the mid 2000s. With PCI to PCIe adapters you can run a MODERN GPU on a Pentium 3, assuming you run an OS with drivers that can fit in the memory capacity (512MB, 1024, or 2048 for desktop systems from P3 to early 945 chipsets, unless you had a server board.) If all you are doing is video playback, even the 512-1gig systems, when combined with a modern GPU are enough. The GPU can do all the decoding onboard and the memory bandwidth required is minor even by those systems standards. IDE, especially the UDMA versions were never near capacity due to the limited IOPs of the controllers and head seek times, meaning a simple SSD swap can improve system performance by 4x or more for IO related tasks. If your system was stuck with 10/100 ethernet instead of gigabit, a gigabit card will make a huge difference, while a 10 gigabit card is still effectively unknown due to the cost of the switches to interconnect them, even though 10G ethernet cards are now only 100 dollars. Still expensive but a far cry from the 250-1000 dollars they were from 2006 to 2016.
Point being: Every person young or old could make do with one of the current computers sitting disused in America and with just peripheral updates and maybe a linux install have a full functioning system that in many cases will be more reliable, cost, and task efficient than buying any of the new shovelware hardware that has been produced in the past 5 or so years. While some of it is less power efficient, per clock or as a whole, much of it is on the level of a CFL versus an LED bulb, but unlike those units still use enough primitive 'consumable' components on the boards to be repaired when they fail, rather than simply thrown away to become another piece of e-waste. And thanks to china, the adapters needed to hook a modern SATA hard disk to an IDE bus, or a PCIe peripheral card to a PCI bus are cheaper than ever, making it possible to mitigate modern security concerns through the simple leveraging of obscure hardware, while losing very little performance for tasks which don't require huge amounts of memory or multi-core cpus.