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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.
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.