IDC: PC Shipments Decline Worse Than Forecasted, No Recovery Expected 393
symbolset writes "Zach Whittaker over at ZDNet covers an IDC report. In it the 2013 9.7% forecast decline in PC shipments is advanced to 10.1%. Further, IDC's longer-term forecast turns quite grim: contracting 23% from 2012 levels by 2017. There is also a projection of future Windows tablet sales, and a statement that total Windows tablet sales for 2013 are expected to be 'less than 7.5 million units.'"
Hemingway Quote (Score:5, Funny)
“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
-- Ernest Hemingway
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The figures look a lot different when you include iPad. That's the sort of PC people are turning to these days.
I don't know anyone who has bought a new PC in the past year but I know probably 20 people who've bought iPads.
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Re:Hemingway Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Ipad is occupies a different niche than PCs. PCs do work, iPads are for looking at someone else's work. So the iPad may be great for home use but at the office it flops. So a lot of people buy them but it says nothing about PCs because that's a completely different market. How many of the people you know bought an iPad while simultaneously dumping their PC or Mac, and of those people how many have an office job?
Re: Hemingway Quote (Score:3)
Yeah but the number of people who do that are rounding errors compared to the overall user base of computing devices.
Otoh I wouldn't use a dual socket Xeon machine with several beefy GPUs for writing, browsing the web and low intensity work.
The absolute truism about what a tablet can do is more about battery life, peripherals and size than it is about raw computing power. We've reached a point where a nexus 7, an iPad or a surface has enough juice for an average persons wants. Note: not needs. Wants. While
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This is a bit true as the PC become ubiquitous amongst people who really did not need one. A tablet or smart phone suffices to fill the needs for most home user needs. The only real drawbacks are the lack of decent keyboards and the tiny displays (ie, they suck for old people), but if all you need to do is browse the web or distract the kids then they suffice. With professionals though the tablets/phones suck completely, even someone doing nothing more complicated than working with spreadsheets and writi
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Ie, consumer versus producer.
How quickly we moved from a 1990s society of p2p potential producers, to a society of cloud dependent, mass consumers. How sad.
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Not just that such machines are overkill, full blown computers running traditional systems are for geeks, and are unsuitable for typical users.
They're quite suitable.. They were used by plenty of non technical users for several decades. Tablets and 'smart' phones are a recent development, and are really only adequate for a small subset of the uses a PC has, and ideal for none of them.
Users do not want to constantly be installing updates, they do not want to worry about security and they do not want to be braving random potentially malicious websites to install software.
Then they wouldn't want tablets/phones either, because the same thing is done here. Instead of random, malicious sites, we have apps written by random, malicious authors who want the users' personal information in return for using their app. I'd take having to clea
Re:Hemingway Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget Windows 8. That must have made a lot of people hold on to their old PCs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Expected (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Expected (Score:5, Funny)
I blame Windows 8.
Re:Expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it really sucks but that is not solely the cause. It's the lockdown that is the cause of the eminent death of the PC industry. Why buy a general computing device that doesn't let you do general computing? Can't believe Microsoft sold the hardware manufacturers on this shit.
Re: Expected (Score:2)
I don't think it so much that Microsoft's old PC manufacturers on Windows 8 as much as they said we're Microsoft, you're going to sell what we tell you to sell.
Re: Expected (Score:2)
Damn's text of speech!
Re:Expected (Score:5, Interesting)
That's rubbish. People simply do not care about other OSes. The reality is no one other than gamers has a desire for a faster machine. Browsing the web and ripping the odd disk does not make someone want a new machine.
Bullshit. Having a slow web browsing experience does cause folks to buy new Desktops and portable PCs (I write cross platform code in a meta language with various target languages as an evolutionary strategy to survive any vast platform changes, so to me a notebook, tablet or phone is just a Personal Computer with a very capital P).
As HTML, CSS and JS have become more feature rich and heavily in use folks I've personally helped folks buy new hardware. When I worked in retail computer sales long ago "Slow Web Browsing" was the #1 reason to buy a new desktop computer. That same factor has been a prime driver of sales in mobile computing as well. Since the computing demands browsers doesn't follow Moore's Law, the larger devices like PCs and Notebooks are now fast enough that web advances take longer to push progress. Before the Internet it was bigger and more featurefull OSs and Office software (and games) which drove PC sales. Nowadays even a dinky phone can do stylized graphical text.
Now that portable PCs have become fairly widespread the websites are making decisions that don't exclude the lower power devices. This means also less pressure on upgrading your PC.
I look to advances in hardware accelerated GPUs and heterogeneous computing tech to bring 3D to the web, if not through webGL, then through one of the scene graph markup languages -- Or via extending the box model in a 3rd dimension. This will be a boon to augmented reality tech which is the next big thing -- Looking through your PC's display as a lens to see sales and markings virtually -- Having your display shift with your body to extend your display as through a window. [youtube.com] My head/eye tracking uses a webcam. I can tilt my head to see surrounding workspaces, and press ctrl+space while looking at it to switch.
The trend in computing has always been for smaller and more general purpose devices. Nowhere is this more evident than in the most computationally expensive mass market software: Games. Initially we had mechanical games (1 machine : 1 game). Arcade cabinets (1 machine : many games, but only 1 installed); As RAM got cheaper and hardware smaller cabinets with multiple games on one machine, switching between them. Hardware got smaller still we got home consoles that could play hundreds of different games, one at a time -- Note that consoles killed the Arcades despite their lower power; It was the size and accessibility that trumps speed after a certain capability is reached (16bit era). Gaming has flirted with PCs vs Consoles for a while until the Consoles became neutered PCs (both have multiple simultaneous applications [eg: dash] and many games per box). Unsurprisingly, PCs are now winning over consoles -- As predicted it's the smaller, lower power, more accessible portable, general purpose PCs (w/ integrated phones/wireless coms) which will end the dedicated gaming device console era.
This is mirrored in computing history, special purpose adding machine, dedicated computer for a problem space, general purpose computing switching between application (DOS-era), then multiple concurrent applications, and now distributed / synchronized applications. Many don't realize this is where we're going -- a Desktop PC to be the hub for all your distributed (synchronized) personal cloud -- streaming your data to you in a Trust No One manner. The reasons are many, one pressure is invasive government spying, another is being able to buy a new device, put in your PC node address, and not having to "migrate" software; Another is that families share their media (games, music, movies, medical records, etc). That's why Google's pushing NaCl, and browsers are becoming the application deployment target -- Not that they're
Re:Expected (Score:4, Informative)
Pasted from one of my earlier comments:
Here are some references about boot malware which UEFI secure boot can prevent.
http://www.chmag.in/article/sep2011/rootkits-are-back-boot-infection [chmag.in]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/16/tdl_rootkit_does_64_bit_windows/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217953/Rootkit_infection_requires_Windows_reinstall_says_Microsoft [computerworld.com]
I recommend reading atleast the first link.
Here's one juicy bit:
TDL4 is the most recent high tech and widely spread member of the TDSS family rootkit, targeting x64 operating systems too such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. One of the most striking features of TDL4 is that it is able to load its kernel-mode driver on systems with an enforced kernel-mode code signing policy (64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista and 7) and perform kernel-mode hooks with kernel-mode patch protection policy enabled.
When the driver is loaded into kernel-mode address space it overwrites the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the disk by sending SRB (SCSI Request Block) packets directly to the miniport device object, then it initializes its hidden file system. The bootkit’s modules are written into the hidden file system from the dropper.
The TDL4 bootkit controls two areas of the hard drive one is the MBR and other is the hidden file system created at the time of malware deployment. When any application reads the MBR, the bootkit changes data and returns the contents of the clean MBR i.e. prior to the infection, and also it takes care of Infected MBR by protecting it from overwriting.
The hidden file system with the malicious components also gets protected by the bootkit. So if any application is making an attempt to read sectors of the hard disk where the hidden file system is stored, It will return zeroed buffer instead of the original data.
The bootkit contains code that performs additional checks to prevent the malware from the cleanup. At every start of the system TDL4 bootkit driver gets loaded and initialized properly by performing tasks as follows: Reads the contents of the boot sector, compares it with the infected image stored in hidden file system, if it finds any difference between these two images it rewrites the infected image to the boot sector. Sets the DriverObject field of the miniport device object to point to the bootkit’s driver object and also hooks the DriverStartIo field of the miniport’s driver object. If kernel debugging is enabled then this TDL4 does not install any of it’s components.
TDL4 Rootkit hooks the ATAPI driver i.e. standard windows miniport drivers like atapi.sys. It keeps Device Object at lowest in the device stack, which makes a lot harder to dump TDL4 files.
All these striking features have made TDL4 most notorious Windows rootkit and it is also very important to mention that the key to its success is the boot sector infection.
Another bit:
The original MBR and driver component are stored in encrypted form using the same encryption. Driver component hooks ATAPI's DriverStartIo routine where it monitors for write operations. In case of write operation targeted at the MBR sector, it is changed to read operation. This way it is trying to bypass repair operation by Security Products.
Re:Expected (Score:5, Funny)
I agree, it's entirely the fault of Microsoft and Windows 8. With Vista Microsoft did their job of making sure the core operating system was so inefficient that it required new high end hardware just to run basic applications smoothly. With Windows 7 and 8 Microsoft has actually been backpedling by writing code that actually runs MORE efficiently!
Clearly the way to save the computer industry is for Microsoft to introduce some major bugs to their next OS that causes it to require 10x the system resources of Windows 8.
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Windows 8 is an attempted solution. The movement from Wintel to tablet computers is the problem. (This is why Windows 8 is basically a tablet OS.)
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You are incorrect. Computer literacy has been dropping for a decade on desktop OSes. Many of the paradigms on Windows 7 were developed during the days of dual floppies, lower resolution monitors, single tasking and little network interaction. Younger people who didn't evolve from those systems find these systems hard to use and aren't able to be productive on them. That'
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I think it has more to do with shifts to other devices than people keeping their PCs longer. People are still buying new computing devices regularly, they're just things like iPads, Chromebooks, etc. Even households with PCs will nowadays typically have fewer of them. When I was a kid, we had two: one for my parents, and one for my brother and me. But nowadays many households have just one, since between the other devices there is not as much contention for occasional use of the stationary PC.
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I see the failure to make machines obsolete as a terrible sign.
I still don't have a fully immersive "holodeck" at home. To reach that point before I die I need the world to be able to make computers obsolete every year at the very least.
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To make them obsolete you have to convince the consumer they need a new one and there is nothing in the pipeline to do that.
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That's the problem.
There's nothing where there should be the first of a large chain of toys, each one being a large improvement from the previous one.
Re:Expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Naa. Computers are an appliance for most people. I don't buy a new blender because mine is old. It's the same with computers.
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I don't expect my blender to turn into something much better in 20 years. I do expect my computer to do exactly that and I'd be very unhappy if it didn't.
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I used to be like that, not anymore. For those I know, they never wanted a new shiny computer, they just bought new because their old one was too slow/buggy and they were seriously pissed about having to buy a new one.
The PC market matured a few years ago and now it's boring. I'm fine with that.
Simply no need to buy as many anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
It used to be that a house with multiple PCs wasn't that uncommon. With phones & tablets there are now many households that can get by with zero PCs, and many more that can do everything they need with just one.
Real world user performance has stagnated, with hardware gains not translating into doing a given task faster anymore. A PC from three years ago isn't that much slower at what most users are doing than a brand new one, so there's no particular need to upgrade.
This is what a mature market looks like. The product is going to continue to sell for a long time, but it's not the hot item it used to be.
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A PC from three years ago isn't that much slower at what most users are doing than a brand new one, so there's no particular need to upgrade
So, all the market needs are more bloated version of Operating Systems? Any guesses on who to turn to solve this crisis?
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Be careful what you wish for...
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So, all the market needs are more bloated version of Operating Systems?
No. It needs more bloated versions of Office suites, too.
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Real world user performance has stagnated, with hardware gains not translating into doing a given task faster anymore. A PC from three years ago isn't that much slower at what most users are doing than a brand new one, so there's no particular need to upgrade.
Not true for gamers, my 3 year old mid range build has to be updated to keep up ASAP.
I wonder if there are enough of us to justify advancement...
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The catch is gamers don't want to dick around with Windows 8, so as Windows 7 gets harder to get, so they drop the whole idea of a major hardware upgrade until windows 8 is passed over either by Windows 9 or Steam Linux. Windows 8 has crippled PC upgrades.
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I don't know of any households with zero PCs except for a few older relatives who never had one to begin with. I know plenty that only have laptops and no longer have desktops, but I don't see them being completely replaced by smaller devices anytime soon - especially with the rise of streaming media. It's great that you can watch a movie on your tablet or phone, but you'll still want at least a 14" screen to watch a movie *with* someone else.
Good... computers should last longer. (Score:4, Insightful)
We're past the time when computers are already obsolete by the time you're walking out of the store with them. I don't have a problem with that.
Not being a heavy gamer, I've had the same core PC (updated disk and graphics is all) for now 10 years. I have bought newer ones for the family, but even the worst new computer is better than the one I still use, and that one is still quite good.
Unless you're a hard-core gamer, computers should last LONG time for your average user.
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New tech like VR headsets which demand high performance computing might bring about a (brief) resur
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Well, for games, the GPU is now the machine for all intents and purposes. Back in the 90s, this wasn't so much the case. CPUs are good enough... it's just like how many of us haven't bought sound cards in a long time when it used to be required early/mid 90s and upgrades always sought.
CPUs have become good enough for the majority (for the moment, 4k and 8k is coming and will precipitate a shift, just like 3d without glasses eventually will when it's holodeck level sans touch/feel). I know CPU could alway
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CPUs are good enough.
Only because most games are written for consoles with CPUs for which the word 'crap' would be praise.
Games written for the new consoles are probably going to make some people regret saying 'I'll just buy a dual-core, you don't need anything faster than that for gaming'.
Why replace what works? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why replace what works? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It better be, considering that it's a 25% price increase, with most of the value - screen, case, power supply and so on - practically the same.
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Even hardcore gamers, the last game released that required users to update their rig was Crysis back in 2007. Gaming has completely stagnated in the last 5 years, and people can basically play the modern games at the same settings as what they were able to do for Crysis, all those years ago. You no longer need to update to play the latest releases.
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My very first computer was obsolete with in a year, one of the earlier games I played on it required more that it had and we had to double the RAM to play it.
Now my 6 year old PC will play any game on the market, and this does not look like it is going to change anytime soon.
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Software hasn't kept up. We should be programming in some GUI based/visual data-flow language that's slow, but lets us build functional (crappy) apps at record speed. Then we need to make everyone a "programmer" so they need faster computers, and they don't have to ask IT every time they need something.
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It's Microsoft's fault (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have to bypass UEFI just to have a working computer you might as well buy some other restricted device. Talk about killing the goose...
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"If you have to bypass UEFI just to have a working computer you might as well buy some other restricted device. Talk about killing the goose..."
The percentage of PC users who even know what that means is vanishingly small.
They DO know what malware means and are often tired of hassling with Windows.
Most people just need an Internet Appliance combined with a Phone. Previous "internet appliances" were crippled. Netbooks were crippled. People want RELIABLE systems which are CONVENIENT and "less crippled".
LOTD i
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I've always found when giving this advice to non-technical folks it was better to focus on what they needed, and leave my politics the hell out of it.
My mother in law expressed interest in a tablet over the last year. So, I did a little digging and decided on the Nexus 7 for her -- after I bought one for myself.
Mine, I went through, disabled or uninstalled stuff, locked down what I could, added ad blockers, and genera
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I can verify this. My suppliers are hitting me with emails and sales calls, and when we talk about new PCs, the first words out of their mouths are about how they will happily ship with Windows 7 licenses.
Endorse MS Much? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Even so, these Windows devices are projected to account for 10% of a combined PC & Windows Tablet market by 2016 – making them an important growth segment for the PC ecosystem."
Really makes Mr. Loverde sound like he's being paid to say good things about Windows. Who in their right mind could possibly believe that Microsoft's failure of a project is going to end up accounting for 10% of the market? It's a failure amongst tablets alone. I don't even know if there would be any benefit from him saying this, it just sounds crazy.
On a related note, I currently play Battlefield 4 on a computer I put together for around $400 a year ago, so I can definitely see why the PC market is struggling. But it will never disappear, which is enough for me.
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But still RAM is badly overpriced (Score:2)
Almost 35 pop (Euro) for an old 2GB DDR2 bar. I mean come on!
Content creation/consumption split is the cause. (Score:4, Insightful)
Then the split happened. Finally people realized, the market demanded and the free market delivered a computer purely optimized for content consumers. They have deserted and are deserting the all purpose computer in droves. At the end of the day, we code warriors would be forced to pay more for our computers. Still the commodity common components like memory and peripherals would be amortized over a larger set of computer users. The desktop pc might not get to be as expensive is IBM 3090. But the days where you can run Fluent solver to simulate fluid flow on a "home" PC are gone.
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People try to push tablets into this "consumption only" role as if it were the only thing they were capable of.
Good luck being able to develop apps for a tablet on a tablet, or even just install a community-created mod for a tablet game, unless the tablet is a Surface Pro or something else built on the Lenovo-compatible x86 PC architecture.
Back on a PC (Score:2)
I ran tablets for a few years, generally wanting to not lug aournd a notebook. After having a tablet stolen, I’m back on full blown PCs again. I missed having windowed apps, real keyboards and media players that didn’t suck (I’m looking at you, Comcast, blocking HDMI playback on your lousy player).
Granted it’s not as portable as I’d like, and I still use a tablet for reading books and remote controls on my home theater, but when I want to do much of anything else I prefer the P
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I'm using a tablet at the moment and just realized that I haven't opened my laptop in over a week. I have a desktop too, but it hadn't been powered on since September.
The PC market has driven development (Score:3)
Want a bigger disk? Buy a bigger disk and put it in your PC!
Want more memory? Buy more memory and put it in your PC!
Want a faster CPU? Buy a faster CPU and put it in your PC!
Want a faster GPU to play games? Buy a faster graphics card and put it in your PC!
The rest of the market, phones, tablets and consoles is all "consumer packaged components" which are not replaceable or upgradeable.
The whole AMD/Intel war would not have happenbed without the PC.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't say that there's a drop in overall computing devices sales, only in PC sales. They actually say that tablet sales are up... If anything, this suggests *more* in landfills, because a number of PC's that would otherwise be donated to a charity like Computers for Schools are no longer happening, meanwhile tablets that can't be upgraded/repurposed are being tossed.
Case in point, I've owned two tablets in the last 18 months. The first one turned out to be a piece of junk, and I gave it to a friend who was looking for something for the kids. There are people who would, in the same situation, simply toss it.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
What makes you think that the kind of people who would toss a perfectly good tablet wouldn't also toss a perfectly good computer? At least a tablet's small, and correspondingly is a smaller item of waste.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, the larger something is the more value people associate with it. I've known dozens of people who buy $20 dust covers to protect their $5 desktop keyboard, but have lost (usually multiple) $300+ phones due to stupidity... err.. negligence (washing machines, sitting on them, etc). They'll also spend hours trying to clean out a keyboard they spilled beer on, but half the time won't even try waiting for their phone to dry out before getting a replacement.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't take this the wrong way but I suspect it might be the people you know, and not a general trend. I see - and know - plenty of people using phones with completely shattered screens covered up with a cheap screen protector because they don't want to buy a new one.
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For a phone that represents 50% market share iPhone users seem to have broken screens far more commonly than the users of any other phone manufacturer.
Smartphone in the first place (Score:4, Insightful)
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one".
Why would someone living on such slim margins buy a smartphone and its expensive data plan in the first place instead of buying a dumbphone? A lot of smartphone customers are paying $80 per month; I pay that much per year for my dumbphone.
Re:Smartphone in the first place (Score:4, Interesting)
But you probably need a computer and home internet too (and have them).
Plenty of smart phone users have neither, and yet can't afford to be completely marginalized.
home phone $20 (I think) + home internet $30, so that's $50/month.
looks at Tmobile ($30/month + $.10 / minute over 100 minutes, unlimited texts, 5GB fast data) or Metro PCS ($50/month unlimited text and minutes, I forget how much fast network), the extra couple hundred dollars for a mid level smart phone (Nexus 5, iphone 5c for example) vs low end computer is well worth it and the same monthly cost.
That's assuming that all one needs a computer for is to look things up on the internet and have an email address, if someone needs a computer to write, or some such (for example they have school aged children) it obviously isn't a substitute.
You could argue library, but the advantage of having ready access to the internet is pretty big vs having to take a half day trip to get the access, and plenty of the working poor are capable of figuring this out and making a decision.
Re:Smartphone in the first place (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would someone living on such slim margins buy a smartphone and its expensive data plan in the first place instead of buying a dumbphone?
Why do people ostensibly living below the poverty line without a high school diploma, popping out babies like it's going out of style own multiple cell phones and drive around in an Escalade?
Because they're stupid. And because our stupid, materialistic culture has convinced them that they HAVE to have it if they want to be considered worth anything.
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And a lot of us are victims. When faced with a problem in which there a very few good choices and a thousand bad ones, with marketing doing its utmost to bury the good ones, even smart people sometimes miss. Also, do not discount the power of display. People do the most crazy things to get attention. If it works, and doesn't kill them or destroy the future, was it dumb?
I'll give you some examples.
I used to drink soft drinks. Seeing that the vending machine was twice as expensive as a good deal on a
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It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one". smartphones are expensive gadgets, and for a lot of people, $400+ is a lot of money and something people can't afford to spend every 6 months.
So don't buy a $400 phone.
Added bonus, I don't think I've ever broken the screen on multiple phones in the $150-300 range, and some of those phones have suffered some serious abuse. One of them was dropped from a 3rd floor balcony, winged off the edge of a swimming pool, and into the drink. I had to change into my swim suit, and go down the stairs to fish it out... it *still* works... my dad's using it now. The only scar it has from its ordeal was that I needed to buy a new battery, and there's a small divo
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had two laptops in the last 6 years, one is sitting in a closet being used as a media server for my house the other is my primary. I've never owned a tablet, but I'm thinking of getting one. I just don't know if I can justify it for the stuff I want to use it for (games and programming). It might be alright to take to the in-laws to read the morning news or surf the web rather than lugging my laptop back and forth. Or I could give one to my wife, since all she does is surf the web and play facebook games, and save some money on replacing her three year old over powered laptop, which I might turn into a Minecraft server.
I digress, In the last six years:
My brother has gone through three tablets and is looking at another one. iPad, playbook, iPad2, now looking at a Transformer. (3 tablets)
My younger sister took one of his old ones as her first tablet, but has since gone through two more and currently has an iPad2. iPad (hand-me-down lasted 3 months), iPad (dropped in pool), Kindle (not a hand-me-down), iPad2 (3 tablets, I didn't count the first iPad since it was a hand-me-down)
My Step-mother has had two tablets (one was a Kindle replaced by her kindle fire) (2 tables)
My mom, who lives in the states, has had more tablets than I care to mention, she comes to visit every year and for the last five years has a different model every time she's here. (5 tablets)
My Dad did get one, but he's barely touched it in three years. He's an old school developer and prefers something with a keyboard and mouse. iPad (1 tablet)
My older sister has had an iPad and a Kindle and currently has a surface RT. Her BF gave it to her two weeks ago and she hates it, too slow, too heavy, doesn't run the software she expected it to (because she thought she was getting a surface pro). Supposedly the BF is taking it back this week, but she wants another tablet to replace her original iPad, which runs like crap now. I recommended a Nexus if she didn't want iPad2 or iPad Air. I think she'll probably be going with the iPad Air since carrying weight matters to her as she travels a lot for her job. iPad, Kindle, Surface RT, TBA (3 tablets)
My Mother in-law is getting her first tablet for Christmas. ASUS Transformer Prime (1 tablet)
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years. Where as between me an my wife three laptops over the last six years and the laptops get repurposed until the literally don't function anymore so they really last me between six to eight years. Tablets get handed down or tossed out because once they're not useful for everyday tasks anymore they sit around collecting dust.
That's just my take on it though.
PDAs (Score:2)
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years.
In this measure, are you counting the iPod touch or the PDAs that preceded it? Those are pocket-size tablets by some definitions.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
I was sceptical, but I looked at the numbers and you might be right. AMD and nVidia GPU card shipments continue to be good, which suggests the gaming PC market is healthy. Although direct-to-consumer motherboard shipments have declined quite a bit in the past few years, that's probably more to do with games tending to be GPU bound and there being correspondingly less need for CPU upgrades. Looks like it's just the general-purpose PC market that's fading out, which is what you'd expect now that "good-enough" tablets have hit the £200 bracket. (I'm looking at the Hudl and Nexus in particular.)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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High-end PCs are still worth building IMO because you're trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of it and it's easier to upgrade a year or two down the line. It's similar to how high-end cars usually have a lot of custom work put into them. However, for the bulk of PCs it's cheaper, easier, and causes fewer warranty headaches to buy from Dell or HP, and the PCs will likely not see so much as a RAM upgrade before being replaced in 3 to 6 years.
I built my last PC but I'm seriously considering j
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And the PC games that do catch on are lasting a lot longer, which means fewer PC upgrades. Look at WoW - it's in decline, but it's still pretty popular in spite of being 9 years old. There's plenty of other older games that still enjoy large followings. Then some newer games don't require much at all. I ran Diablo III off integrated graphics when it first came out, Minecraft runs fine on my 7 year old laptop, etc. Games don't drive hardware nearly as much as they did 5 or 10 years ago.
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PC hardware is "good enough" where games tend to not be pushing the envelope on graphics anymore.
Take Everquest: Next for example. Instead of continuing with detailed textures, they have decided to follow Blizzard's lead and go for the low-res, "cartoony" type of world. Part of this is due to their voxel technology, but part of it is so their game can run on almost anything.
PC games are not really declining either. GOG seems to be doing a good business, Steam is doing well, and even MS's store is hanging
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And hardware sales are down. Sounds like what everyone else is saying, that current hardware is good enough and they have no reason to update.
7th gen consoles held back PC game spec creep (Score:3)
Sounds like what everyone else is saying, that current hardware is good enough and they have no reason to update.
That was true in the seventh generation when PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were stuck on tech that was high-end in 2005. But now, the latest consoles are up to 2013 tech (AMD Jaguar, do the math), and PC games' system requirements are likely to rise to meet PlayStation 4 and Xbox One specs.
Re:7th gen consoles held back PC game spec creep (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like what everyone else is saying, that current hardware is good enough and they have no reason to update.
That was true in the seventh generation when PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were stuck on tech that was high-end in 2005. But now, the latest consoles are up to 2013 tech (AMD Jaguar, do the math), and PC games' system requirements are likely to rise to meet PlayStation 4 and Xbox One specs.
If you bought or built a PC in the last couple of years it is already more powerful than the new consoles. To bring it up to par you may have to add RAM (about $65 worth) and a video card (about $150). PCs will continue to have an advantage over consoles as it takes time for console development.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/pc-vs-ps4-xbox-one-how-to-upgrade-pc/ [digitaltrends.com]
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Yep... I was looking at a Microcenter ad the other day and they were advertising an AMD CPU+motherboard bundle that looked interesting... until I realized that the CPU was only about 15% faster than my 2-year-old one and that the mothe
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Macs are actually doing as badly as anyone else. The only real difference is that Apple's successful in mobile phones and tablets whereas Dell, Lenovo etc. aren't.
Re:Victory at last (Score:4, Interesting)
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Agreed (Score:3)
Another factor in favor of laptops these days -- dirt cheap. Well under $300 now, whereas middling desktops at Costco are at least $500 to $600 AND you then need a monitor (that can go from $100 to $1000 depending on your hunger for pixels).
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And Apple has done a good job at really integrating everything so that it all works together. For example, it’s drop dead simple to share audio/video via Airplay, as opposed to the almost non-functional DLNA mess that only works when the stars are aligned just right. If you run Safari all your crentials follow you around on the built into all products keyring. Yes, there are plenty of add-ons for other platforms (most of which likely predate Apples’ keyring), but it happens out of the box and by
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When Apple finally stops producing desktops/laptops and moves entirely to phones and tablets will idiots claim that iPad is the best platform for content creation / video editing / music development because it's made by Apple?
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Don't worry, PC gaming and desktop Linux will save the PC!!
Re:My PC is NSA spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft helped the NSA bypass their crypto. They were the first to join PRISM.
Do you actually have any evidence for this? Seriously, there are huge amounts of accusations flying around, but no real evidence. And what are the alternatives? Walled garden, becoming property of the advertisers, or a UI that only Stallman could love.
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I've been using Linux since 1995. Linux has been falling behind not gaining. I can't find any Linux distributions that boot on my MacRetina, a hugely selling laptop that's been out 16 months.
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Which, of course, means an end to the tattered remnants of literacy on the Internet.
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Either he was right and that included the time scale.
Or he was wrong.
It's easy to predict this that and the other with disregard for the
time scale on whcih the prediction should be evaluated.
Example: Jobs thought he licked cancer. The cancer in the end
proved him wrong.
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