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.'"
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.
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...
Re:Simply no need to buy as many anymore (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
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:Victory at last (Score:4, Interesting)
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: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
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)