Laptops, Desktop Sales See 'Renaissance;' Shortages Won't Ease Until 2022 (reuters.com) 61
The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said. Reuters reports: Remote learning and working has upturned the computer market during the coronavirus pandemic, zapping sales of smartphones while boosting interest in bigger devices, which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade. "The whole supply chain has been strained like never before," said Gregg Prendergast, Pan-America president at hardware maker Acer Inc.
Annual global shipments of PCs, the industry's collective term for laptops and desktops, topped out at about 300 million in 2008 and recently were sinking toward 250 million. Few expected a resurgence. But some analysts now expect 2020 will close at about 300 million shipments, up roughly 15% from a year ago. Tablets are experiencing even faster growth. By the end of 2021, installed PCs and tablets will reach 1.77 billion, up from 1.64 billion in 2019, according to research company Canalys. The virus pressed families into expanding from one PC for the house to one for each student, video gamer or homebound worker. Earlier this month, Sam Burd, president at Dell, said the industry "renaissance" would soon bring devices with AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off cameras. Compared to last year, Dell's online orders from consumers surged 62% in the third quarter.
Annual global shipments of PCs, the industry's collective term for laptops and desktops, topped out at about 300 million in 2008 and recently were sinking toward 250 million. Few expected a resurgence. But some analysts now expect 2020 will close at about 300 million shipments, up roughly 15% from a year ago. Tablets are experiencing even faster growth. By the end of 2021, installed PCs and tablets will reach 1.77 billion, up from 1.64 billion in 2019, according to research company Canalys. The virus pressed families into expanding from one PC for the house to one for each student, video gamer or homebound worker. Earlier this month, Sam Burd, president at Dell, said the industry "renaissance" would soon bring devices with AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off cameras. Compared to last year, Dell's online orders from consumers surged 62% in the third quarter.
growth (Score:2)
Re:growth (Score:5, Funny)
... it literally rocks \m/
You can probably fix that by putting rubber grommets on the hard drive mounting screws, you know.
Re: growth (Score:2)
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Oh, I bet your squirrels are imbalanced. You see, inside every computer are squirrels that make the computer go. Sometimes you get a runt, and the squirrel on one side runs harder than the squirrel on the other side, and vibrations can occur. You should probably put the poor thing out of its misery. :-D
But if you're actually serious... missing fan blade, maybe?
Re: growth (Score:2)
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your squirrels are not entangled and therefore are not in sync in the most important way.
now, there's a device called an einshornshen box, similar to a skinner box, where the squirrels can become properly entangled. and it can be done at normal lab temperatures, too. quite convenient. you should get yours done.
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Wait. Is that einshornshen in the box, or is the box in the einshornshen, or is the box shaped like an einshornshen? Because I could see the squirrels getting eaten or skewered in a couple of those scenarios, depending on implementation. Or is the name metaphorical? Asking for a friend.
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I'd rather hear about studio monitors. Do you know of any in the $300 and under range that have decent bass response? The pair I have now sound great over the range they cover, but they bottom out around 70 or 80 Hz. I really need them to go down to 40-50 Hz, I know lower than that will probably require a discrete subwoofer, which I assume would put me over the price range.
Re: growth (Score:2)
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Just as long as the Magic Smoke (tm) doesn't start leaking.
Totally believe this. (Score:5, Informative)
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Totally believe this.
I ordered an fx8350 (Piledriver) for sixty bucks a couple years ago; they were fetching two and a half times that much on eBay last I checked.
Something's changed.
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Why do I get the feeling that this global shortage isn't caused by people blowing hundreds of dollars on a device they have no intention of using...
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Workstation ergos are superior for most work. (Score:3)
Those who always had workstations including docked notebooks have enjoyed the comfort, multiple monitors larger than any common mobile device can incorporate, superior keyboards, peripheral choice etc for many years.
As job tools even expensive desktops are trivially cheap. (Bubba your local auto independent may have forty grand in hand tools compared to which most home systems cost chump change.) Why not enjoy one or more?
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Those who always had workstations including docked notebooks have enjoyed the comfort, multiple monitors larger than any common mobile device can incorporate, superior keyboards, peripheral choice etc for many years.
As job tools even expensive desktops are trivially cheap. (Bubba your local auto independent may have forty grand in hand tools compared to which most home systems cost chump change.) Why not enjoy one or more?
We didn't need them? For WFH once or twice a week, or on pager duty it's not really needed, and we've already got that kind of setup if we wanted it. Not sure who you're trying to convince.
Most new PCs are probably for students, or people that never WFH before and are getting new work laptops. Maybe even just gaming, getting back into old hobbies because we're at home more.
The rest of us, um.. yah we know how to make ourselves comfortable, thanks, and we are very fortunate.
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
PC is accidentally the most popular "open platform" that exists, due the mandatory IBM PC compatibility.
If it ever dies, things like Linux goes with it.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
PC was never going to die, even Steve Jobs said so in the Post-PC era. Its importance would diminish but never disappear because there are tasks you require a PC for.
And mandatory IBM PC compatibility was a myth. There were many PCs in the 80s that were MS-DOS compatible but was not IBM PC compatible. Yes, there is a huge difference - many things ran MS-DOS just fine, even though they weren't IBM PC compatible. And MS-DOS compatibility was a way of saying "most PC programs will work" - only a few things like games did not work - usually because graphics didn't work too well.
Only in the late 80s did computers start to narrow down and emulate the IBM PC closer - mostly because things like games were being ported to everywhere - Commodore, Amiga, IBM PC, etc and having MS-DOS compatibility wasn't cutting it.
But PCs will always be around. They may become less mainstream and more niche, but they will always exist.
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I can see some corporations trying to remove it from existing on purpose if it gets weak enough.
"it only exists for piracy and writing viruses"
And indeed the first PC clones weren't 100% compatible, but the consumers were more prone to buying a PC clone if it was 100% compatible.
Fear of loss of economies of scale (Score:2)
Its importance would diminish but never disappear because there are tasks you require a PC for.
The fear, as I understand it, was that less demand for PCs would cause the market to react with less quantity supplied. In the long run, as PCs become a specialty product, they would lose the economies of scale that they presently enjoy, and only established businesses would be able to afford one. The majority of people would have to make do with a dwindling supply of used PCs, much as retro video gaming enthusiasts presently make do with a dwindling supply of CRT TVs.
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...due the mandatory IBM PC compatibility
So my Model 80's Microchannel architecture is just a figment, eh.
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Your Model 80 is an attempt at re-taking the IBM PC from the hand of the clone makers.
But they just cloned everything good in it.
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Re: Apple owns 5nm fabrication (Score:2)
5nm isnt really 5nm
Not for Long (Score:3)
Apple just secured 80% of the 5nm fabrication capacity from TSMC. Intel is fumbling with their own, and AMD just got the wind knocked out of it. Expect x86 to get real expensive on top of the demand.
And when China invades Taiwan, Apple is F#&%ed, along with the rest of the Western world that relies too much on Taiwanese production.
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Why? Apple does business in China, why wouldn't they continue to do business in China-occupied Taiwan?
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I wonder what counts (Score:4, Insightful)
I am really surprised at just how screwed up global supply chains are— I get that the US has trumped all over itself and had some impact on demand side, with Europe following at a distance... I am lost though at how much impact it has had on the production side! Bicycles are sold out for all of 2021 effectively, and so many stupid things are almost impossible to get. PC production not recovering until 2022 makes me wonder what else is really broken right now.
Re:I wonder what counts (Score:4, Insightful)
I am really surprised at just how screwed up global supply chains are— I get that the US has trumped all over itself and had some impact on demand side, with Europe following at a distance... I am lost though at how much impact it has had on the production side! Bicycles are sold out for all of 2021 effectively, and so many stupid things are almost impossible to get. PC production not recovering until 2022 makes me wonder what else is really broken right now.
Just in time inventory control has a lot to do with it. From manufacturer to retailer, everyone is now running lean and mean with inventory. A cornerstone of the process is projected demand, and, normally, it works pretty well. Great for the bottom line, because very little precious physical space is "wasted" warehousing parts - lots of final assembly factories run with less than 8 hours of parts inventory on hand. A constant stream of trucks replaces in-house parts warehousing.
One down side: the supply chain, as designed, has little ability to respond to sudden, unforecasted, peaks in demand. Add in the fact off-shore manufacturing production runs about 6 months ahead of the calendar. Example: West Coast ports start seeing containers of Christmas items from mnaufacturers in China in July. Those items started shipping from the factories in June.
Apparently not a universal shortage (Score:5, Informative)
Just today, I ordered 25 fairly decent systems from Dell, and was told they'd ship as soon as the shipping people were back at work Monday. Zero wait time because there's no backlog.
And at about 40% less than comparable systems at the beginning of the year.
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Built-to-order systems are taking longer at the big 3 vendors. Lenovo has a 3+ month wait for their CTO AMD ThinkPads.
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Just today, I ordered 25 fairly decent systems from Dell, and was told they'd ship as soon as the shipping people were back at work Monday. Zero wait time because there's no backlog.
And at about 40% less than comparable systems at the beginning of the year.
Bulk ordering office equipment does not counter the very real shortage that exists for many components. There are many available if you "just need a computer". There are a shitton of specific parts with long backorders and lead times, and that's not just gaming rigs or high end components. There's all sorts of strange things out of stock.
"AI" (Score:2)
AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off camera
Adding "AI" for the easiest conceivable tasks on a computer will not end well. The best-case scenario is we get another Clippy.
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"Hey it looks like your vide chat has ended with 'Mom', would you like me to turn off your camera for you?"
Nah Cortona, lets just leave it on in case the NSA wants to watch me later.
Building Euclid to Solve Pi (Score:3)
There's probably an opportunity here (Score:4, Informative)
The BYO department at my "local" (two hours away, as I live in the boonies) Micro Center has been pretty well-stocked throughout the pandemic. I was able to fill a cart with the exact parts I wanted to build a machine dedicated to video editing in one trip. This was shortly after Governor Cuomo locked down everything in the state except his mouth, triggering the mad rush for pre-built computers (among other things, like toilet paper).
The pre-built department was a madhouse the day I went. I fully expected fistfights and riots to start any minute. People were buying up anything that would boot up.
Business at the BYO department, on the other hand, was pretty much as usual. Everything I needed was in stock, and I didn't have to make a single substitution or change to my build plan.
The same was true when I went there a few weeks to pick up a UPS and some other odds and ends. Pre-builts were flying out of the store so quickly that they may as well have lined the customers up at the truck to buy them. But things were normal at the BYO department, with the exception of the selection of high-end video cards being a bit thin. I still could have filled a cart and built a very respectable computer the same day if I needed to.
For those with the skills (which are pretty modest), this may be an opportunity to make some extra cash building computers. I may just take out an ad myself. The selection of pre-builts near me is basically non-existent, so there's probably decent demand. Whether the local folks have the money to make it worth my while is another question.
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I'm sure that's true.
The Micro Center I go to is the one in Yonkers, New York, not far from New York City and two hours south of where I live. There are quite a few other stores where computer parts can be purchased in every direction except north of the Yonkers store. For me, it's the closest "real" computer store to where I live; but in every other direction from the store, it's not. So it stands to reason that the demand would be spread out.
The last time I went, which was a few weeks ago, they had Intel
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The stock situation at the Micro Center near me hasn't been quite that rosy. They frequently run out of specific CPUs, graphics cards, and even cases. The hot new parts -- Ryzen 5000 series, RTX 3000 series, Radeon 6000 series -- are all nearly impossible to get, though things should improve in a few weeks. Still, the ability to build a computer hasn't been hurt that badly unless you are building a gaming system.
The surprise is that the value proposition for building low end systems has tilted toward Intel.
Good for business (Score:4, Informative)
Tablet will never replace laptop or PCs (Score:2)
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"Never" is a strong statement; you'll likely have to resort to True Scotsman arguments to keep that statement true.
Today there are 2-in-1 laptop/tablet devices. In 2015, there was an physics student intern at my workplace who did a substantial part of his internship from a Microsoft Surface tablet (with wireless keyboard). It turned out that it had similar specs as my brand-new company-issued laptop art the time (256 GB SSD, Intel i5-5xxx, 8 GB) and a touch screen as a bonus. The company laptop was running
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Now that many tasks are I/O-bound (which has been noticeably true since somewhere around the 486, maybe even earlier) the CPU matters less than it used to. But it still matters for some tasks, and in those cases your typical tablet falls on its ass. Processors are now heat-limited, so more cooling means more performance is possible. This is where tablets and phones (and even the really small SFF PCs) really tend to fall down. You just can't reasonably get as much cooling in a smaller space as you can in a b
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I/O bound tasks do not really exist anymore, at least not on a typical PC.
Perhaps when you have a mini computer or a mainframe and do absurd things (which I can not imagine anymore)
Re:Tablet will never replace laptop or PCs (Score:5, Insightful)
I always wonder when I see the specs of a phone with something like 8+ cores and 8+ GB of memory. It seems such a waste of good hardware -- I'd love to have that in a Linux laptop where I could do actual work, instead of smearing my finger grease on celebrity photos. It wouldn't be quite workstation class, but battery life could be nice with those ARM cores.
In other words, my problem with tablets and "smart"phones is not so much the inner hardware, but user interface and the OS.
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Those cores are feeble and 8GB RAM is no longer a lot. Any PC with less than 16GB RAM is crippled by having to use swap to run common software. At best swapping reduces SSD lifespan.
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The 8 cores are actually counting a bunch of low-power cores that are there just to save power in standby while the phone is waiting for notifications or something, not actual cores to count on when doing "real" work. The cores are also generally pretty weak too compared with higher TDP x86 and the software support isn't stellar too, for example for one of the best supported hardware platform - the Raspberry Pi - they can't manage to get even decent browser video playback performance, even in HD - while the
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I wasn't really referring to how good or bad the touch interface is, my point is that we aren't missing anything in terms of "oh, if only I had this ARM device as a laptop or tiny desktop instead of a phone or tablet". There are plenty such arm devices (from the Raspberry Pi and similar to full laptops like the Pinebook Pro), at least compared with the feeble demand and that's for a good reason: things aren't THAT powerful anyway and the software support even when it's the best the industry has for Linux de
Re: Tablet will never replace laptop or PCs (Score:1)
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Well I mentioned "linux desktop" so Android and iPhone aren't included. Also I'd argue that Android tablets are actually less supported than the Pi - even Pi 1 is still getting regular updates while Android tablets are lagging very often 6 months behind. Even with the big Blue-borne vulnerability which was disclosed before September 2017 to vendors (and as of early September most had some patches) even the flagship tablet at the time, Samsung S3 still went into the next year without patches (it was dependin
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I always wonder when I see the specs of a phone with something like 8+ cores and 8+ GB of memory. It seems such a waste of good hardware -- I'd love to have that in a Linux laptop where I could do actual work, instead of smearing my finger grease on celebrity photos. It wouldn't be quite workstation class, but battery life could be nice with those ARM cores.
In other words, my problem with tablets and "smart"phones is not so much the inner hardware, but user interface and the OS.
Tablets and smartphones are consume devices. The demise of machines that you can create things for people to consume is greatly exaggerated
People who just consume tend to forget that others have to create and make, and that's no country for smartphones or tablets. I can't even stand to do basic surfing on Android tablets - of course part of that is the seeming suicide of the latest Firefox update.
Er (Score:1)
which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade.
Only in the minds of marketdroids. People with real jobs actually continued to use these for work, etc.
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which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade.
Only in the minds of marketdroids. People with real jobs actually continued to use these for work, etc.
And idiots they are. It takes a special kind of stupidity to say "No create - Only consume!" Because they forget that there is life beyond Facebook "What kind of 15th century dildo am I" tests.
Wife bought an HP in a black friday sale. (Score:3)
They still haven't even built it yet. At work, we had 9,000+ HP Chromebook order cancelled by them because they couldn't fill it (granted this was a few months ago), and we were forced to get Acer ones which cost 2x as much and do not have compatible parts nor as many machines.
Basically all high end gaming desktop hardware has been sold out instantly and with like a 30%+ markup where it is available by scalpers and their bots. I've been waiting to build a new machine for like a year new for my primary desktop but there are no parts.
Yea. It's bad, it's been bad, and while I'd like to think this will get better in the next year, there is little reason to think it will with vaccine availability still a pipe dream for most.
Haswell era is officially over (Score:3)
Comet Lake (and upcoming Rocket Lake) are now substantial upgrades as single thread performance takes backseat and almost all software can benefit from more cores. NVMe over PCIe is a drastic improvement that hard to ignore. Z490 chipset with its support of DDR5 and PCIe NVMe 4.0 is also a big deal. In the data center, ESXi 6.5 EOL also pushing sales of new servers, but that is entirely different discussion.
PC sales are up because finally there is something worthwhile to buy.
complication (Score:2)
Fork me,
AI to logon and switch off a fecking camera.
Over complication will be the death of us all.
K.I.S.S.