Why PC Sales Are Declining 564
First time accepted submitter Benedick writes "I have a four year old desktop and a three year old notebook. Why haven't I upgraded to a new machine? Because they still work great. PC sales aren't declining because of Windows 8. They are declining because our PCs are so good, they last a lot longer. Will Oremus of Slate explains it better than I can."
Reason number one. (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows 8.
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 8 is kind of like getting your naughty bits pierced. At first it hurts like hell, but once you use it for a while, you begin to take really like it.
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Funny)
And then the infections start appearing.
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 8.
I don't get every version. I tend to sit on the fence and see how newer versions sort out. Perhaps I get to see them at work. I avoided Vista as there were so many things wrong with it. Windows 7 looked like what Vista should have been. Windows 8 has raised too many questions and we're not getting it at work, staying with Windows 7 machines.
Also, as I've said for the past coulple years, the PC is overkill for many people who just want email, social stuff, simple games, they get a phone or tablet for that now.
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Also, as I've said for the past coulple years, the PC is overkill for many people who just want email, social stuff, simple games, they get a phone or tablet for that now.
Hell, the maintenance aspect alone makes PC's not worth it for those uses.
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 8.
It may be fun and easy to bash Windows 8, but I don't think that is the reason. It's fine. When I see the metro desktop after logging in, it just looks like the menu was automatically opened on Win 7. That's not such a big deal. Once you have organized your app icons, though, it is really no different than clicking on one in the taskbar or the desktop. I find it inconsequential from that perspective, but you also get the live tiles and new apps, some of which are useful. Windows 8 is not the fiasco that Vista was, with its required hunt for drivers. On a multi-monitor setup, I can have the metro UI pop-up on any monitor, which is useful at times. Most of the time I am in the desktop. but I really don't notice switching between metro and the desktop. I run Windows 7 in a VM as an attempt to isolate the email, Flash, etc, and browsing risks. I am impressed with the performance if Hyper-V, but not happy that you can't mount USB drives or burn CDs from the VM. Hopefully that will be fixed in the future.
If I think of my own hardware purchases, it's easy to understand why PC sales are declining - tablets and phones. I by a new PC or motherboard about once every 7 years. I just bought a new PC after upgrading my mb about 7 years ago. I put it in a case that is 10 years old now. Since buying that last mb, I bought:
I am going to sell the iMac and Windows laptop soon. I'm interested in a Chromebook and some sort of Win 8 laptop. I am sure all of the above will be replaced by the time I upgrade my PC again, part of which is due to how its speed is now more than sufficient for almost everything I do. Eventually I expect my hardware mix to be a powerful desktop, a cloud-centric tablet/laptop, and a phone, with the latter two being replaced much more frequently than the desktop. Note also that it is easier to upgrade desktop hardware, so the replacement cycle is longer for PCs. Tablet and phone hardware improves much more noticeably with each new model at the moment. The same isn't true for PCs. That is what is slowing PC sales, not Windows 8, IMHO.
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 8's desktop mode also happens to be butt-ugly compared to Aero Glass. It's like Microsoft took everything they learned about putting a 3D graphics card to good use for desktop window acceleration and eye candy, then flushed it all down the toilet right around the time they finally started to get it right.
Fuck MetroModern. Unless Microsoft gives us back what we have now with Windows 7, Windows 7 will be the last Windows I ever run natively as my real operating system, and future versions will be in a VM under Linux. And if they ever take away my ability to reinstall Windows 7 and refuse to let me buy new copies, I'll be walking away from Windows entirely. When the day comes a few months from now that I'm ready to go buy a 3.8GHz+ i7 with 4-8 cores and pair it with 16 gigs and a 27" monitor flanked by a pair of ~20" monitors rotated into portrait mode, I'll be *damned* if I'm going to step backwards and settle for a new version of Windows that looks like someone ported Bob to Windows 3.1...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The elephant in the room that no one is really talking about is that Silicon doesn't really scale past 5 GHz. While it is possible to get a CPU to run at 100 GHz (yes, GHz) unfortunately
a) you can't afford it, and
b) can't afford to cool it.
It is going to be quite a while (decades) before (Silicon-)germanium are ubiquitous enough. The jury* is still out if graphene will pan out. Time will tell...
> It all comes down to both AMD and Intel building chips that are just so insanely powerful
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Windows 8 may have some influence on diminishing PC sales but I also think the massive uptake of smart phones and tablets are having a massive impact here.
I'm not by any means saying that smart phones and tablets are a general replacement for PCs, but I'd speculate that the vast majority of PC sales have in recent times been to people who use them for email, web browsing, facebook and the like. For these tasks, the smartphone and tablets are perfectly good, reliable, more convenient and cheaper alternatives
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Windows 8.
Wrong... Windows 8 is becoming a scapegoat...
People don't need to upgrade. Anyone with a Windows 7 system has everything they need for home computing. Only the outliers need the latest and greatest hardware (gaming, video editing, etc.). Everyone else is perfectly happy surfing on their tablets and using a Windows 7 desktop/laptop for their financial software, homework, day-to-day work, etc. Most people use their tablets or consoles for gaming.
Anyone who is technical savvy who complains about the Windo
Re:Reason number one. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's truth to that but also that their old PCs are "good enough."
The thing is, the output of PCs hasn't really improved much in the last few years. We used to see jumps in performance between 50% and 100% more. The best we've seen is the slow adoption of 64 bit-windows-ness where people hope to improve things by having more than 3.5GB RAM. (And for most it wasn't much benefit)
There was nothing in terns of software that required an upgrade from XP to 7. That XP magically got slower than 7 with every update and patch remains "a mystery" but people got the idea. That WinME and Vista were such crap that people wouldn't buy it broke the public of its notion that "upgrade means it's better!" long ago. 7 had been more or less forced on people. They didn't care for it but before long when they wanted a new PC, they had no choice. And it least it wasn't too dissimilar from XP and so adjustments could be made.
But now with 8 it's even worse. Microsoft had convinced the PC industry that they needed to lock the hardware to the software so that downgrades or running other OSes would be more difficult. Combined with the previous public experience, it means "holy hell no we don't want to change now!!"
So yeah... PCs haven't improved much. It's basically true. But they break and stuff. But I almost always want to keep a laptop under some kind of warranty. I didn't this go around. If there was a contributing reason, it would have to be because I would rather wait to see how bad this hardware locking thing gets. So yeah... it's Microsoft's fault even though I don't run Microsoft.
Re:That really makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages [tigerdirect.com], but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
Re:That really makes no sense (Score:4, Informative)
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time.
Dell or HP would be happy to sell you a Win7 machine:
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Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." That's Microsoft's original slogan.
Microsoft cares about the license fees, but they also care about the power to define the industry. As long as the vast majority of PCs are running Windows, then Microsoft technologies will dominate, which makes it easier to convince companies to install Windows. It's a vicious cycle.
Also, they have direct financial incentive to keep you running Windows. As long as you run Windows, you are eligible fo
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course it makes sense - you bought a Windows 8 machine because your mother needed a new machine, and you have no problem installing Linux on it.
The sales that are slipping through PC makers' fingers are the "Oh, my old laptop with the factory Win7 install still works perfectly well, but I'm in the mood for something new that's slimmer/lighter/has better battery life." When faced with the prospect of upgrading to a new machine and having Windows 8 on it (and actually wanting to use Windows), it's a pretty
Win 8 a contributing factor, not the main culprit (Score:5, Interesting)
We used to replace our desktop PC once every 5 years or so, and our laptop once every 3 years or so, on average
What I get from my friends (and the companies they work for) is that nowadays, companies are keeping their office desktop PC for a longer period --- many Pentium 4 machines running Win XP are still being used --- mainly because of budget constraint and that they are not that satisfied with the latest offerings from M$
I can't say that Win 8 is the main culprit of people not upgrading their machine, but it *IS* a contributing factor
On another comment that I've posted on another Slashdot thread I already told you guys that my company is not purchasing any laptop for our sales force this year --- while in the past we bought, on average, 1,500 to 2,500 laptops every year --- and the reason for my company's not buying this year is because we couldn't find any laptop vendor supplying 3rd generation i7 powered laptop that runs Windows 7
We decide that it will be best none of our system run Windows 8
Only the laptops of my company run Windows --- our office computers are all running Linux --- and the reason the laptops that we purchase for our sales force run Windows is because of the software they use
Or else we would standardize everything in Linux
Re:Win 8 a contributing factor, not the main culpr (Score:5, Informative)
If you're buying professional versions of Windows, you should have downgrade rights. It might come with 8 on it, but you can just remove it and put 7 on provided driver support is there (and considering almost no enterprise is going to 8, there are business class laptops with full driver support in 7).
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>, you should have upgrade rights
FTFY
In the /. dialect, going to a lower version of Windows is called "upgrade".
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we couldn't find any laptop vendor supplying 3rd generation i7 powered laptop that runs Windows 7
i'm not sure if i missundestood you, english is not my primary language, but srsly?!?!
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&~ck=mn#!facets=80770~0~16063830,226292~0~14720685&p=1 [dell.com]
took me 60 seconds, first stop.
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And crappy Intel video.
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Value-added resellers (Score:5, Informative)
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... and install a fresh Windows 7 Pro on it. In the 18 months that I've had the machine, I've never once used it.
The last netbook I bought, I decided that I'd keep a Win partition around with Win7 on it, for the maybe one time a year I need to use a single program not available to me in Linux (in truth, there are alternatives, but a couple of the agencies I work with insist on this one piece of software) in addition to my usual Linux everyday workhorse distribution.
Last week was the first time I booted it into Windows since I set it up with Linux. It was painful. A few hundred megs of anti-virus updates needed to be
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I've been working with computers since 1985, and until about 2005, I had always built every machine I ever owned, but then I discovered the Dell Outlet, since the company I was working for at the time was a Dell shop. This discovery ended really quickly my desire to build machines, as I could not build an equivalent system for what I could get a Dell refurb'ed system for. Oh I guess I could have gotten fairly close -if- my time was worth nothing.. The machine I just retired, a Dell Optiplex GX620, a Pentiu
Re: Reason number one. (Score:4, Informative)
Why buy a new system, I ask??
Because for the same price ($500) I got the same RAM, a 3.8ghz quad core APU capable of playing last years games and able to crossfire to double it's GPU for $80 (later), and a much larger hard (500GB). Took 20 minutes to assemble it. Probably took me less time to just buy what I wanted, and put it together than you did stumbling around looking for deals and redeeming coupons. Additionally: I got a much better machine, with all new parts, which will last a few more years than yours will. That's why.
I mean, if you're time's worth so damn much, you can't spare 20min to assemble the system, then you'll be making enough money that price isn't a consideration -- What's a few hundred dollars? I suspect this isn't actually the case, I mean, if it was you'd just buy the best thing possible at the time so that you wouldn't have to waste time upgrading that crappy 160GB drive later.
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Why buy a new system, I ask??
Because for the same price ($500) I got the same RAM, a 3.8ghz quad core APU capable of playing last years games and able to crossfire to double it's GPU for $80 (later), and a much larger hard (500GB).
I think LVSlushdat got the better deal.
By nearly every metric, a modern Intel Xeon is better than an AMD A10. Performance per watt, instructions per clock, peak clock speed, framerates, responsiveness. AMD only challenges Intel on price by having desperately low margins, and they don't even win at that consistently. The one place where AMD has an advantage is the GPU, and LVSlushdat got a pretty powerful GPU that works especially well with professional applications, not games.
A dinky consumer hard drive is
Written by a non-cat-owner (Score:5, Funny)
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Fire, swimming pools, hot tubs, lava, shotguns, Gallagher, cannons, M80s, trebuchets, toddlers, flame throwers, tanks, grandmothers, that fat gamer dude, gorillas, tornadoes, ninjas, wood chippers... well, you get the idea. In fact, when it comes to destroying a computer kittehs are not anywhere near the top ten.
Re:Written by a non-cat-owner (Score:5, Funny)
You, sir, have obviously never owned a cat.
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If they lasted longer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Still, crappy logic, especially when OEM computers are designed to have a short lifespan to spur sales of newer models.
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For the usual tasks like light office work and web browsing tablets nearly have all the processing power you'll ever need. Which means a machine like an Ouya with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen are enough. Ican remember whan PCs hardly could handle a GUI and autocorrection of Word would bog the machine down. These days are gone and have been gone for 10 years.
Gamers used to buy/upgrade every 2 years if they could afford it. But even
The folks who want the latest stuff just build it (Score:4, Interesting)
There are still people who will pay oodles of money for a pre-built machine, but most of those folks have migrated over to the Mac platform by now.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Lasting A Lot Longer You Say? (Score:2)
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As the old saying goes, "If it ain't broke don't fix it!". The reason people migrated to Windows NT from Novell was not because the server was better, it was because of marketing hype. When my small company back in the day migrated from 1 Novell server to NT we had to put in 4 to do the same job. We kept hearing how it was cheaper than Novell, but we had to buy Anti-Virus software, backup software that worked, pay extra for user licenses or face the wrath of the BSA, and buy bigger and faster computers f
Ban the Space Heater (Score:2)
Classic Shell (Score:3)
I know I wont upgrade until the start button is back.
You could try Classic Shell to put the Start button back on the Windows 8 desktop.
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He shouldn't fucking have to.
What about gamers (Score:5, Interesting)
back in the day, not everybody had a PC. Gamers and engineers and other hardcore users comprised a larger % of the PC market. These users tend to upgrade often to run the latest Doom at max 640x480 resolution with all options on.
Nowadays everybody, i mean EVERYBODY has a pc, even the village idiot and 98 year old grandmas. All they do is check facebook, google maps, and send some email. These users do fine with 5 year old pcs. The hardcore users are a tiny percentage of the market now.
btw TFS is not quite right, the old machines weren't of lesser quality... my old 486 ran great for 10 years and it was still working when I threw it out.
Re:What about gamers (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't even need a new PC to play games. My going on 3 year old PC was bought to play games, and it plays everything coming out at max or near max settings. Clearly no need to upgrade there.
My six year old *Vista* PC is now what my wife uses when she wants to play a game. Although it can't play at max settings anymore, we still haven't found a game that it can't actually play reasonably well. Again, no particular need to upgrade there.
Games being cross platform has meant they need to deal with the pathetically low specs on the current consoles, which combined with games being stuck being compiled for x86 and DX9 to work in XP means you just don't need new hardware like you used to.
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The Cloud is RAM, apparently (Score:5, Interesting)
from the article:
"Meanwhile, the rise of the cloud has reduced the need for extra memory."
Really? "The Cloud" acts as RAM?
Re:The Cloud is RAM, apparently (Score:5, Funny)
No silly.
The cloud is the new floppy disk.
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its not reliable, though.
however, if you run it in RAIN-5 mode, it can be more robust.
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I think they meant "more storage". It's a common mistake.
Re:The Cloud is RAM, apparently (Score:5, Funny)
Youve never really experienced cloud computing until you've put your pagefile on Google drive.
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if "work" includes being stupendously slow but technically functioning, sure, it might.
you do realize that a page file on a fast local disk is already a horrible compromise of speed for functionality, right?
My computers always lasted a long time... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if it's just me but my computers pretty much never die. I've been building them myself since the mid 90's. I stopped upgrading when Core 2 Duo came out because the PC I built still runs everything great today. I wouldn't use the Athlon XP 2000+ system I have that still runs because it doesn't run everything great but it does still work. I really don't see it being a problem with computers lasting so much longer but I could be an odd case since I don't buy stuff from Dell, HP, etc.
It's worse than that (Score:5, Interesting)
So yeah, not only is the current computer good enough, but there are actual disincentives to upgrade. They could at least put a racing stripe on it, make it prettier.
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Re:It's worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
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As geeks, we should all go out and learn lion taming since it's something new to learn.
Unless of course, it turns out to be nothing at all like chartered accountancy.
Re:It's worse than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Typically I think computers don't fall behind, instead the applications have become more demanding. The applications aren't necessarily better but they do want more RAM or more CPU, often deciding that they want to load into memory and stay there before you even use them, just so that you get the instant-start when you do click the icon. The application makers see everyone with faster computers and so they decide they should use more of those resources. So with newer apps your power horse computer suddenly feels bogged down. Even Windows itself is essentially bogging the system down before you even load your first application (win8 though seems a bit better in this regard than win7, though worse than xp).
For example, I'm using Firefox on mac, and it is always sucking up CPU. It is NEVER idle! Even when it's not even visible it takes up CPU. I upgrade to latest version and it greatly improved for awhile, but if you let it run long enough you start to see it always being active again. Why does it do this, I'm not really sure. I've seen some devs explain that it's going through memory and trying to clean it up in the background. But at some point shouldn't it figure out that it has been idle for 2 days and decide to just stop? Maybe all these tabs that are not active have some background javascript running for no reason at all, but no way to see this and no way to shut it off. In version 19 I saw it take up to 90% of cpu even though I hadn't touched it in hours. Basically the devs in their desire to do what the user doesn't want have decided to take up those unused cycles and make them do stuff.
Now add in full disk encryption, antivirus, corporate spyware, apps that need byte code interpreters, and your work machine that used to be a dream to work on starts to drive you insane by how slow it is.
Real reason: virus infections (Score:3)
I have seen it too many times... Somebody complains that their computer is worn out and getting slow. You look at their browser and its 19 toolbars and wonder how that was allowed to happen.
Since they're about to get a new computer, I offer to refresh the drive, and, frustrated, they agree. So I run the recovery position restore to factory defaults, run windows update, download chrome, install f-prot, let them marvel at it being just like new.....
I only do this for family, but I have a big family.
If anythi
Because old machines are perfectly fine! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm currently playing through Crysis 2 on my old gaming computer, and it is running perfectly. No lag, shiny graphics, everything. Why spend money to replace it? It does everything I want it to do!
Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
8GB DDR2 800
Two 9800GTX cards in SLI
two 500GB Hard Drives RAID 0
Windows 7 64-bit
2560*1440 monitor
"High" settings, Crysis 2. Runs fantastically. I don't see the point in replacing it (at least, until I move into a place where I have to pay the power bill...)
I'm looking forward to seeing how well this computer handles Bioshock Infinite.
Re:Because old machines are perfectly fine! (Score:4, Funny)
I agree. This is me playing the new Tomb Raider: http://mathsci.ucd.ie/~plynch/eniac/ENIAC.jpg [mathsci.ucd.ie]
It's slow as shit :(
the old ones are still "good enough" (Score:3)
Since non-linear video editing became more common there haven't been any new "must-have" functionality that bogged down the system to the point where people feel like they need a faster system. (Yes, gaming can be the exception to this, but most "normal" people aren't high-end gamers.)
The last computing device I bought was a firesale HP Touchpad that now dual-boots Android. Before that I spent under $450 on a Dell laptop that I'm still using today. It works fine for surfing the web, doing email, playing videos (even high def), etc. While it would be fun to upgrade, I don't *need* to.
Heck, my in-laws are still running Vista.
He has a point (Score:3)
The last two times I got myself a new laptop, I did because the previous one was breaking expensively (screen going bad in both cases), not because it was actually getting too slow or anything like it. That's not to say I don't enjoy the higher speed and capability of my latest one â" an SSD and enough RAM not to need swap is nice â" but nowadays such performance bumps are firmly in the "nice to have" category, not "pressing need" for me.
PC companies missed their chance. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to see how an industry keeps people on an upgrade treadmill, look no further than the cell phone market.
Once upon a time, the subsidy scheme was required to get people to play in the market given the genuinely high cost of the devices. Nowadays, 'unlocked' prices are hyper-inflated to lend a sense of legitimacy to carrier subsidies. Every two years, the average consumer might as well buy a new phone because it's 'just such a deal that would go to waste' even if their last device still works fine for their needs.
It's the same way so many people buy cars so frequently that they always have car payments. They get accustomed to the payment and suddenly *not* having a car payment is 'weird' and means they better get a new car.
Meanwhile, consumer PCs never really embraced some scheme to get people to have some low, forgettable monthly payment (cloud computing being an exception). They see the expense in a straightforward manner and thus don't feel the same compulsion to upgrade. Therefore, the bulk of the market goes to buying a new one when it breaks.
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Phones also are advancing quite a lot. There's a lot more difference between an iPhone 3G and a high end phone today than there is between a 4 year old PC and a new PC.
Reality is exponential growth has to slow... (Score:3)
... sometime.
The breakneck pace of innovation we saw for the last 30 years is slowing down. The reality is as hardware power increased software cost (like games) increased in time and money to develop. Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_-slr7wL8KE#t=85s [youtube.com]
Then on top of that add ghz and heat break wall that was hit around the time of the pentium 4. If you all remember right the P4 was to scale towards 10Ghz eventually it never got even close and the industry went a bit nuts because not all software can be parralelized. Just many trends have converged is all that makes PC's last a lot longer.
They stopped selling working computers. (Score:4, Insightful)
It used to be you could buy a new computer, and use it. Now to do that, you have to find an operating system, figure out how to get it to work with the new (unsupported on older OSs) hardware. Why bother? I'm dreading the task when this laptop finally dies.
I bought a Windows 8 machine on Black Friday, it lasted 4 hours before I gave up and returned it.
Windows 8 sucks so much, it can lift matter back past the event horizon of a black hole.
Re:They stopped selling working computers. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 8 sucks so much, it can lift matter back past the event horizon of a black hole.
My favorite Windows 8-ism, and I swear this is true, is that they removed the ability to shutdown the computer.
No, really. They did.
There's still a "shutdown" option in the new "power charm." It even brings your computer to a power-off state. It just doesn't shutdown the OS.
Instead, "shutdown" logs you out (closing all your open applications), and then hibernates the machine rather than shutting down.
The concept is that this makes booting "faster" but in my experience, it's at best a wash. (I think booting fresh is slightly faster than restoring the entirety of memory.) In any case, you still have to wait for all your applications to restart when you log in, so what's the point?! Plus, generally when I choose "shutdown," it's because I want the OS is shut all the way down for some reason. If all I wanted to do was turn the power off, I'd just hibernate the machine.
Which brings me to my next point. The Hibernate option does not exist in the "Power charm." You can't Hibernate anymore. Apparently there's a setting somewhere that can reenable this feature, but searching for "hibernate" in the new Start Menu didn't find anything useful.
Anyway, long rant short: Windows 8 managed to break the ability to turn your PC off!
Re:They stopped selling working computers. (Score:4, Informative)
There is an option to disable this and do a normal shutdown and boot. There is still a control panel so maybe it can be found there.
I did notice that when you power off, that after the screen goes blank that the computer is still active with the hard drive light still flashing for another 10 seconds. If you kill power this way (via power strip) I wonder what gets screwed up. I think some genius decided that since 90% of people never turn off their computer that everyone else can be ignored.
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You can still pull the plug from the electrical socket. They haven't figured out how to fuck that up....yet.
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> Anyway, long rant short: Windows 8 managed to break the ability to turn your PC off!
Gnome 3.0 did that. They eventually reverted it. Impressive how UI people do seem to think alike.. Oh right, Apple somewhat started that trend...
but when Apple does it, it makes it more usable :) /sarcasm
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My favorite Windows 8-ism, and I swear this is true, is that they removed the ability to shutdown the computer.
No, really. They did.
There's still a "shutdown" option in the new "power charm." It even brings your computer to a power-off state. It just doesn't shutdown the OS.
Not to mention the stupidity of the whole "charm" thing to begin with. When my boss bought Windows 8 (during the $25 sale, and as he puts it "admittedly replacing Vista so how bad could it be") he came to work a week later triumphantly exclaiming that his neighbour figured out how to shutdown the machine by moving the mouse to some random corner of the screen.
Another theory: few multi-process apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Single cores in new equipment aren't getting significantly faster, and while the number of cores in CPUs is slowly increasing, most apps are still sequential in their processing. This makes new machinery not really worth buying because it wouldn't speed your apps up by much. It's a poor investment to buy a whole new PC for a small incremental upgrade in performance.
Even in those cases where apps could potentially harness multiple cores because some of their internal tasks are naturally concurrent, they don't do so because they're written in sequential languages that cannot easily multiprocess. Developers have been really slow to embrace the new raft of concurrent languages like Erlang or Go which make multiprocessing so easy. I'm not sure why that is, but a good bet is familiarity with the old and aversion to the new.
'Just another theory to add to TFA. Any others?
Er(icsson)lang and Go(ogle) (Score:3)
Developers have been really slow to embrace the new raft of concurrent languages like Erlang or Go which make multiprocessing so easy. I'm not sure why that is
Blame instructors in the colleges and trade schools who aren't familiar with these languages either. Unless you work for a well-known company whose name begins with Er or Go, you're not likely to get exposed to them.
He's largely right (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 8 is a factor. It's not the largest one, but it is a factor. People don't like it, and people also feel that they don't *need* a PC like they used to. That means when faced with a Windows version you don't want vs the iPad (or whatever other tablet) that you do, the tablet is going to win an awful lot. That wasn't the case in the past, because the technology simply wasn't up to par. Today it is - a typical consumption only web user can get by just fine on a tablet and only occasionally needs a PC. Fundamentally, Metro on the desktop sucks. Microsoft could have avoided the whole problem if they'd just put a button in Control Panel labelled "make this OS work like Windows 7", in which case you'd have a faster version of Windows 7 that can also run Metro apps. That would be more popular. (You can do that yourself with start menu replacements and neat tools like ModernMix, but telling users they can download third party tools to fix it just points out that Microsoft botched the release.)
That makes the implications obvious: households that used to have 2 or 3 PCs now only need one. Many households won't need a PC at all.
For people who do still need or want one, existing PCs last a lot longer than they used to. XP machines are still kicking, and do what people want. 3 year old PCs aren't significantly worse than brand new ones if they're properly maintained. Fundamentally, the product used to improve by leaps and bounds. It now improves in tiny increments, and tiny increments aren't enough to promote replacement. It's now like a stereo: you replace it when it dies.
Multicore is part of the problem here, as well. Intel and AMD can cram as many cores in as they want, most of the stuff I run only uses one of them. It's hugely frustrating to have a CPU sitting at 25% usage while I'm waiting on calculations because most of the software out there still doesn't use multiple cores very well. Unless they're trying to sell me something with significant single thread performance boosts, why would I care how many more cores they can shove in?
The PC market had a great run, but it's over. The market is going to contract to a new normal: systems being used years longer than in the past, and fewer people needing them. It won't go away for a very long time, simply because phones and tablets aren't nearly as good a replacement for many tasks that we're doing... yet. But stagnation and decline are the new norm.
I always keep a desktop for 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always built my own desktop PCs. They always last longer than 5 years. I build a new one after 5 years because I want to not because I have to. In fact I often hand down my old PC and it stays in service for many more years. You might lose a PSU or a HDD but the computer itself should last long after obsolescence.
PC sales are down for the same reason all sales are down. The middle class has been robbed of buying power. Poor wages, lay-offs, outsourcing, tax burden, or whatever other reason you can come up with. There are more people than we have work to do. When people struggle they often won't buy nice things like computers. They may not be happy with the old one but they can't afford to replace it. I'm sure new car sales are down as people keep the old ones longer.
The middle class = the American economy. When the people suffer there is a "trickle up suffering" *
*("Trickle up suffering" is a registered trademark of SampleFish)
In other words, PCs aren't improving enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
But is a huge increase in computing power going to make my computing experience that much better than it already is?
I doubt it. Fast enough is good enough.
I blame the Gema Consoles (Score:3)
Lets face it, the average user and business PC are serviced well enough by Windows 7, or even XP. So who is left to chase the gains brought by Moores Law?
The PC gaming enthusiasts, thats who. And why are those guys for the most part sticking with the same PCs?
Because most PC games are locked to the performance of a game console - Xbox, et all - and those are a little long in the tooth themselves.
Until the next generation of Consoles pushes the envelope of hardware, and the game developers follow suit... PCs will have no reason to follow...
Re: (Score:3)
The other aspect of this is that game performance is mostly graphics card performance.
If you have a decent PC all you need to play almost any game at a really good level is a graphics card upgrade.
Extended lifecycles (Score:3)
At the same time home users are not seeing a reason to upgrade. Most people are not doing much more than surfing the web and maybe using some form of an office suite. With fast multicore CPUs, cheap RAM, and SSDs, even power users are not replacing as much continually upgrading. I used to go through laptops in 18 months tops. Now, I'm over two years on my i7, 16GB, 256GB SSD equipped laptop and I see zero reason to upgrade anytime in the near future. It's just not being taxed, even with some of the crazy analytic workloads I throw at it. My home PC is going on 2 years old. I've upgraded. Added a new video card to replace my old 8800 GT, I added an SSD boot drive, new monitor. But replacing the whole box, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The industry needs to face it, PCs are the new TVs.
Not only that they last longer (Score:3)
Old computers never die... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been saying this for years. Sometime shortly after the 1Ghz "barrier" got broken, almost all computers became "good enough" for almost everyone.
I just recently put a built-from parts (and virtually silent) circa 2003 machine with a 1.8 Ghz AMD Barton, back into service with a modern 80+ power supply, 1.5 gigs or ram and a new(ish) drive. It may not be quite as snappy as my current main system (which is 5 years old) or my htpc (which is 7) but it's really a perfectly usable machine with a fresh install of pretty much any modern OS.
The primary reason to run current-gen hardware these days is lower power consumption, and to a certain extent modern graphics hardware (capable of hardware HD x264 decoding). If all you need is a web browser and office suite, anything that uses reasonably fast RAM from 10+ years ago will more than fit the bill.
Lots of people end up replacing perfectly good hardware just because "windows gets slow" which (sadly) few people seem to know that a reinstall will fix. That might take a few hours, and to hire a tech to do that might cost $75 or so... but that's still cheaper than a new machine.
Not entirely correct (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, some machines might be lasting longer. And some people might be forcing their machines to last longer. But, even though there are people with mod points and Win 8 who will mod down anyone who suggests that they may have made a poor choice, I can assure you (at least until I'm silenced by being modded down as a "troll") that there are people like me who are not buying a machine because of Win 8. I'm definitely in the market for a new laptop. 0But you just can't get anything at a decent price new that doesn't include Win 8. And I don't want to pay new or higher prices for a refurb, when that system will likely have a compromised battery, a screen with stuck or dead pixels, or come pre-infested with malware and perhaps unable to make that "only-one-to-a-machine" set of backup disks that they used to send out with the machine but now require you to make for yourself. If I could find a comparable deal to some current Win 8 laptops on a similar New Win 7 system I would snap it up, but I didn't have the cash free before Win 8 came out and now it is too late. Can't even buy a Win 8 system and them pay again for Win 7 and install it, since Microsoft forced the manufacturers to make machines that you couldn't install other operating systems on!
So some Microsoft fan boy might have written a counter argument to what most of the industry is saying, but the real truth is Win 8 is awful and few people want it. Microsoft ad blitzes and modding people down who disagree will not change that.
People dont want to buy more broken by design stuf (Score:3)
Its all broken. Its all wrong. Its all crap. Its all fix-it-in-the-field bullshit and people are not biting on the promise that it wont be broken this time. /boot where the kernel is. Which can be replaced. Really?
1., A printer with its own damn webserver in it but I still have to search the manufacturers website for the driver. FU
2. Each application has its own method of delivering updates? FU
3. I have to download a distro and then download the entire freaking thing again and again as updates? DangIt!
4. I install a 500 dollar application and then updates come. And come again. And a service pack comes. A and more updates come again!
5. I change hardware and Windows Media Players says FU to me, I changed my hardware and my digital rights are foobar. No fix. FU,.
6. I have a SSL security system that any two bit monarchy can make a key for any website on the planet? FUUUUUU.
7. I can encrypt my filesystem, except not
8. I go to the store and see computer cases that look 20 years old. Zero innovation. Really?
9. And finally we have a economic system that people dont believe in anymore and they are hoarding their money which is being devalued in their pockets. FE
unplanned non-obsolescence (Score:4, Interesting)
Unplanned non-obsolescence is the dumbest thing I've heard since breakfast, which puts it in with some stiff competition.
How about frantically, desperately deferred non-obsolescence? How about IE6, Exchange, and Office suite document non-portability as a modern-day Maginot Line, equally doomed?
But in the end, what could they do? We were clearly entering the end-game on the desktop PC as a rain-maker a full ten years ago.
Meanwhile we managed to gadgify consumption with pocket trinkets where the entire device costs about the same as any decent ISA expansion card back in the day. Because they are autonomous (and you can lose them under a sofa cushion) each gadget is separately counted. It's a bit like counting remote controls instead of televisions, but we'll ignore that.
And best of all, according to the true nature of innovation, we now have the cyanide-green Apple business model of land-fill express non-replaceable batteries. Microsoft and their OEM cabal are green with envy they can't sell a PC whose golden age is so effectively knackered. That was not their father's green. The times they are a changing.
Reason Number Two... Ease of Use for Video Editing (Score:4, Insightful)
I know there is a lot of speculation into the PC Sales dip, but let's face it, it is the same old song and dance in PC land. If I buy a new PC it has Windows 8 it comes loaded with crapware and doesn't do very much of what most people want to do. Tonight I went to Staples to browse and most of the Windows 8 machines were stuck on "Your protection expired XX days ago. Would you like to purchase Norton." AND I STILL CAN'T CREATE AND EDIT A VIDEO OUT OF THE BOX. However MS-Paint, Calculator, and Notepad are still hanging in from 1987, but to be fair, MS-Paint did get a facelift.
Flash forward to the iPad. I can give grandma an iPad with iMovie within 15 minutes she has first amazing video trailer of the grandkids on YouTube. Yes, I know the PC has robust suites like Adobe, Roxio, and Vegas but they aren't simple. Grandma has to figure out the Camera, take the SDHC card out, import the video, setup a project (hmm.... does grandma want DV-NTSC Standard-48Khz or DV-NTSC-Widescreen-48Khz, or maybe AVCHD-1080i(50i) Anamorphic) , import the video segments into timelines and on and on until she gives up. It is far too painful, just opening the door to the SDHC card can be a 15 minute project.
The problem with the PC is it hasn't gotten simpler. It hasn't gotten less painful to use, and grandma still can't get her video onto YouTube. One a daily basis on I use Linux, Windows 7, iPad, and MacOS/X. To me they have just become tools to get different jobs done. The clear winner for ease of use, efficiency, and convenience is the iPad tablet where I can get my video onto YouTube without crapware popping up telling me I need to update or am unprotected.
Oh and one more reason. SSDs. I can put an SSD in an old box, and suddenly, it becomes a vibrant fast box, even with all the crapware.
And MS, if you are listening. Put some useful WOW factor, polished software into your OS. Make the consumer feel like they really got something high value for their dollar or just keep doing what your doing. And if you keep on the same path, make sure you knee-cap the next XBOX with always on Internet required for play. Also, if you decided to launch a phone, make sure you abandon all your early adopters and ensure that the phone has no polished apps. Does anyone at MS still know how to code beyond rearranging the UI? Just asking.
Not only windows 8 (Score:4, Interesting)
My mother uses Linux and probably could not tell the difference between it, Mac OS X, and any version of Windows. Nor does she care. She is also running it on an 8 year old machine. Now can anyone possibly tell me why she would need to either switch OS's or upgrade her machine? Keep in mind that the machine can run HD Youtube videos at full screen with no problems.
But hypothetically lets go down to staples with a $900 budget and buy her an off the shelf machine(laptop desktop doesn't matter) and do the minimum required to hook her up. I might as well keep the phone handy for when Norton or whatever bloated bit of AV pops up and tells her that her machine is in peril. Then she will click on some pay music crap and maybe game center. Then I will tell her to google things but she won't find them because her default browser will have been set to something stupid, not to mention the crap toobar that was probably running.
Then a few months later she will call me and ask why Office has stopped working. I will tell her that she never bought office and that she was running a trial version and that it will be a nice stack of cash to get it working again.
Or she can spend nothing and keep her present machine, which in her opinion would be better than something brand new.
Windows 8 barely enters the equation. Now switch to my brother. He has bought tiny laptops for years. Paid a fortune for each one. He travels and writes. He also wore them out fairly quickly (none lasted 2 years). But now his laptop is a bit bigger and only comes out when he is parked in his final destination. In between his large screen phone serves many of his portable device needs. He can email, review writing, and do research. I suspect his laptop will last him much longer this time around.
Then take my other brother. He runs a large multinational business with a cellphone and an iPad. He has an awesome dataplan on his 3G iPad and I suspect he may never buy another PC-Type computer again in his life.
Again little of this is about Windows 8. If anything I would say that the mistake of windows 8 was even making it. They should have just kept updating Windows 7. I never used it much but it seemed fine. I doubt that it would have been that much of a pain to add multi-touch and anything else that Windows 8 has.
Software activation (Score:4, Insightful)
One reason people don't buy new computers as often as they used to is software activation
I dread buying a new computer because moving all of my stuff to the new computer has become a multi-day ordeal of trying to convince Indian call center operators that I am not running the software on more than one computer
If I could buy a new machine, clone my hard drive and go, I would upgrade about three times as often
Re:Software activation (Score:5, Informative)
I've done that cloning trick multiple times with Macs, when moving from one lab to another, or upgrading a laptop. It is a beautiful experience.
Or, if your new laptop has a newer OS, the Mac's Migration Assistant still makes moving over completely painless. I've done this a couple of times, too. Usually no applications barf or ask for activation, etc. And again, everything is where you left is. A beautiful experience.
And, (now I'm sounding all fanboi), I recently smashed my iPhone. Bought a replacement, wiped the old one right there in the Store. Got home, plugged in the new phone, and iTunes figured out that I had a new iPhone. It copied the backup right over, along with apps, settings, old messages, etc. Everything right where I left it. So painless.
Partly Correct (Score:3)
Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.
If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy [google.com], understated [google.com] and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing [google.com], stop removing useful features [lenovo.com], give us the form factor we actually want [google.com] and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.
Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?
He sees the trees but misses the forest. (Score:3)
He is correct PC's have always been upgraded because the old ones wern't as nice/cheap as the new ones.
The reasons he thinks new PC's aren't as nice as old ones are squarely the fault of the OEM's that think they can continue to sell the same shit they sold 5 years ago with tiny bumps for outrageous sums of money.
The netbook market took off, when you could buy netbooks for $200. But the PC manufactures got scared and promptly started trying to sell them for $400-600.
PC's were also places where the latest and greatest technology was available.
Now the only PC manufacture selling new technology is apple. Please show me a windows machine with a monitor similar to the macbook pro. Where is thunderbolt? Oh yah on the mac. Today I can buy a $400 tablet from google with a better screen than any PC. Heck just about any tablet being sold today that isn't running windows has a better screen.
Then there is windows8 of course...
Bottom line, the PC manufactures have gotten fat/greedy selling garbage and they wonder why their sales have fallen off now that there are other competitors.
The netbook shall return (Score:3)
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
PCs are not good enough. PCs are underused. (Score:3)
The problem is not that MS launched a new OS that underwhelmed. The problem is that we have a machine with a ridiculous amount of CPU and GPU power compared with the portable shit (tablets and phones), yet we can't seem to put this power to meaningful use. I mean, if you don't to scientific computing or video/photo editing or gaming, what's the point of a PC over an underpowered piece of junk or a console? Software developers should really start thinking hard (yes, MS too). But I guess it's far easier developing 2D games for a shiny new platform than doing real innovation.
Re:If it ain't broke.... (Score:5, Insightful)
just like apple did in the late 90's
oh your 2 year old mac is doing fine? OK heres os 9.22, everyone will be using it, except for you cause we told our installer to specificly ignore anything less than our brand new shiny G3, pay up or fuck off
or in the mid 2000's
oh you just bought a G5 OK we switched to intel, pay up or fuck off
Re: (Score:3)
Even the late 2000s. I just had to buy Snow Leopard for my g/f's MBP (older 15", Dual Core 2.4, 4GB RAM) so that she could play WoW. WoW ran just fine on all the previous versions, but for some reason the newest version needed a version higher than 10.6. Same thing for... Google Drive and newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. WoW I could kind of understand, not really, but fine, whatever. Simple web browsers? That was what upset me. From a hardware point of view, there is no reason that the laptop co
But it IS broke. (Score:4, Insightful)
But it is broke.
Nearly all new computers sold today are laptops. and nearly all of them have shitty displays, shitty keyboards, and shitty mouse pads. The key caps start falling off fairly soon. After a while, other keys just stop responding, or lose their debouncing so you get 40 'w's in a row. The wifi adapters fail just after warranty expiry, and they have miserable range and throughput. The bluetooth never worked properly to start with. The USB ports get loose and stop working. And as for the battery...
All bad. All really bad. But not the worst.
New PCs come pre-loaded with endless amounts of bloatware that slow them to a crawl. As soon as you log in your shiny new "productivity tool" for the first time, it insists on downloading updates to all of its update downloaders (thanks Randall), and demands that you reboot it sixty-one times. Or, worse, reboots without warning.
For non-technical users, using a consumer PC is like driving through a blizzard, even when it's new. You can do it, but it's no fun. Compare that to a tablet or a large (four or five inch) non-Windows smartphone, and there's no contest.
Why are computer sales down? New computers are broken, and consumers have cottoned on to that.
Re:But it IS broke. (Score:4, Interesting)
Kind of like ~1998, when manufacturers started shipping PCs with one stick of ram instead of two, no secondary cache, and HSP winmodems that ended up being half the real speed of the nominally-slower PCs they were supposed to replace. Rarely in computer history has there been a similar era when the performance of new computers was so *devastatingly* compromised for the sake of saving so little money. Granted, most of those PCs could be rescued by adding more ram and a $10 COAST module, but still... Jesus H. Christ... it was absolutely *criminal* what PC manufacturers did that year just to save a few bucks.
Re:disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe, just *maybe* coders could start focusing on making fast software again instead of just waiting for faster processors? You know, like we did in the old days?
Re: (Score:3)
Touch screens are inefficient and need to die eventually, we simply haven't found the right solution to the problem according to most people. In my opinion it comes under the form of the keyboard but oh well. And tablets will never be useful for professional activities, for starters they lack the processing power to go through a few gigabytes of data quickly and the quick and easy to use interface. And that's becoming a common requirement these days.
I have a feeling you're gonna be disappointed in the future...