PC Sales See 'Longest Decline' In History 385
dryriver writes "Global personal computer (PC) sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the 'longest duration of decline' in history. Worldwide PC shipments totalled 76 million units in the second quarter, a 10.9% drop from a year earlier, according to research firm Gartner. PC sales have been hurt in recent years by the growing popularity of tablets. Gartner said the introduction of low-cost tablets had further hurt PC sales, especially in emerging economies. 'In emerging markets, inexpensive tablets have become the first computing device for many people, who at best are deferring the purchase of a PC,' said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement."
Re:Not necessarily because of usage. (Score:5, Informative)
Computers made in the last 5 or so years are darn fast, and unless you are a hard core gamer, will be plenty fast for the next 5-10 years. I just built my father a modern computer in the hopes he won't need a new one for about 10 years.
Pretty much this. I run a couple of repair shops and we end up fixing 5 year old computers more often than replacing them simply because for day to day browsing tasks, they are more than sufficient. Hell, most of them can even decode HD to some extent, which pretty much rounds out what 90% of the market uses them for. PCs are becoming a niche market, get used to it, it wont change. Tablets and phones are the future, especially as input methods improve (attachable keyboards, docking stations and such)
Re:I got yer fix! (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever actually seen a mainframe? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors.
The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.)
Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.