Sales Of PCs, Laptops, Tablets Continue to Fall, Hit Lowest Point Since 2011 (canalys.com) 314
According to the latest numbers provided by marketing research firm Canalys, the shipments of PC devices -- which includes desktops, notebooks, all-in-ones, two-in-ones, and tablets -- amounted to 101 million units in the first quarter of 2016. The number underscores a 13% decline from the same period a year ago, and it is also the lowest volume since the second quarter of 2011. Apple led the chart among PC OEMs, moving 14 million units (suffering 17% fall), followed by Chinese conglomerate Lenovo. HP assumed the third position, with Dell and Samsung closely following it. Tim Coulling, Canalys Senior Analyst said in a press statement: The global PC market had a bad start to 2016 and it is difficult to see any bright spots for vendors in the coming quarters. The tablet boom has faded in the distance and the market is fully mature. Global shipments declines are expected to continue unless vendors bring transformational innovation to the market. Apple and Microsoft are propping up shipments in established markets with their detachables, but price points make them less affordable in low-income countries. Although other vendors are coming to market with cheaper alternatives, they are unlikely to have a big impact on volumes in the short term. The number of people looking to buy their first PC is at an all-time low and 2016 is likely to bring yet more turmoil to global PC vendors.
Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:3, Insightful)
And this explains Apple declining more than PCs how?
Re: Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:4, Funny)
"And this explains Apple declining more than PCs how?"
Overpriced "hipster" items...
Re: Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:5, Informative)
What I would like to see is a MacBook Pro that has thunderbolt 3, a 4K display, MAYBE MAYBE a keyboard from the new MacBook, which I have tried but I'm still undecided on, and an A10 or A11 coprocessor for running apps on a low power mode sparing the big hunking desktop-class skylake CPU. 64GB of ram as a max would be nice, as would 2TB SSDs. I don't need it thinner, as I can comfortably tote this one around now as is. Just give me as much battery as can be.
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as a macbook pro owner my self... may i suggest you build your own and install osX on it.
Re: Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:2)
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Really? Sure it reduces the slowest bottleneck of the PC, the spinny disk, but it does not improve other bits of performance. I can make my PC perform quite well by putting much of /usr/local into /dev/shm during boot. Faster storage is great, but the real factor is where are people using technology now. The only answer for that is much of the facebook crowd use a PC for just facebook and now they're able to do this on their phones there is no need to upgrade the PC when they don't use it.
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And this explains Apple declining more than PCs how?
Apple has not updated most of their laptop or desktop systems for more than a year. They were waiting for Skylake. They just updated the base Macbook in April, but too late for 1st Quarter sales. The others will likely be announced at WWDC in June. Expect a BIG jump in sales. My wife and daughter both plan to buy new MacBook Pros as soon as they are available. Source: MacRumors Buyer's Guide [macrumors.com].
Re:Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:4, Informative)
While you make a good point about the tracking in Windows 10, even the summary states that while Apple sold more units, they also had a bigger decline in sales than the industry as a whole, so you can't chalk this up to Microsoft fear/hate.
Re:Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, computers are "good enough" for most people now. Heck, I'm still running my quad core from 2008. It still works fine and compiles quickly, I see no reason to upgrade. Even if I did, I'd have to deal with EFI and a bunch of other new things so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade. My laptop on the other hand is getting old and slow (it's probably 10 years old now.) However, I don't use it as much as I used to, so again, not in a hurry to replace it. I use my Nexus 7 (2012) still for most things I'd use the laptop for, and even that is starting to get slow. I'll probably have to replace the tablet soon, but the desktop and laptop will still last for a while.
I figure when my main PC dies (which will probably be years from now) I'll upgrade.
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Your computer from 2008, would feel almost new once you install an SSD in it and maybe some more RAM (assuming you haven't yet done it).
The processors haven't improved that much over time.
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I had it equipped with 8GB of RAM, and the processor is a QX9650, I bought it with the intention of using the computer for 10 years or so. I have had a couple components fail over the years: a power supply, a video card, and one hard drive.
I run a raid10 so I have decent read/write speeds. Back some years ago the SSDs then were only marginally better, I figured I wouldn't even notice. Now they're faster but for a 1TB usable space they're still too expensive. The four 500 GB drives I got for my raid10 set me
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My only "computer" is a 2009 MacBook. Haven't had a need to upgrade. I don't play a lot of games, and when I got it I maxed out the ram. Basically computers are good enough for most jobs. Now I am looking for a replacement as the battery is shot but even then I am not finding much I like. Don't care for Windows, and apples current laptops leave much to be desired. broadwell arch, missing ports( I need more than one port especially if power goes through it as well. I also use the sd card slot quite a bit.
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...even the summary states that while Apple sold more units, they also had a bigger decline in sales than the industry as a whole...
I do not think it is appropriate to conflate Apple's computer sales issues with those of Microsoft.
.
For Apple, the over-priced nature of the goods tends to make people hold on to the hardware longer. Apple is coming off a good sales cycle which saw their computers move ahead a lot in popularity. But that initial rush is subsiding, and Apple is on the down side of the peak.
Whereas with Microsoft, the data are more long-term. Microsoft's OEMs have mentioned Windows 10 as an impediment to sales. Micr
Re:Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't chalk all of it up to Microsoft fear/hate, certainly, but that might be one factor.
One of my own small businesses is a clear example. We would have bought a handful of new laptops and desktop workstations for various people at least 2-3 years ago, but the usual complaints about Windows 8 put us off and we were waiting for 10 to fix the problems. Since 10 is a complete non-starter for that business because of the privacy and robustness concerns (dealing with potentially sensitive information = instant compliance violations if we can't fully control our equipment) we're still making do with 5+ year old machines.
That's increasingly painful, because we're talking about laptops that now have sub-2 hour battery life if they're not plugged in, several machines that have small, spinning disk storage, and so on. We would drop thousands on new PC hardware in a heartbeat, if someone would just give us anything close to what we actually need, which is basically modern hardware + Windows 7 + a couple of the updates that newer Windows versions do offer to support that modern hardware (USB3, hi-res screens, etc.).
Re:Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:4, Interesting)
after a while (probably soon) any win10 based pc will NOT have drivers for anything lower in the MS domain.
there may even be issues with linux. I preduct that MS is waging an all out war on linux+osx and will use all their pressure to increase the UEFI secure boot stuff and make it so that we can't disable it. only the higher end boards will allow overriding secure boot. even then, I suspect MS will try their best to force those vendors to turn off that switch, too.
MS sees the writing on the wall. so does intel, which is why intel is laying off 10k people!
I used to upgrade my own set of pc's every year or so. I have a stack of mobos here dating from the mid 90's (really hard to throw out working hardware, even if its ancient) and yet I have not bought a new system or board in years. all my systems do what I need and given the tight economy, I can't justify keeping the pc vendors in profits when money is so tight these days.
tablets have run their course. they simply are not replacements and are definitely LUXURY items. I have no tablets and no plans for any.
corp america does a pc or laptop 'refresh' every few years for their employees. and people who break their systems need replacements. but people doing non-urgent upgrades are few and far between, these days.
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Donate/sell/ the stuff you know you are not going to use. Charities, schools, churches, etc..... put it on something like CraigsList in the free section and people will haul it away for you. :-)
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[3] Vendors seem to think tablets are like phones and customers are going to upgrade them every couple of years. They aren't.
The vendors somehow haven't noticed that tablets don't benefit from the concealed pricing and natural update timetable that almost all mobile phone plans conveniently create for phones. Support for tablets more than a couple of years old is often abandoned, sometimes to the point that modern OS updates or new/updated apps won't run properly on even quite recent hardware. A lot of user
Re:Saddled with Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's Google's job!
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Worse yet, the CPU's from intel have bogged down badly. 4-core i7's are only about 20-25% faster than they were 5 years ago. They are more power efficient by >2x, but most home users don't really care about that. Hell, most have no clue how much power their PC's use (hence the proudly boasted about 1000W supplies for machines that peak out at ~300W).
SSD's have been the biggest system speed boost in recent years. My new machine 6 months ago barely feels faster than the 9 year old machine with an SSD.
S
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erm... because outside of Slashdot and tinfoil_hats'r'us, that is not a buying consideration? Everyone in the market already has telemetry in devices they carry in their pockets, and to bed, and to the toilet.
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For the consumer market, it's true that some people don't know, some people don't care, and some people don't think they have any choice, all of which may lead to accepting telemetry.
For business customers, where the real money is, it's an entirely different situation.
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Yeah, 99% of people don't know or care about that, so that's not the cause.
I'm thinking that a lot of the factors center more along the fact that newer processors aren't bringing a lot more to the table compared with even 5 year old processors. 10 years ago the difference between a 5 year old chip and a new chip in the same market segment was 8-12x the performance. These days that brand new i5 will only be 20-30% faster than that 5 year old one so there's no real pressure to upgrade. Speed isn't the dri
maybe everybody has what they need now? (Score:3)
we have been led down a path... "we doubled the speed of the Smokin'Board processor, so you need it. notice how slow things are?" and that is because the bloatware providers saw that chip coming, and packed in more delays and non-features to cut your computing speed effectively in half.
everybody knows it. and they're saying "enough. This is fine. Stop."
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Companies very much care about the operating system. This is really Microsoft's bread and butter. It always has been. Even home use flowed from the fact that Microsoft dominated business. Even if the OS isn't spying on you, it can break and there's also the usual "let other people test it" burn in period.
That doesn't surprise me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, if everyone else is anything like me, we're all waiting for the deluge of "VR-ready" "new is better" stuff coming out this summer.
I'm ready to plunk a couple grand on my first major PC upgrade in years (still running an Athlon II + nVidia 560Ti), but every reviewer says "wait".
So, we've all been waiting for VR facebook solitaire, I guess. How gonzo.
Re:That doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember my first CD-ROM drive, a Mitsumi double-speed CD-ROM drive, came with a CD of crappy demo games and applications. One of them was a VRML world. That was in 1995 or there abouts. I've been waiting for "VR-ready" since then. Or maybe since Lawnmower Man [imdb.com] in 1992...
Re:That doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah baby I want to run vi and make and ssh in a bunch of VR windows. oh yeah, they'll run so much better and give my the POWAH. And Slashdot 2.0 and other forum text areas in VR, that makes me hard just thinking about it. Once we have that and my microwave oven and toaster on the IoT it'll be The Singularity bitches!
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dont forget the "Illusion VR" suit
Re:That doesn't surprise me (Score:5, Interesting)
One can actually thank the advent of tablets for making the use of older computers with newer software possible, a lot of scaled-down mobile devices use variants of what had been desktop or higher-end laptop components years earlier. As software companies are forced to write for less horsepower to have good applications on the mobile devices the side-effect is supporting slower, older computers.
They're trying to counteract that with rules as to what chipsets and processors new OSes will run on, but if they're not careful they'll end up with a fractured market like cell phones.
Mobile apps deliberately exclude PC-only users (Score:2)
As software companies are forced to write for less horsepower to have good applications on the mobile devices the side-effect is supporting slower, older computers.
Either that or the application is made available only for the mobile device. For example, you can't use Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or many banks' check deposit applications on a webcam-equipped PC; you need either iOS or Android with Google Play. You can't even comment on a Vine or Instagram post if you don't own an iPhone or an Android phone because they require all commenters to have first created an account inside the app.
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You can buy a 'burner' Android phone for $10
Which make and model? I searched Google for 10 dollar android phone and found several results talking about the same $9.82 LG L16 and L15G on TracFone that Walmart sold in November of last year. Among these results was an article warning me that the offer resembled a clearance [pcmag.com] and thus unlikely to remain available. The starter Android phone recommended in the article was a Posh Orion Mini, which Amazon shows for $50.
never activate or buy time for it
I fear that trying to run one of these apps without cellular service won't get past the app'
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The Nvidia GTX 1080 is looking pretty sweet. I don't even play PC games any more, and I still kinda want one. It might drive me back into gaming. Of course, if I get that, I'll need a new mobo, CPU, ram, and ssd to go with it. Crap I might as well get a 4k monitor too.
There may be some room left to grow in the PC space.
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once you have that built, StarCitizen graphics are pretty good
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I have a laptop from 2011. Swapped out the HDD for an SSD a year ago, and it runs everything I need beautifully.
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SSDs.......everyone should consider upgrading to an SSD if they want to see a bang-for-the-buck performance improvement over a spinning drive. Granted, that can be done without doing a full computer upgrade, but if you are considering an upgrade, I wouldn't get anything without an SSD.
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how about if I don't spend any bucks? the disks keep spinning and I have money for the banging.
Re:That doesn't surprise me (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there's also an economic factor at play. This might be due to the frequently referenced "middle class squeeze" where people simply decide to keep what they have a bit longer rather than get a replacement because their disposable income doesn't stretch quite as far as it used to.
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No. The rest of the 99% are still blowing money like there's no tomorrow. They're just not blowing it on PCs any more. The PC market is mature and saturated. It's no longer got any "razzle dazzle".
H*LL, even the tablet market is starting to lose it's luster already...
Re:That doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at my non-technical family and friends, 5-10 years ago many people had home PCs so they could send emails, order stuff from Amazon and read the BBC's website. A smartphone now meets all their requirements so they no longer need the PC.
I know several people who've dumped their PC and now rely solely on their phones. They don't even bother with a tablet. Those folk are part of these statistics.
Upgrading? (Score:3)
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I have a client who buys refurbished PCs for "non-critical" employees, so they're 2-odd years old when they get them. Many get SSDs swapped in after two years (4 total years old) for the hard disks and have had their lifetime extended nearly indefinitely.
It wouldn't surprise me to see some of these machines outlive Windows 7 extended support if the power supply doesn't quit before that or there's some compelling reason to view the OS as obsolete. This would probably make some of them 8 or even more years
Any laptop upgrades other than RAM or SSD? (Score:2)
Other than an SSD, what can a typical user add to a laptop that already has maxed RAM? I imagine most laptops don't support a lot of different CPUs, graphics cards, or internal network cards.
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Not really.
We have reached the point of good enough.
1. You only need so much power to run Office and accounting software. Your average PC today is probably 100 times the power of a VAX-11/780 which is more than enough to run excel for most people.
2. Cloud apps Facebook, google docs and so on run in the data center and your PC is little more than a smart terminal for them.
Gamers, CAD/CAM, programmers, and so need PCs and will keep updating but even then not all that often. My work PC is a Xeon E5-1620 with 3
Moores law is done? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Moores law is done? (Score:5, Interesting)
When the OS starts costing more than the CPU....
apt-get install wine (Score:3)
When the OS starts costing more than the CPU....
Then it's time to consider whether Debian with apt-get install wine can run your applications or close enough substitutes.
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Moores law is becoming irrelevant.
Your PC is already powerful enough to edit cinema-quality video. Even though your 3D games are entering Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org] the gameplay is no better than Half Life 1. You don't need to double the power of your PC to get your tax returns and word processing done.
That's why most of the "innovation" over the last decade has focussed on putting the same power into a smaller space.
Only one thing left to do (Score:2)
Drop the price
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Or add cores. A 6 core processor is a huge jump in price, and requires a different socket with a more expensive shipset (more $$$). Intel has really spent all their effort on energy efficiency and let the performance stagnate.
Maybe (Score:2)
more people come to their senses and won't buy the latest and greatest hyped up machinery when the current one still works or are ad-blockers the cause ;-)
Unless... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you are a hardcore gamer or a business needed lots of power, there is no real reason for regular or average computer users to upgrade constantly.
Windows is an awful mess and people are tired of the constant upgrades and changing featuresets/UIs. The computer you bought 3-5 years ago, barring mechanical failure still meets or exceeds your needs for the most part, so why waste the money?
Computers are too common, so the "WOW" factor that tells folks to buy a new one all the time just isn't there. Tablets/Smartphones are starting to hid the same skid.
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The computer you bought 3-5 years ago, barring mechanical failure still meets or exceeds your needs for the most part, so why waste the money?
Indeed. I have a computer that's about 8 years old (Gigabyte-brand motherboard, Intel Core2Quad Q6600, 8GB DDR2 RAM) that I've made only some minor changes to (lots of storage, SSD boot disk, GeForce 550 Ti graphics card, etc.) that's still ticking away just fine. Turns out the Gigabyte's marketing their boards as "ultra-reliable" was accurate.
I intend to upgrade later this year to something a bit more modern (i7, more RAM, new graphics card, bigger monitor, etc.), but the need really hasn't been pressing.
Re:Unless... (Score:5, Informative)
Doing this naively is going to fail. Assuming this is a full retail version, because technically you're not allowed to do what you want on a OEM or SystemBuilder version. "Techncially". So I am assuming a full retail version of 7.
What you want is using sysprep [microsoft.com] to generalize your system before moving the disk/image:
sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown
When it's done with that, image and/or move the disk. You *will* have to activate.
Good luck
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Performance Plateau (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simple... We've hit a performance plateau quite a while ago. Not sure when I bought my Dell XPS 15 L502x. Something like 2010 and it was on sale for 50% of the price. Anyway, that is a Core i7 2630QM (or 2635QM, I need to check) and it came with 4GB RAM (later upgraded to 16GB). There is simply nothing I can throw at it that it can't do with cycles spare.
Five year old machine: totally fine...
So, PC sales are dependent on replacement sales... as most people do not need more performance.
I'd wager to say that the late Core2Duos in the XP days, would be enough performance for most tasks, but I'm sure I'll get the 640kByte is enough quote attributed to Billy
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My desktop system at work is a Core 2 Duo from February of 2007. At the time I had been waiting for a 64-bit PC, and this was one of the first that were available at work (about 6 months after Intel released the CPU). It works fine for almost everything I need. I'm looking to upgrade soon, though, as it maxes out at 8GB, the hard drive is mostly full, and it's too slow when running VMWare when I need to run Microsoft Windows.
Google tells me that Windows Vista was released in November 2006, and my company
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Until last year I was rocking an old c2d; I couldn't even tell you it's age, but it was *old*. Was doing just fine; in fact it still is in my daughter's computer.
Definitely a performance plateau, and that's OK. The market has "matured"; anyone who was paying attention knew the heyday of upgrades wouldn't last.
Re:Performance Plateau (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I'm good: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
In other news. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe we should just add smartphones to the definition of "PCs" (a device you can carry in your pocket does seem to be a "personal" device, anyway) and go on with life?
Innovation didn't stagnate, it just is being focused on a new form factor.
Can you use it to make an app? (Score:2)
Maybe we should just add smartphones to the definition of "PCs" (a device you can carry in your pocket does seem to be a "personal" device, anyway) and go on with life?
I don't consider a device a fully "personal computer" unless the person who owns it controls what computing is done on it. Because of its cryptographic lockdown, an iPhone or iPad is a "personal computer" only when paired with a Mac on which to run Xcode. An Android device has a better chance of being a personal computer given the existence of AIDE to create apps directly on a tablet, not to mention the ability to build apps on any old hand-me-down desktop or laptop PC.
everybody's got one now... (Score:2)
2016 : YEAR of LINUX on the DESKTOP!
Spent $700 On Phone (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can't afford PC, laptop, or tablet.
sucker.
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Longer upgrade cycles (Score:2)
Not just laptops (Score:2, Informative)
Some official statistics may look decent [factcheck.org], but the labor-force participation [bls.gov] (a figure not prone to fudging like politically redefined unemployment [usatoday.com]) is the lowest it has been since 1978 [factcheck.org].
With over 94 million [cnsnews.com] not even looking for work — and thus not included in the unemployment statistics [huffingtonpost.com] — we can afford less and less non-necessities.
With the constantly rising food-prices [go.com] and the incomes of those still working stalling [nypost.com], expect further declines.
Socialism — measured as the part of the GDP sp [usgovernmentspending.com]
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A completely off-topic rant. However a few things that Mi fails to consider:
if you follow the FactCheck link given you will see that the labor force participation rate today is higher than at any time from the end of World War II to 1978 (or for that matter higher than any time before World War II), a period of prosperity that conservatives generally imagine was a Valhalla of probity and Great America. Its rise after 1978 was due to women entering the workforce in large numbers (often opposed by conservativ
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Workforce participation by women, actually, declined less in recent years [bls.gov], than that by men. That is, quite indisputably, a sign of decline. Because, contrary to all the talk of "equality", women remain the only sex capable of giving birth — an activity, which takes months and years away from employment. If, despite this, their withdrawal from the labor is slower than that by men, we are in trouble.
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Socialism — measured as the part of the GDP spent by government [usgovernmentspending.com] — sucks.
There's actually extremely little correlation between labor force participation rate and gov't share of GDP. Germany's only slightly below US levels on labor force participation, the UK is roughly in line, and the Scandinavian countries are actually above US levels on both labor force participation and gov't spending as a share of GDP.
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OMG! 1/3 of the country has no job? My 3 year old is a dead beat! Granny should quick slacking off! Its a crisis!
Seriously, they is a very misleading number. Unless you factor out the young and old it is meaningless. We have a lot of Baby Boomers retiring now, and old folks are living longer. Not factoring this out is disingenuous.
Prime age participation (ages 25-54) is at 81.2%, only slightly lower than the all time high of 84.6% right before the dotcom bubble popped.
Source: https://research.stloui [stlouisfed.org]
Not a difficult problem to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry just needs to get off its laurels and stop pushing cloud. Since everything is going web application, there is little reason to have a beefy desktop system. The software vendors are pushing leased software that's cloud based, meaning the money hardware vendors would have made is now being spent monthly/annually by the software/cloud vendors.
If the hardware industry decided to standardize and actually push a free OS like Linux and tout the advantages to owning your own data, they would be back in business. Its wishful thinking and the hardware industry as a whole has never been very good about acting in their own best interest, preferring to suck the dick of their sugar daddy Microsoft but we could hope.
Offline use (Score:2)
Since everything is going web application, there is little reason to have a beefy desktop system.
Unless a user wants an application on a laptop to continue to work while the user is riding the bus to or from work and thus away from usable Wi-Fi. The severely limited offline support on a Chromebook was a big part of Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign.
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as bad as 4G coverage is in some places, for most of the population "offline" is happening less and less and the trend will continue.
granted for serious work you want a reliable connection but as been discussed, most buyers are "consumers" and app appers?!!
evolution of the Apple logo (Score:5, Informative)
Last summer I refurbished a small manufacturer in the agricultural space (mainly for my own sanity). We tried to buy new and failed.
It was a Windows shop with many legacy XP systems scattered about on the production floor (some used maybe once per month depending on product mix out the door). Not a single long-term employee expressed any love for Windows, so we had buy-in to replace everything on the white collar side with Mac Minis, after one of the employees brought in his own quad-core mini with 16 GB RAM to show off.
Then we went to the Apple store and discovered that in the soldered RAM era, the price point we had approved covered a dual core system with 8 GB of RAM soldered in. By the time we scaled it up to be comparable to the Mini from two years earlier, it became 50% more expensive. Because of the Windows legacy, we expected fairly heavy use of virtualization, making 8 GB a very low ceiling into the near future.
And then the answer came back at the new value point: well, fuck it, we're already getting an armload of HP refurbs for the manufacturing floor, let's just get more refurbished Windows 7 boxes for the office staff, too.
More teeth, smaller apple. Funny how you can now see Apple shrinking all the way from the stock exchange.
This will reverse next year (Score:4, Funny)
VR is going to take off at a ridiculous pace, and people will need a powerful PC (or XBox One or PS3...) to use it. So I suspect this trend will reverse either next year, or the year following.
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VR is going to take off at a ridiculous pace
Have you still got your Zune?
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Do you really think that? The only people really seeming to care about it are hardcore gamers. Normal people, outside of IT not so much. Now of course, VR may turn out to be so awesome everyone wants it and need it for work and home...
Allow me to be very sceptical about that...
Re:This will reverse next year (Score:4, Funny)
Where are my Funny mod points when I need them?
Vendors need to stop selling crap! (Score:2)
PC manufacturers are running into a few problems:
- Despite all the bad things about Windows 10, one of the good things is that the OS has been slimmed down somewhat so it runs reasonably well on lower-spec systems. I have a 7 year old PC at home that works great after I added an SSD. This is probably so they can squeeze Win10 onto bare-bones tablets and even smaller devices. By doing this, however, the need for a new PC is less urgent.
- Specs on even low-end PCs are quite impressive and will last most mediu
What did everyone expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, today's PCs are GROTESQUELY overpowered for anything but certain types of games.
I'm running a six year old hex-core CPU (i7 970) with a 2 year old video card (GTX 970) and an SSD boot disk.
I'm not doing 4K gaming. It's primarily a workstation (see WORK) and I do a bit of light gaming on the side.
There's literally no reason I couldn't go another 5 years on this machine.
I also have an older laptop (Thinkpad T61p). It's still fine for web browsing and light gaming as well. RAM is maxed out and it's running off an SSD boot disk too.
It does what I need it to, so I have zero reason to replace it.
Can anyone seriously fault me for not spending another couple grand to refresh these machines?
Honestly, the PC market was in the Moore's Law bubble so long, that it's LONG overdue for this sort of correction.
We'll probably see decreasing sales over the next 5-10 years as people are keeping their workhorse machines longer.
Current equipment will need the time to age out. And, once it does, we should see the sales cycles stepping up again, though never again to the levels they were.
All my fault (Score:3)
I have 6 desktops, 2 laptops, a MacBook, 2 iPads, 7 or so Android tablets, a Windows tablet.... I guess I should buy some more?
I think sales of things like Tablets will rage when a product genre is new, or finally reaches a tolerable price point, but how many tablets or laptops does a family need? Disclaimer: I'm a developer, and use all the equipment I have, so not typical... and your average family has probably already bought a tablet or laptop that works well enough to read e-mails, browse the webs, or watch cat videos.
Sales are bound to drop off. Most people don't need the latest and greatest technology, and even those who used to, are finding it less urgent to upgrade. What's mostly left is new purchases to replace broken/dead tech items.
Re: (Score:2)
I have a $110 10.5" tablet that's been working fine for three years, mostly daughter uses it for email and social media crap. where is the incentive to upgrade?
The likely reasons (Score:2)
2. Only programmers and gamers need to buy powerful computers (not counting h
Re: (Score:2)
We've updated the Dells we bought around 2009 to Windows 10. They're all running Office 2010 as well, and thus far no issues. Not the fastest in the world, to be sure, but for office work, there's no need for anything advanced. It basically saved us half our upgrade budget, enough that we stuck some extra money to take into account attrition. We certainly expect some of these computers to kick the bucket over the next couple of years, and we'll do a more casual upgrade schedule. Yes, it means having a more
People are playing with their phones (Score:2)
Root Cause: Offshoring and Prioritizing Essentials (Score:4, Interesting)
Hardware plateau? (Score:3)
Any computer made in the last 7 years with 2 gb of memory can run windows 10 at a reasonable speed, basically any computer that can run windows 7 well can run windows 10 well. Even gamers are realizing all they really need to replace for most games is the video card. So computers are getting replaced now when they old computer just dies.
What will start computer sales again? Probably when Oculus-like VR drops from $600 to say $200, maybe some breakthrough in 3d projection. Home robots? Who knows, something that demands more computing power.
Re: (Score:2)
Inflation? Inflation is too low. They should be printing money right now.
Re: (Score:2)
The global economy is battling the Fed and USA Congress cancer.
USA Federal reserve and USA Congress are the primary engines for the weakness, creating inflation...
Well, they aren't doing a very good job at creating inflation [usaa.com] since the rate is just a little north of zero at present, and actually well under the Fed's target rate to sustain economic growth.
But never mind, in the right-wing mind inflation is always at terrible levels (if a Democrat is in the White House, anyway) and hyperinflation around the corner -- any day now, just keep watching, you'll see...
Re: (Score:3)
You are blaming Windows 10 for PC sales not declining as much as Mac sales?
The figures combine PC & tablet sales. I suspect a lot of Apple's falls are due to traditional tablet sales tanking - the PC makers didn't really have appreciable tablet sales to lose. As for Mac/PC sales, Apple & Lenovo started the year ahead because they're mainly in laptops, small-form-factor and all-in-ones, which have been doing better than desktops for the last few years.
Intel probably get a slice of the blame, too, with delays in releasing new chips. The mobile Skylake chips with the higher-
Build from barebook? (Score:2)
a good number people now who consider obtaining a new PC, or an upgraded PC will usually build one from scratch for 1/3 of the cost.
Can you give me a good example of a retail laptop and a comparable "barebook" build for one-third the cost, including the price of an operating system compatible with the applications that someone already uses?
SMAC from GOG is silver (Score:3)
I will never again use Windows - simply waiting on the system to die on me and moving to Linux [if there is an option to run my beloved very old windows games like Alpha Centauri that I am done] .
Alpha Centauri is rated silver in AppDB [winehq.org]. Load Xubuntu on a USB stick, sudo apt-get install wine, and see what you can run.
Re: (Score:2)
you are doing it wrong.