PC Shipments Hit the Lowest Level In a Decade (cnbc.com) 202
PC shipments are at the lowest levels since 2007. From a report: Gartner said this week that the PC market declined 4.3 percent during the second quarter. The research company said that shipments were at the "lowest quarter volume since 2007," noting the market dropped for the 11th quarter in a row. The report is in stark contrast to another from IDC in April which said that the PC market grew for the first time in five years. Gartner said HP has the largest global market share with 20.8 percent of the market. HP is trailed by Lenovo which has a 19.9 percent share, with shipments down a substantial 8.4 percent since last year. Dell, Apple and Asus finish out the top five players. In the U.S., Gartner suggests Apple's shipments were down 9.6 percent from last year. The research firm didn't give an explanation for why that might have occurred, though Apple was late to refresh its computers with the latest Intel processors. Upgraded Macs just hit the market last month.
Frost piss. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not just Windows 10 since this apparently includes Crapples. The iOS-ification of OS X into "macOS" helped.
Seriously, why would anyone want a new PC? The older ones that still run Windows 7 are better than the newest ones that are stuck with Windows 10 and the latest Apples are all complete shit. Is anyone surprised by this?
Re:Frost piss. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you say the latest Macs are shit? Are you talking about the non-upgradable RAM soldered to the motherboard, the low-end dual core i5/i7, the weak GPUs (if any), the pointless expensive toys (touch bar), the five years without upgrades for the Mac mini, MacBook Air and Mac Pro, or the fact that OS X started going downhill after 10.5?
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You forgot dropping the magsafe power connector, the overpriced SSDs and the reliance on dongles to connect anything. And don't forget the insane price: even if you were to overlook all the other shortcomings, a
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That and they just look and feel cheap now. No keyboard travel, no magsafe, no light-up logo, no startup chime, no accessories in the box anymore. The machine just screams no frills budget cost cutting machine, yet costs 5 times as much as a comparable PC.
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Any refurbished professional grade HP laptop(elitebook anyone)
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You really need those 2 TB3 useless ports? Well my
Re:Frost piss. (Score:5, Informative)
We're running Dells we bought in 2009 or thereabouts, upgraded to Windows 10 (I know I know). Other than the odd PSU or hard drive blowing up, the machines seem to be working fine for what they are; workstations dedicated to word processing, email and a bit of browsing. I wouldn't want to open really large spread sheets on them, but other than that, they do the job. Every year that we don't have to buy replacement hardware is basically money in the bank for us, and we have a replacement budget in place for total failures like the motherboard. I would expect that in the next year or two these units may begin to fail, so we're looking at new purchases in 2018-19, at which point they'll be ten years old.
And when we talk about replacements, we're not likely talking about new desktops, but rather going to PCs-on-a-stick like the Lenovo Ideacenters. Again, for many of these computers, we're really talking about wordprocessing, email and browsing, and the advantage of these units is there almost disposable, and providing they last three or four years (we've had some test units running without issue 24 hours a day running videos and slideshows on large flat screen monitors for over a year now), we'd still be ahead of the game on the hardware side.
So our medium and long term strategies don't involve replacing $400-$600 desktops with similar models. We'll still be buying laptops for the road warriors and certain departments, like finance, where a bit more muscle is needed to run spreadsheets, will still see traditional PCs, but our days of buying a bunch of $500 Dell or HP desktops or towers on a regular refresh are pretty much done, and really, I would expect by the time we do do our big upgrades in 2019, small form inexpensive PCs will probably be a helluva lot more capable. Who knows, maybe in four or five years maybe we won't be buying Windows machines at all.
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Absolutely. The problem is that over the last five or six years the hardware has become so good that it's become harder to build software that can break it. And in some ways Microsoft's push towards mobile has meant they've done a lot of work to reduce the resource footprint of Windows, meaning that newer versions of Windows have to some extent reversed the tendency of the OS and its software to consume RAM and cycles. If the competition with iOS and Android have done one thing, they've forced Microsoft to
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We've purchased a couple of refurbished Thinkpads. Very nice units, very rugged, and with the extra battery capacity, and they were about $300CDN (about 240 Euros) a piece. They're off-lease units, so a few scuffs here and there and no dead pixels. From what I can see the whole refurb market is in real growth. That isn't new computer sales, of course, but you can get a pretty good machine for a lot less than a new one, for most people these kinds of machines are more than they'll ever need.
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It's a combinations of factors, as you point out unlike a few years ago older machines still perform the tasks that people want to do just fine so if you already have one that works there's no reason to replace it...
Another factor is that previously buying a pc was people's only way to access the internet, which is what many people bought them for despite being a terribly unsuitable tool for most people. Nowadays, many more devices are usable for internet access and are far more suitable for the vast majori
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Bang on, especially that they were seen as only way to do things. Several threads to pick up.
Firstly, unless you've a graphics-heavy job, why buy an expensive Mac? If you are a light internet user, why live your life in fear of Windows viruses?- recent ransomware headlines have underlined this.
A _decent_ tablet costs 50% of all web traffic now non-desktop. So you don't literally need a p.c. somewhere in your life to be able to fully interact with the web, which was the case even in 2015.
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That is part of it. Offerings are pointless these days as there is no compelling reason to get a new computer. They aren't much faster than that of five years ago from a user perspective, and as you pointed out killall the common OS offering is dismal. Macs just keep humming along, and it isn't like they were high performance to begin with. If you are a OSX user you have become accustomed to crappy graphics and you aren't about to drop thousands upon thousands to get something a hair better only to never be
Re:Frost piss. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is crappy graphics on OS X?
Eve Online looks on OS X the same as on Windows, so does world of warcraft.
Neither my Mail.app nor Safari.app need a special graphics card.
Never saw crappy on any computer since 20 years anyway, in what strange world do you live?
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Never saw crappy on any computer since 20 years anyway, in what strange world do you live?
Why didn't you just sign of your post with "disregard that I'm talking out of my arse"
It's much shorter to write.
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What is crappy graphics on OS X?
Eve Online looks on OS X the same as on Windows, so does world of warcraft.
Dishonesty or whitewashing detected. :)
I have played Eve Online in OS X, Windows, and Linux. As long as you have a decent gfx chip, you are good and everything looks mostly the same (OpenGL vs DirectX does cause some minor changes). If you are relying on Intel integrated graphics, Eve is unplayable except at the lowest of resolutions with the smallest amount of eye candy. Granted, Eve Online is best played through a spreadsheet, but if you want to see anything, you need to have a nice discrete gfx chip.
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Try running Elite: Dangerous on OS X - you literally cannot land on planets because Apple never bothered to implement OpenGL compute shaders on OS X, and there probably are not enough players to justify porting the game to Metal...
(The workaround would be installing Windows, where compute shaders are supported just fine in DirectX - on the same hardware...)
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if it has thunderbolt 3, you could use an external GPU in there, and get about 80% of the desktop performance from the card.
Not perfect, but doable.
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I dual box EvE on my 2014 13" Mac book Air just fine.
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Kids use phones most of the time. At home they use pads and Xbox/PS4 for games, movies and YouTube. They have MIGHT have a school ChromeBook. That is it. All of the bases are covered. The only kids in to "PCs" are the gamers moving into Steam and PC games. A stand alone PC is just not needed any longer to use the net.
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I finally upgraded from my 2012 MacBook Pro a couple days ago. I got a name-brand Windows 10 laptop.
I did it because Apple has nothing compelling about them anymore. They innovated (for the time) by rolling out a high-res laptop screen. I bought, and then spent the next 5 years having no reason to change anything (until my laptop started dying).
This time around, I saved the money. 4k screen, pen support (useful to me), decent battery life. Done.
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Re: Frost piss. (Score:2)
There's ONE supposedly-upcoming laptop that genuinely excites me -- the Razer Valerie ( https://www.razerzone.com/proj... [razerzone.com] )
* 3 screens
* mechanical clicky keyboard (as-yet unknown how satisfying it'll be, but still likely to be a huge improvement over everything besides *maybe* a Thinkpad)
Everything else available now or in the pipeline is uninspiring, glued/sealed Apple-like crap that's a step down from what I have now (Precision m4800), or at best, an uninspiring step sideways.
People will start buying new
Re: Frost piss. (Score:2)
Chiclet keyboards don't necessarily *have* to suck, as long as the keyswitches are well-designed & high quality. A modern Thinkpad chiclet keyboard is still a net improvement over 97% of current non-mechanical keyboards (but inferior to the best laptop keyboards circa 2000). Modern laptop keyboards suck mainly because their switches are shit. Compaq (pre-HP) laptops used to have *fantastic* keyboards (at least, on their enterprise-class laptops like the Armada circa 2000).
Re:Frost piss. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. It's just that the average person really doesn't need the equivalent of a 1980's supercomputer sitting on their desk for reading e-mail and surfing the web. It used to be that you required a PC to do anything related to computing, and that's just not the case anymore. I was talking to my parents the other day, and told them that when they were ready for their next computer, they should probably just get a simple tablet and hook up a keyboard to it. Anything more for them is just unnecessary overkill, and does more harm than good. They're in their 70's, and are intimidated by technology, so the simple capabilities of a tablet seem best for them.
Personally, I'm running a 6 year old PC as my main development machine. It was a high-quality PC at the time, costing over $4K. GPU is outdated (I opted for quiet operation rather than the most power), but since my own game isn't really pushing any hardware limits to speak of, that's fine. It's still as snappy as ever. I'll honestly don't even know when I'll consider upgrading, so long as it keeps running.
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I'll honestly don't even know when I'll consider upgrading, so long as it keeps running.
It will be a few more years, then the power savings will make it worthwhile. If you run Linux or other Free OS on it and do not care about the cost of power, you should not need to "upgrade" until you experience hardware failure.
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Came to say the same; you beat me to it.
I really, really want to upgrade my PC [7 years old with small upgrades - video mostly along the way] or buy completely new kit, but what operational system to run? Install Win7 again? Soon it will be unsupported.....Linux is cool but I am simply unwilling [ATM] to spend the time learning cause I don't have much time....
I am so fed-up with the endless jig of learning new UI's every few years, tweaks to protect privacy, enhance performance, fight bloatware or even have
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"Windows 10 did it." gets a "+5 insightful". Not being disparaging here because you're absolutely spot on, but perhaps Slashdot needs a "+5 that was fucking obvious". It hasn't helped any seeing the direction Microsoft has been going since they spewed out Vista. They won't be happy until they can force all Windows Users onto some form of monthly rental OS. Throwing out crumbs of a better operating system so they can justify making people use a spyware laden social media launcher isn't a good idea, neith
Re: Frost piss. (Score:2)
Firefox has really gone to shit over the past few years. When IE 6 was the norm, Firefox was the clean, shiny, compromise-free new browser, and IE was a hot mess of legacy kludges. Now, Firefox is the lava-hot mess of legacy kludges... except that NOW, the alternatives all suck too (just in slightly different ways... like Chrome's refusal to let you block thirdparty cookies or disable autoplaying sound/video... or Edge's continued flakiness).
Most people don't need a new PC (Score:2)
Most consumers are probably happy with their current PC's. They edit the odd document, use email, browse the web and that's it. A 12 year old Windows XP machine can do that very well still. Unless the machine actually dies, buying a new one is not on their mind or in their budget plans.
Even for companies, the current hardware they have works well enough for probably 90% of their employees. Upgrading hardware is not going to give them any increase in productivity so why buy anything new unless the old mach
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Absolutely. At home, I'm running a 10 year old AMD Phenom X4, and it's only gotten noticeably slow in the last year or so (although DOOM didn't run great last year).
At work, we just upgraded our four-year old 2.6 GHz, i5 dual-core Lenovo laptops with... new 2.6 GHz, i7 dual-core Lenovo laptops.
Year-over-year performance improvements simply aren't that important these days. The massive core counts recently announced by AMD and Intel may, on the other hand, make an upgrade attractive...
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Most likely yes...
Your 6400+ was cutting edge in 2007, but it's several generations behind and 10 years old... Modern mobile processors are likely more powerful while using a fraction of the power. There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
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There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
Other than that emulation of an x86 executable on an ARM processor is slower than running it natively on an x86-64 processor.
No longer a home appliance (Score:5, Interesting)
PC's are alive and well in business, but shrinking at home. They are too expensive and too much trouble to maintain for consumers, in part because Windows is a POC.
The younger generation can type on virtual (mobile) keyboards as fast as most PC typers such that they don't need a PC for email etc.; and tablets can have plug-in keyboards.
Re:No longer a home appliance (Score:4, Funny)
It doesn't count if their accuracy is terrible, even WITH autocorrect.
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You're spot on except 'u' and your lowercase sentence. Phones expand both for you, so nobody actually sounds like that anymore. But yes, we're moving to a more forgiving mode of communicating, and I'm all for it.
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The younger generation can type on virtual (mobile) keyboards as fast as most PC typers
It doesn't count if their accuracy is terrible, even WITH autocorrect.
Lol. You speak truth; however, my experience with autocorrect is that it introduces more errors than it fixes. Very frustrating when the word "damn" gets changed to "Damon". I guess I just do not speak politically correctly enough. Ah well, I am older and will die off soon.
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Not just kids. My wife has a laptop that's probably opened the lid on three times in the last six months, and now she complains that every time she does, it has to download dozens of updates. Mostly she uses her phone and tablet, and she's not even sure she wants a new tablet, except sometimes she likes to watch movies, particularly when she's sick and in bed, so maybe we'll upgrade to a decent 8" tablet. Even I crack open my notebook a lot less than I used to. Most of my email is done on my phone these day
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Mostly she uses her phone and tablet, and she's not even sure she wants a new tablet, except sometimes she likes to watch movies, particularly when she's sick and in bed, so maybe we'll upgrade to a decent 8" tablet.
Why not a 10" with a full HD screen for video, unless that would be too unwieldy for bed use.
Most of my email is done on my phone these days, it's just a lot simpler.
The reality is a lot of the casual and entertainment aspects of computing which I used to do on my PC is now being done on my portable devices.
Yep, I found that I don't even need to turn on the PC for basic browsing/email like I used to, thanks to the tablet (10" Lenovo A10-70f). Heck I'm even replying to you on it, with a bluetooth keyboard. (Logitech K480 which I picked up for 11 bucks and is much more pleasant than I expected)
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I use my current PC far more than my tablet. I just don't need a new PC. My current machine is fine.
Re: No longer a home appliance (Score:2)
I'd love to see *anyone* -- young OR old -- type 100+wpm (and few errors) with anything less than a good, tactile mechanical keyboard. At least, not without lord of autocorrect Eris...
Windows Troubles [Re:No longer a home appliance] (Score:3)
They don't, and that's part of the problem: it requires too much babysitting and preventative work to keep running right.
Malware is a big problem, especially when the PC is not configured properly or people visit too many shady sites or install shady software. PC vendors put all kinds of crap-ware on them and if you don't remove it, bleep often happens down the road.
About a year ago my Windows 7 PC couldn't get Windows updates; a bad update file jammed
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everybody's poking at their phones (Score:3)
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Oh come on, get your facts straight - it was the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 detonating, not the S7!
Useless article (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA does not link to the original data, and it is referring to results of only the last quarter.
Does it count only brand-name PCs or the industry as a whole? Are they counting revenue, turnover or number of units sold?
It does not say. Therefore you can't really infer anything from it.
The gaming PC community is the one most willing to spend a lot of money on new computers. That community is thriving.
While a good gaming PC today costs about the same as a gaming PC did twenty years ago, low-end PCs for office work have gone down in price considerably and there is little incentive to upgrade.
Remind me (Score:2)
Remind me, when was Ryzen released? In earnest, I mean. PC sector is undergoing some switches.
Additionally, it appears that some of the larger OEMs have finally gotten the message that SSDs for the system mount / OS drive is mandatory, and that going with larger SSDs is better; although, it may be some time before you see a Samsung 960 PRO NVMe of an appropriate minimum size (1TB+) standard on anything.
Now if they can offer better networking (10GBe, or even 5GBe would do), better audio (never use integrated
Performance plateau (Score:4, Insightful)
A dual core box from 10 years ago is still plenty of power for what most people are doing. It still browses fine and plays YouTube without any problems as well. No big shocker there. Sure we have cores into double digits but clock speeds aren't any faster. Software has become bloated at the same pace. Go back 20 years to 1997. Your browser renders pages as quickly today as it did back then.
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Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yea, I built my previous one in 2008 and it is still running (girlfriend uses it occasionally). I had enough Windows 10 problems with it that I rolled it back to 7 and built myself a new system last year, just because I can :)
[John]
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Yup. This has been the case for over a decade now. Even in the corporate market where there are policies letting you get a new PC with no questions asked if you current one is more than four years old (for example), most employees don't ask because getting the settings just the way they want them on the new system will take forever--they probably don't remember half the things they've changed. The typical upgrade cycle is more like eight years. Laptops are upgraded more frequently, as the mobile systems
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It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore. Many people just need a laptop, and some just need a phone.
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It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore.
The flip side of this is that with PC component prices rising due to lack of economies of scale, the sticker shock of needing a PC might end up dissuading someone who gets buy with a phone and a tablet from becoming a gamer, artist, or hobbyist in the first place.
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Sadly, this is true. My gaming PC is 5 years old now, and the only parts on it that were seriously out of date were the graphics card (Radeon 6870: AMD stopped offering driver updates for it), and the hard drive. I upgraded those two parts with a GeForce 1060 and an SSD, and it's still as good as any modern PC that costs less than $700. The original Core i7 processor in it posts benchmarks comparable to a modern day Core i5. Why would I bother upgrading that?
Not news (Score:2)
This has been a trend for quite some time. And the causes are the same: Lackluster jumps in performance in the last 10 years, and the rise of the Portable Personal Computer (PPC, Smartphone.)
Naturally no one is going to bother to buy a new PC when all their current one needs is a memory and GPU upgrade.
I've spoken with people still running Core2's for their gaming rig, just slap a nice GPU in there and enough memory, and for gaming.. it's plenty.
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingl
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This has been a trend for quite some time. And the causes are the same: Lackluster jumps in performance in the last 10 years, and the rise of the Portable Personal Computer (PPC, Smartphone.)
I think it's more that the performance has mostly outpaced the need. Like you can now get 8/16 core CPUs at consumer-ish prices, NVMe-based PCIe cards that make normal SSDs look slow, 64-128GB RAM, but like... why? The only real killer product for consumers is the GPU and even there a single 1080Ti will play almost every game at 3840x2160 with Very High/Ultra quality at 60+ FPS. If you just want 1080p gaming with decent quality or play games that are more fun than GPU intensive like say Overwatch, DOTA, Roc
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The only real killer product for consumers is the GPU and even there a single 1080Ti will play almost every game at 3840x2160 with Very High/Ultra quality at 60+ FPS.
This is exactly what I said. And the really sad part of it all, is Core2 based systems are still just fine for HIGH END gaming, as long as you got the killer GPU in there. These games, still, don't really need 239482 cores, or high frequency on the CPU. It's just not really very demanding on the CPU for games. GPU is where it's at. And that is absolutely destroying PC sales. And making NVIDIA tons of cash. Ask NVIDIA or AMD how the PC market looks, and I bet they're gunna say it looks fantastic, we'r
Learning programming (Score:2)
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingly difficult now. How do you talk someone into investing in this big clunky box when their PPC does everything the big clunky box does?
Four words: Advanced Placement Computer Science. Phones traditionally haven't been very useful for learning programming. Even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI monitor, their security models are hostile to compilers.
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Four words: Advanced Placement Computer Science. Phones traditionally haven't been very useful for learning programming. Even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI monitor, their security models are hostile to compilers.
Yeah, that's about the same as telling me my car doesn't have enough gas to get to where I'm going. I'm going to get more gas. In the case of PPC's, root the thing and boom, in case of Android PPC's, you got full linux distro and compilers at your fingertips, literally.
No sympathy for iPhone people, you bought into the walled garden. Now you get to live in it.
I no longer need to upgrade every 1 to 2 years (Score:2)
At my shop I got a 6+ year old Dell XPS 9000 i7 920 which I used for my personal computer then then about 5.5 years ago I set it up as my POS system at my shop. Works just fine...
I got a Dell Inspirion 1710 Laptop that is 10 years old and all I needed was to add a SSD drive to it and its work perfectly at the kitchen table for browsing the internet.
At home I got an AMD 10 5800 which is about 3-4 years old and still doing what I need it to like photo/video editing/and playing games. If it wasn't for Ryzen I
Gartner, IDC, yadda yadda yadda (Score:2)
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BSD isn't dead, there are plenty of BSD machines out there. You can even buy them at your local enormo-mart....they're called PS4's.
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Not to mention Macs and iPads, which use part of the FreeBSD userland.
how about dcent hardware (Score:3)
No one seems to want desktops these days, but for laptops -- go back to 4:3 screen resolutions. The 16:9 resolutions SUCK PERIOD.
I have no intention of buying any brand new laptop until screen ratios get back to what it was.
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Even better, 3:4 screen resolutions (not for laptops, obviously). For now, old supplies last -- I've just snagged an used but mint condition "professional" 1600x1200 one for $40 (only flaw: it weights like 5 tons so a regular mounting arm wouldn't hold it). Too bad, once such monitors degrade, we'll be fucked with only 16:9 crap left. Useless in landscape, can't be reasonably placed in portrait either.
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Actually, this monitor is LCD. A LCD that weights 17kg (I'm not joking! -- just checked with a personal scale).
Use Snap to get two 8:9 viewports (Score:2)
Would you prefer an 8:9 aspect ratio, 12% taller than it is wide? If so, take your 16:9 display and snap a window to fill half of it. That's one advantage of a laptop over a tablet: split screen is a standard window management feature.
The Blame List (Score:4, Insightful)
Why I haven't upgraded:
Conclusion: Unless you're a gamer your old PC is fine.
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You can skip out on 1 and 2 by buying a refurbished ThinkPad with GNU/Linux from Technoethical.
Duh... (Score:3)
Let's see, Intel and AMD's offerings have been complete shit until very recently. your 10 year old i7 is absolutely fast enough and in some instances as fast as a i7 computer from 6 months ago.
Only recently did both chip makers get off their asses and offer any kind of a performance boost that will make a difference and get people interested in buying a PC.
Watch sales to double in the next 12 months.
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your 10 year old i7
No such thing, the first i7's were released until November 2008.
in some instances as fast as a i7 computer from 6 months ago.
That is because the fuckers at Intel slap the i7 brand on damn near everything from low clocked dual-core ultra-mobile parts to high end desktop monsters.
Progress has definitely been slower than in the past and intel's "mainstream first" strategy has left the high end market confused but nevertheless a Broadwell-e i7 will be substantially faster than the corresponding original i7.
Whether you will notice that speed of course depends on what you
I for one... (Score:2)
The past monthI had to buy a new laptop. I ended up buying an used T450 on e-bay, instead of a new T470, because the model from two years ago was more than enough for my needs, and it was almost $1k cheaper. I've been a serial buyer of PCs since the concept existed, and, being on the power user end of the spectrum, it's the first time that such a thing has happened to me. Always I had to have the new whatever, be it 16Mb RAM, or a color screen, or USB... This time that would be M.2 NVMe SSD (the acronyms ar
Computer Is Smarter Than Me (Score:2)
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You don't understand because you haven't done it. You're just guessing, try it and learn something.
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He's talking about watching pr0n. I think.
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In fact, I would make it a hallmark of my business to NOT be like the others, while also not coming up with nonsense such as donating money to charities in the company's name. I'd simply sell a honest product or service and never cut corners.
I buy my computers from a small, local custom PC builder who operates this way. Super high-quality components (they constantly evaluate reliability and stock the components that perform the best over time) and excellent service, with the ability to precisely customize a PC to my needs. As long as they keep up the excellent performance, I'll never buy a PC from anywhere else. The catch? You pay significantly more for a PC than if you just buy some mass manufactured product from Dell.
What you're describin
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So why "go public" to begin with? That's the whole point. You just assume that this must be done. Why?
No, I don't assume it "must be done". Please don't put words in my mouth.
I haven't been in that situation, so I can't speak as to the mindset of those who do it, but I suspect it's a desire to grow the business and become more successful. Or, if you want to view it negatively, you could call it a combination of greed and ambition. They essentially sell their company to the public for a large infusion of capital, and in return, control is ceded to a managing board of directors and the shareholders at larg
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Another reason for an IPO is to let investors cash out.
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"Companies exist purely to make as much money as possible."
What kind of greedy bastard coined that expression?
What kind of troll asks that kind of off-topic question? Ohh, yeah. An AC.
Re:Obvious really. (Score:5, Insightful)
People may be, but the big drivers of PC sales, particularly in the over $500 range or businesses, and in particular the enterprise, and quite frankly the extra cycles and RAM that come with newer desktops don't really confer much advantage for many applications. It's one thing if it's the guys in the engineering department who need hefty workstations, or the guys editing videos or running financial simulations, but the bulk of most offices are people churning out documents, emailing and working on fairly modest spreadsheets, and most of the hardware put out in five or six years ago (or even longer, as I can attest), can do that without issue. Even if you're making money hand over fist, why would you replace perfectly good hardware? Not replacing hardware means you make even more money.
We should be tracking video card sales (Score:2)
Admittedly it just had its 3rd video card upgrade. Everything else is "original".
We should be tracking video card sales
Yeah, yeah, more laptops these days.
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I've got a similar machine, HP/Compaq CQ5320F was originally an Athlon X2 2.8 GHz with 3GB of RAM. But the motherboard can take a Phenom X4 (I've got the 2.8GHz 925 in it)
I eventually upped the RAM to 4GB. the specs were vague on how much it supported, but I found out this version of the motherboard can handle more than 4GB of RAM so I upped it to 8GB
I've upgraded the GPU three times. Onboard is Nvidia 6150SE, which I originally upped to a GT220 (1GB GDDR3 version), then to a GT640 SC Rev 2 (1GB GDDR5) an
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I've been building computers for myself for close to 25 years (starting when I used to drool over 286 motherboards with 1MB of RAM!) and I've come to realize that the last computer I built (a good 6 years ago now) is probably the last one I'll ever build. It's still running, and running well, and is more than fast enough for my needs. All I've done to it over the past half decade is replace/upgrade its storage. An i7-930 with 24GiB of RAM is a pretty quick little beast for any day to day operations.
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I probably didn't need to replace my 2008 system as it still works just fine for most of what I do at home (mostly systems type stuff with lots of VMs on my R710), but I did get a pretty hefty kickback from the government last year so I initially spent about $2,900 on a new system that included a 43" 4k LG type monitor. Then added more bits over the year bringing it up to $3,600.
With the power I have now, for my more simple needs (I play a few older games and am looking forward to the Starcraft Reboot), it'
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From the quotes provided, they only include built systems by top-tier home PC makers. So it's hard to tell what's being measured.
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And how many Pis and other SOCs are lying unused in drawers? Well over half I'd guess. I have several that I always meant to use in projects but never did.
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I stopped rolling my own about six years ago. There was a point at which the savings couldn't justify the effort anymore.
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the biggest namely Linux KVM which battles against the vSphere. AWS/EC2, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace.
are you confusing kvm and qemu?
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I assume you're not using a stock Intel heatsink. I have to throttle mine to 1.6G or it hits 80 [Celsius] if I run 4 mencoders in parallel.
I know what the solution is, but that involves making a decision. Well two, actually.