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Businesses Hardware

PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years (venturebeat.com) 67

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
From a report: Gartner found PC shipments were up globally in Q2 2018, the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that's largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.
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PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years More

PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years

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  • You mean when there is real competition, lower prices, and innovation there is more interest in PC market the market grows... Who'd a thunk it?

  • It's about time! (Score:3)

    by JudgeFurious ( 455868 ) on Friday July 13, 2018 @01:09PM (#56942316)
    All those machines from 6 years ago, they're finally wearing out. I didn't think this would ever end!

  • Needing an upgrade. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday July 13, 2018 @01:09PM (#56942322)

    The issue is, for a lot of people their Phones and Tablets have been more then good enough for their computing use. The people who do real work on their computers actually have been taking advantage to the fact companies like Microsoft, and Apple and the others have been working dilgantly trying to get their bloated apps optimized for mobile devices, that the PC applications have been getting updates which work faster then before, saving us from getting an upgrade.

    However we are reaching a point now where things are catching up and our 6 - 8 year old computers are starting to show their age and are due for an upgrade.

    However as I have ranted many times before, We are no longer really looking for a PC, but a Workstation. The PC Functions have fallen to our mobile devices, were real work and processing is more of Workstation thing.

    • Cyclical (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The business has become cyclical for just those reasons.

      We'll see this year and maybe next of increased sales and then sales will decline. And when those machines wear out or whatever, people will start buying machines again.

      Markets are only so big and they all eventually get saturated.

      • The PC upgrade cycle has also became longer then before too.

        1989 8088
        1993 486DX 50 MHZ
        1997 Pentium 200 MHZ
        2001 Pentium 3 1ghz (Technically I switch to a powerbook at the time, but that would be the competing processor)
        2006 Core II Duo
        2012 Core I7 3rd gen Sandy Bridge
        That is where I am at now The 8th Gen Chips seems nice, but I will probably upgrade next year..

        But before when upgrading after every 4 years I have gotten a noticeable improvement in the computer. Then by 2008 With the great recession, and als

    • It's not due to mobile (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday July 13, 2018 @01:59PM (#56942714)
      PC sales began leveling off [asymco.com] in the late 1990s, more steeply after 2000. Long before smartphones and tablets.

      What happened was Intel and AMD ran headfirst into physics. Prior to 2000, CPU clock speeds had been doubling roughly every 18 months. But the power a processor needs increases non-linearly with frequency [rice.edu]. Past about 3 GHz (roughly 2002), CPUs began to require exorbitant amounts of additional power for little gains in clock speed.

      Consequently, the rate of clock speed increases nearly stalled after 2002 [wikipedia.org] (at a bit above 3 GHz). Before 2000, each new gen of Intel CPU roughly doubled performance. Today, each new gen only nets about a 5%-15% performance improvement, and most of that has been due to improvements in parallel processing (more cores, speculative execution, hyperthreading, all the goodies which made the news last year as avenues for new exploits).

      Up til about 20002, software makers had been counting on increased CPU performance to support the new features they were adding. They relied on people upgrading their PCs to be able to run the latest version of their software. Now that an upgraded PC was barely faster than the PC it replaced, software makers were forced to do something they'd given little thought to in the past - optimize.

  • Thanks spectre and meltdown! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Who wants to bet that the industry finds similar vulnerabilities to fix on a regular basis from now on? In the same way that Apple "fixes" their older phones.

  • I can't imagine how people can get anything done without support for many multiple screens. Two external units are my bare minimum. Most laptops however, either support only one or make you turn off your built-in LCD when you connect the second one because they can't handle the total resolution. For me, a professional programmer, desktop is the only viable choice.

    On a different note, I'd be inclined to risk a statement that the PC market growth has something to do with the declining price of bitcoins and

  • Isn't this the same firm that was declaring the PC market dead about 6 months ago. It is like the 7th day Adventists, if you predict the death of something every other week, and growth the weeks in between, eventually one or the other will happen.

    • I'd love to see someone making a graph of what gartner and IDG predict and what actually happened and show how stupidly off those predictions actually are. Usually in economic predictions, short term at least, are kind of self fulfilling, as people may tend to use them as targets, but the ones made by these 2 entities a more like random number generators...

    • Isn't this the same firm that was declaring the PC market dead about 6 months ago. It is like the 7th day Adventists, if you predict the death of something every other week, and growth the weeks in between, eventually one or the other will happen.

      Oh come on. "Global PC shipments grew 1.4% in Q2 2018, first increase in 6 years" - same time last year sales fell 4.3%. In 2011, Q2 saw sales of 83.3 million, this year it was 62.1 - a drop of 25.5% despite that huge growth you so loudly cheer now. The PC market is at best undead.

      Heck, here's a chart if you need a visual cue. https://www.businessinsider.de/pc-sales-decline-year-chart-2017-1?op=1&r=US&IR=T [businessinsider.de].

  • Two possible explanations (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Friday July 13, 2018 @02:34PM (#56942998) Homepage

    A lot of journalists attribute this to Windows 10.

    I'm not so sure but what I'm sure of is that PCs just don't run forever and probably we're close to the stage when a large mass of older PCs have finally been deprecated in favor of new purchases. Secondly, the number of people on this planet is still growing, so that should have happened sooner or later.

  • My computer is six years old, but I'm not running into any issues that are frustrating enough to actively try to solve.
    My six year old GPU still runs today's games, can handle my three monitors.
    My six year old SSD still handles files fine.
    My six year old CPU still handles the workload.
    The 32GB RAM limit of my MOBO is starting to be a bit irksome, but not really a big issue.

    So maybe if I wait a few more years CPU manufacturers will handle their security issues, their process shrink issues.
    GPU manufacturers w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Same. SSD, GPU, lots of RAM, Windows 10 are all ok for now.
      Some clear direction from the CPU design over the security issues and then its time to upgrade.

  • A decade ago, it was compiling OpenOffice on Gentoo that moved me to Q6600, then Sandy Bridge, then Ivy Bridge. Now it's the Chromium and Webkit build times that are moving me to Ryzen/Threadripper, provided my HVAC can handle the load. What else would you use a computer for?

  • You don't do coin mining on a laptop and not everyone can afford a server/GPU rack so ...

    • You don't do coin mining on a laptop and not everyone can afford a server/GPU rack so ...

      So next year the PC market will completely collapse - like coin mining.

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