PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years (venturebeat.com) 67
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.
A New Challenger Approaches (Score:2)
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?
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No. The reports state that the sales increase was due to business refreshes.
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Right... And the fact that AMD just added competition to the market and Intel was forced to cut their prices on many of their chips and release the i9 series has nothing to do with that. The IT purchasers probably were finally able to get their needs past the bean counters to get what they needed now that prices are coming back into check.
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No, that's just you making an unfounded assertion not backed up by either report.
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https://techreport.com/news/33... [techreport.com]
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It's about time! (Score:3)
Re:It's about time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows 10 Finally Killed them all, grinding them to a halt.
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If it was only six years. My work box runs on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 from 2008. It still keeps up with most things, though an OpenSCAD render yesterday took the better part of 45 minutes to complete. (Probably ought to run that same render on the Core i5 4690K at home to see how it compares.)
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Yeah, but I am using a decade old desktop PCs. They are starting to get to their limits. However, I am still unemployed after 1 year, 6 months, 27 days, 19 hours, 34 minutes, and 1 second. :(
Needing an upgrade. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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
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>> "The issue is, for a lot of people their Phones and Tablets have been more then good enough for their computing use"
> That's not true. I wish people like you would just stfu with your "opinions as facts". No one gives a shit what you think.
Micro$oft people get angry so easily...
It's not due to mobile (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Just waiting for the Ryzen+ version to pull the trigger on my first PC upgrade since 2009. Gonna go future proof for the next ten years with a 16 or 24-core Threadripper2
Why not 32? [extremetech.com]
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I could eat ramen and shit better haikus than that.
Thanks spectre and meltdown! (Score:1)
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.
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No:
“PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment,” Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa said in a statement.
Multi screen / Bitcoin effect (Score:2)
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
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Even my Eee 1000 can do it. GP is either delusional or unlucky.
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I think Laptop Computers a now classified as a PC nowadays too.
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With DEs that support multiple desktops having been a thing for decades, I've never seen the need to emulate them in hardware.
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Wow, looks like I managed to get under someone's incredibly thin skin, eh. Ow!
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No, the growth was entirely in business computer refreshes which ended up canceling out the decline in growth of consumer sales.
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As a computer user, I think a lot of it is JavaScript too.
It used to be "I just need a computer for browsing the web and word processing", now browsing the web is by far the heaviest demand out on my computer (work one even).
I do simple layout, photo editing, prepress, the creative suite is lighter for this type of work than many websites that are just for faffing about.
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As a computer user, I think a lot of it is JavaScript too.
It used to be "I just need a computer for browsing the web and word processing", now browsing the web is by far the heaviest demand out on my computer (work one even).
I do simple layout, photo editing, prepress, the creative suite is lighter for this type of work than many websites that are just for faffing about.
Jesus Christ, have you forgotten about Flash already? That was far worse.
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Heavy flash was less omnipresent than heavy JS I think.
For normal web browsing anyway.
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Isn't this the same firm (Score:2)
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.
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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)
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.
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I there causation or merely correlation? And if so, which way round?
Meh, think I'll wait another couple of years. (Score:2)
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
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Some clear direction from the CPU design over the security issues and then its time to upgrade.
No, it's Gentoo vs Chromium vs Air Conditioning (Score:2)
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?
The rise of blockchain ? (Score:2)
You don't do coin mining on a laptop and not everyone can afford a server/GPU rack so ...
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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.