It Was Flat Sales That Helped Microsoft Become America's #5 PC Maker (arstechnica.com) 51
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Microsoft was the fifth-biggest PC maker in the U.S. in the third quarter of this year, according to industry advisory firm Gartner. The top spot in the U.S. belongs to HP, with about 4.5 million machines sold, ahead of Dell at 3.8 million, Lenovo at 2.3 million, and Apple at 2 million. The gap between fourth and fifth is pretty big -- Microsoft sold only 0.6 million Surface devices last quarter -- but it suggests that Microsoft's PC division is heading in the right direction, with sales 1.9 percent higher than the same quarter last year. The company pushed down to sixth place was Acer. The current quarter should be better still; the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio have all been given hardware refreshes which, when combined with the always-busy holiday season, should stimulate higher sales.
Globally, both Gartner and IDC reported a flat PC market (up 0.1 percent in Gartner's view, down 0.9 percent in IDC's), after the previous quarter's modest growth.
"The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades," said one Gartner analyst.
In defining what constitutes a PC, Gartner includes notebooks and "premium" ultramobile devices -- but does not include iPads or Chromebooks.
Globally, both Gartner and IDC reported a flat PC market (up 0.1 percent in Gartner's view, down 0.9 percent in IDC's), after the previous quarter's modest growth.
"The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades," said one Gartner analyst.
In defining what constitutes a PC, Gartner includes notebooks and "premium" ultramobile devices -- but does not include iPads or Chromebooks.
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With views at arsholetechnica decreasing it is easy to see their transparent attempts to get more by doing duplicates on slashdot.
What will drive the next refresh? (Score:5, Interesting)
New Windows versions have dictated hardware refresh up to now. With Windows 10 being the last version, there's no line in the sand. Hardware is good enough. You don't need faster at this point, the bottlenecks are external. Especially office work.
They are going to have to make software even more bloated to encourage hardware buys, or expect that division to suffer.
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Re:What will drive the next refresh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the price of PCs is increasing. This makes sense also, someone else commented that computers are becoming more like durable goods such as a car. If you will have the same unit for a long time, then it makes more sense to get a "premium" one, compared with if you were going to have to replace every couple of years.
In many ways this is a positive- at least from the environmental perspective and in terms of our having quality hardware being designed and available. More OT, I think Microsoft did a lot to push the PC HW business to higher quality, though the down side seems to be that they also follow Apple's habit of producing hard-to-repair, glued together, machines.
stop selling OS for non microsoft hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft could stop selling their operating system for non-microsoft computers. Just like google and apple do.
Microsoft computers, like google computers, are not built by microsoft. I suppose one could argue apple doesn't build there's either but they do design and integrate them themselves.
Or they could just go exclusive and only support HP or Lenovo.
THat would definitely drive the upgrade cycle.
Re:stop selling OS for non microsoft hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's sales increased by more (Score:2)
Apples computer sales increased by 18% last year. That means just their increase alone exceeded all of the microsoft sales. Why isn't that news?
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Wait, what? From the Gartner link [gartner.com] which generated this /. post, Apple's US sales were 2,189,000 units in Q3 2017, and 2,022,000 units in Q3 2018. Apple's worldwide sales were 5,385,000 units and 4,928,000 units for Q3 2017 and Q3 2018, respectively. That's not an 18% increase, that's about an 8% drop in each case.
What should be news is not just that Microsoft has exploded on the scene in the US, but that Lenovo is simply crushing it worldwide (up nearly 11%) and in the US (up over 22%).
Re: Apple's sales increased by more (Score:1)
The only reason to go Apple is because it's the sole proprietary platform you can use to write apps for their profitable gadget, the Iphone.
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There's a very simple answer to this.
Not so long ago microsoft patch dropped support for Windows 7 on 7th gen and higher Intel Processors.
Why?
7th Gen Intel Processors and upwards support 4K UHD, 10-bit HEVC and VP9 encode/decode..
That's right, the BS in the media industry, and Netflix's desire to stream 4k video based on a hardware signature, requried the licensing of the processor broadly affect Microsoft's ability to continue supporting an entire platform.
Do you really think Microsoft and Friends wouldn't
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The reason for this is simple: Microsoft wants you to move heavy CPU functionality to Azure, so you have to pay them monthly for a subscription. This is why MS isn't trying to make the OS force hardware upgrades. They want everyone with thin/zero clients and paying them monthly for each CPU cycle used.
This is the ultimate in vendor lock-in, worse than anyone has dreamed because you can't just take your Azure service and move somewhere else, or bring it in-house.
Combine this with all the snooping data fro
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Yes in the consumer arena, no in the corporate one. Windows system upgrades still drive "hardware refreshes" at major companies, even on hardware perfectly capable of running that new software.
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Poor Headline (Score:2)
Was the industry flat and Microsoft gained over a rival? Were both the industry and Microsoft flat but Microsoft's rivals had enough change to shift Microsoft's position? Was Microsoft flat, but industry overall changes caused Microsoft's rank to change? The headline is ambiguous. I guess I should be happy that the title wasn't "You will never believe what outrageous thing happened to Microsoft's ranking".
How come? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You posed a question about human behaviour and referenced an issue with a device two generations earlier without any qualification as to the impact on people.
I hate the quality of my Surface Pro 3. But the incredibly quick turnaround of problems including replacement devices shipped out a day later is what keeps me considering the next Surface Pro when my old one dies.
On the flip side my father wanted to buy a device with this form factor right while I was having issues, so I recommended against it. He ende
Excluding Chromebooks (Score:2)
Re:Excluding Chromebooks (Score:4, Informative)
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It's easy enough to add an SD card for storage and you can always install ChroniumOS if you're worried about privacy.
Re:Excluding Tablets (Score:1)
Re: Excluding Tablets (Score:2)
Most tablets run a toy operating system with no real filesystem and limited storage options. Many of them don't even support real removable storage. They don't have a USB host connector.
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Once again stealing ideas from Apple (Score:2)
Yep, I said it. Come at me, bro.
Re: Once again stealing ideas from Apple (Score:2)
Ideas from Apple like a touchscreen system that runs a non-toy operating system? When, if ever, will Apple do something like that?
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Oh, you mean the one that's such a piece of sh*t that you turn it off to keep it from doing stupid stuff? Oh, wait, I'm thinking of that crappy, worthless touchpad.
Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The dup article touts Microsoft's US PC sales once again, overlooking the fact that Microsoft's miserable 600k worldwide PC sales are less than one sixth of Acer's worldwide PC sales. WTF. [gartner.com]
With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project". Looks like the spin department is desperately feeding the media to try to keep it on life support.
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How is it misleading? They said they are #5. They made no mention of being bigger than Acer.
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With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project"
Sorry, no. It's not a vanity project. It's a very much needed strategy to stop Microsoft from being the guys who sell unloved old-school software to old people who will run it on ugly machines; while Apple and Google sell a great ecosystem of desirable devices running all the popular apps.
It should be obvious which way would be a dead end.
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It should be obvious why Microsoft is peddling Linux VMs on its cloud.
Zero excitement in PC industry (Score:3)
My home office / light gaming machine is a 2011 MBP that I bought new. I'm using a 12 year old 22" Samsung flat panel monitor. For a couple of months I've been looking for a replacement. Ideally it would be an AIO of some sort. I'm not really interested in another Mac. However the Dell XPS 27 is at least the same price as an iMac. Both are using 7th gen i7 process when the I-9 are available. The graphics cards in these are also a couple years out of date. Look into a desktop with a 4k display in the 27" range and you're still close to $2300 US. I can't see that money for two year old (at least) tech. Asus has a 27" AIO that you can't seem to buy, Acer isn't much cheaper. Basically there really isn't much worth buying in the PC arena unless you want to spend a small fortune for dated gear.
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That's because AIO PCs are a niche product (I would argue that the AIO Macs are also a niche). If you start expanding your search to a regular desktop/tower and a separate 4K monitor you'll quickly find you can get much better hardware at a fraction of the price. And if you're so inclined, you can even make a DIY AIO PC by buying a small form-factor PC that has a kit to mount to a VESA mount on the monitor, and that will also be a fraction of the price, though it won't look quite as nice.
I wonder when I will get a new PC... (Score:2)
I still use decade old desktop PCs with 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 & Debian oldstable/Jessie v8.