The PC Market Just Had its First Big Growth in 10 Years (theverge.com) 40
The PC was supposed to die 10 years ago, but it's just experienced its first big growth in a decade. From a report: Market research firm Canalys reports that PC shipments reached 297 million units in 2020, up an impressive 11 percent from 2019. IDC puts the year at 302 million shipments, up 13.1 percent year over year. Gartner also agrees that 2020 was a big year for PCs and the biggest growth we've seen since 2010. PC shipments are up thanks to demand related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Supply constraints made it difficult to buy a new laptop halfway through the year, and demand continued throughout 2020. "Demand is pushing the PC market forward and all signs indicate this surge still has a way to go," says IDC's Ryan Reith. While home working and remote learning have been big drivers, people are also turning to PCs and laptops for entertainment.
Old computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Old computers (Score:4, Funny)
Aside from the IME, Spectre, Meltdown etc you mean.
Guaranteeing continued sales even with a progress stillstand.
HA! And you thought Intel messed up there!
And if it hadn't been for those meddling AMDs, we would have gotten away with it!!
Re: (Score:3)
The cost of replacing your battery will be more than your computer is likely worth.
Re:Old computers (Score:5, Informative)
The cost of replacing your battery will be more than your computer is likely worth.
If you compare the cost of buying the laptop used to the cost of a new battery, probably. But if the laptop still functions and does what I need, I'd rather spend $100 on a new battery that $800 plus on a new laptop and have to take the time to migrate what I need over to it.
I'm sure I'm an outlier but my current laptop is 5+ years old but was $4700 when it was new as I needed pretty specific performance for work. I haven't looked at what a new computer that is comparable would cost. But I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap to get 32GB of RAM, 8GB of video RAM, 2 TB SSD and another 4TB on a spinning drive. Replacement batteries are $80.
INB4 the next "PCs are dying" nonsense cries. (Score:4, Insightful)
When everyone who stocked up now will be good for a decade at the same time, and sales fall even deeper.
Because apparently analyst "experts" do not get the basic things that a child gets, like market saturation, or opportunity leading to a wave followed by a trough.
I think Wall Street needs a seven year old human as a permanent member. To point out the too obvious things. And those so foreign human things. ;)
It's how our economy's structured (Score:2)
Re:INB4 the next "PCs are dying" nonsense cries. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ignoring pandemic bump and busts, PC's are still the mainstay of businesses and that's not changing any time soon. It's one of the reasons why these "mobile first" dev stacks are annoying. Mobile UI's are a subset of real GUI's, and box one in when it comes to productive UI design. We need a state-ful GUI markup standard to help expand office-ware beyond MS. JS+DOM keeps failing in terms of bloat & reliability. Make GUI's Great Again! Fuck the over-mobile fad. Burn Bootstrap on top a flagpole while gittin off my law!
All thanks to.. (Score:1)
All Hail Our Holy Lady Dr. Lisa Su!!
Slayer of evil Intel!
Soon to be Slayer of evil Nvidia!
Joke aside, the new Ryzen and Radeons impressed me so much that I finally upgraded from my 3770 and gtx 970.
Why Intel is not going away (Score:3)
Re:Why Intel is not going away (Score:5, Interesting)
They announced in their CES presentation that most of their sales are bread and butter (Celeron/Pentium) laptops for schools and small businesses. They sell hundreds of millions of them and amd/arm-based competitors have a long way to go in that department
Huh? ARM is currently entirely suited to that market. It is cheap, energy efficient and even last gen mobile CPUs have enough power for what most users in that category want to do. If Apple's move spurns a shift by Microsoft towards ARM support, then it will become a blood bath in that market and any profits are going to evaporate very quickly. Further the rise of convertible tablets and phone docks is going to blur the lines to the point where the market will probably come under attack even if MS doesn't shift towards ARM on PCs.
This sort of thing is just investor hype from Intel to divert attention from their failure to compete at the high end of the market on both design (AMD) and process (TSMC). That is the real existential threat for them.
Re: (Score:3)
It is cheap, energy efficient and even last gen mobile CPUs have enough power for what most users in that category want to do.
You can't get cheaper than free. Intel had such a hard time producing good CPUs lately that they probably had more low-binned CPUs than good ones. They can sell them cheap and don't care if the end consumer gets terrible battery life.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
No, ARM was NOT suited, too under powered for laptop use for word processing and spreadsheet. I have arm tablets and pi. No one wants efficiency at the price of being as slow as mud in January.
Maybe Apple's new ARM will change that, but before that wasn't viable option.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Makes sense to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my family of 4, in 2020 alone we acquired
2 new family computers ... And we probably aren't that unusual. So, yeah, I imagine it's been a good year for the tech industry top to bottom.
2 new windows laptops from work
1 new chromebook from school
1 new iPad from school
2 new 10" Kindle Fires
2 new smart phones
4 new headsets
2 new web cams
2 new monitors
1 new printer
Re: (Score:1)
They are Work Stations vs PC. (Score:5, Interesting)
I expect much of this, is a lot of people who are working from home, and not leaving their office. So they would rather have a work station, with a full sized keyboard, and a big monitor. Also I expect that a lot of these businesses may be pressuring people to work with their home device. So a Desktop Workstation would be a better value overall.
Work gave me a laptop. 99.99% of the time it is plugged into a Docking Station with 2 other displays, and the laptop display open, with a mechanical keyboard and a good optical mouse. If work told me I needed to work with my own equipment, and my personal stuff was out of date, I may have opt to get myself a good desktop system vs a laptop too. Just because it would be a better work station. More power, more flexibility, bigger displays.
End of the desktop... (Score:5, Interesting)
We've been hearing for years that the end of the desktop is neigh. But it's not going to happen anytime soon imo. In the 80's desktops, "personal computers" as they were called then, were expensive. Even a cheap one was not so cheap. By the late 1980's the prices got more reasonable. By that point many of us were upgrading frequently because the difference between computers that were 2 years apart was very noticeable. Between faster/more RAM, faster CPU's and video card advancements it was crazy how much of a difference 2 years made. This went on through the early to mid 2000's.
Then laptops started to become competitive with desktop performance. Since desktops were a lot easier to upgrade by swapping in a new VGA or more RAM, new desktop purchases slowed and laptops were harder or impossible to upgrade. So they got purchased more. Which ate into the desktop market a lot.
While there have been advancements in desktop hardware in the last 10 years, most mid tier desktops from ten years ago are still good enough. The days of not having the latest VGA to play a game are gone. There just isn't the need to upgrade like there was. Email and internet surfing is done on phones these days. But most people I know still use the desktop for a lot. In some cases a docked laptop. But unless you are a hardcore gamer, do a lot of video editing, there's just no need to have the latest and greatest. And even then, a 3 year old high end gaming computer is probably still good enough for the vast majority.
Re: (Score:1)
We've been hearing for years that the end of the desktop is neigh.
Don't listen to "neigh-sayers"! <g>
Re: (Score:2)
We've been hearing for years that the end of the desktop is neigh. But it's not going to happen anytime soon imo.
The end of the desktop is almost certain to coincide with The Year of Linux On The Desktop.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. I refurbished my 3770K with a new case and a GTX 1660 Super for my friends last fall. The dad has been using it for teleworking since spring and commented on how surprised he was at how well it ran despite ostensibly being from 2012. Even if I had left the existing GTX 770 in it I'm sure it would have still been good: I was running The Division 2 @ 1080p high settings around 90fps shortly before building a new system.
Who cares about market growth? (Score:2)
As long as the market does not dissppear entirely, then consumers can buy new pcs and good manufacturers can prosper by increasing narket share.
Died and replaced by what, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are we really supposed to move all of our work to mobile phones? MSWord - do it on your phone. Excel - do it on your phone. Visual Studio, Photoshop, CAD applications, hell let's throw in my own work (testing spacecraft), let's all do it on bloody mobile phones with their microscopic screens and their anemic input methods and their walled gardens. No more desktop games either, everything goes to mobile phone.
I despise those idiots who see a trend and extrapolate it out to infinity, with predictable ridiculous results.
Re: (Score:3)
I think they meant laptops as separate from desktop PC, but I've always used a tower PC as my main box, a laptop just can't compare for a number of reason. Max memory, disk speed and number of disks, ease of upgrade/expansion/replacement, the PC is the best home computer solution.
Sure I have a laptop I hardly use, and my employer gave me a laptop that I plug into huge expansion dock and drive big monitors and lots of peripherals, then I remotely access it from home, lolz.
Re: (Score:2)
Not on the phone screen itself, but there are phones like the Asus ROG Phone that already have their own dock to present a desktop-like experience. For anyone doing general business computing via their browser, email, Office apps, etc. we've reached the point where they could provide an adequate experience. I personally did my programming homework at school via RDP to my home desktop, and there were a few times in a pinch I even did it with my tablet and bluetooth kb/m.
If you've never (Score:3)
"The PC was supposed to die 10 years ago" (Score:3)
Tablets, frankly, are expensive toys. You really can't do any serious work on them. Laptops are okay but they're not expandable or upgradable in any significant way. Smartphones are not computers, they're phones that LARP being a computer, and they're locked down regardless. If you want serious computing power it has to be a desktop, there will always be a market for them, they're not going away.
Re: (Score:2)
The one thing is monitor real estate. Yes, you can do some work on a tablet, but nothing beats multiple, high IPS monitors for getting work done easily, and laptops, tablets and smartphones can't really offer that. CAD, spreadsheets, video post-production, audio production and other tasks which just require screen real estate come to mind.
Yes, there have been some stabs at that, like the Motorola Atrix, but because the hardware isn't standard and support vanishes after a model, using a phone as something
So sales last year were just 260 million? (Score:4, Insightful)
News flash, 2007: Sales of PCs are 260 MILLION! Company valuations are soaring on the awesome news of rapid growth!
News flash, 2019: Sales of PCs are 260 million...down from 351 million in 2011...PC market can basically be written off as unimportant.
Shows you how much focus of "business news" and "industry news" is about endless growth. A Steady-state, of making products and getting paid for that == death.
I'm pretty sure this relates to stock values, not real company value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Are they counting internal upgrades too? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Very Explainable Why (Score:1)