Gartner Predicts 9.5% Drop in PC Shipments (theregister.com) 47
The party is over for PC makers as figures from Gartner suggest the market is on course for a breathtaking decline this year. From a report: According to the analysts, worldwide PC shipments will decline by 9.5 percent, with consumer demand leading the way -- a 13.5 percent drop is forecast, far greater than business PC demand, which is expected to drop by 7.2 percent year on year. The PC market in the EMEA region is forecast to fare even worse, with a 14 percent decline on the cards for 2022. Gartner pointed the finger of blame at uncertainty caused by conflicts, price increases and simple unavailability of products. Lockdowns in China were also blamed for an impact in consumer demand. It all makes for grim reading from a channel perspective. While worldwide PC shipments fared the worst, tablet devices are forecast to fall by 9 percent and mobile phones by 7.1 percent. Overall, the total decline over all types of devices in the report is expected to be 7.6 percent. This is in stark contrast to a 11 percent increase year on year in the shipment of PCs in 2021 and 5 per cent for mobile phones.
Expected (Score:3)
Pandemic social distancing means that a lot of nations are going back to face to face communications at least to some extent, which means that need for more computers is going down. At the same time everyone who actually needed one for remote work now has one, and that one will likely last them quite a while.
It's going to be interesting to see if we'll see a wave of need for replacements for pandemic era machines in a couple of years, or if they will last users a decade. Considering how good of a performance a typical PC has offered for last decade or so (ever since intel's Sandy Bridge really) for typical user's needs, I suspect that most people will be just fine with their computer for another decade if it doesn't break.
Re:Expected (Score:5, Insightful)
But many postponed PC purchases because prices spiked from supply problems. There should still be pent-up demand for a while.
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Re:Expected (Score:5, Insightful)
And every gamer has postponed getting a new PC until the GPUs become available because you don't buy a PC where your old GPU doesn't fit only to discover that by the time GPUs become available again, they don't play nice with the chipset of your mainboard.
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And every gamer has postponed getting a new PC until the GPUs become available because you don't buy a PC where your old GPU doesn't fit only to discover that by the time GPUs become available again, they don't play nice with the chipset of your mainboard.
Gamers are a small but lucrative market.
What Gartner is talking about are mainly business purchases. With recession on everyone's mind companies are looking cut expenditure and that means not replacing those laptops for another year or 2.
GPU prices are slowly dropping to normal, as a gamer you could have easily replaced every other component as CPU, RAM, storage, et al. were all pretty cheap. I built a new gaming box for under £900 in 2021... I managed to get a GTX 3070 FE for £370, a new
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The thing is, if I replace my CPU/Mainboard now and by the time GPUs become available at sensible prices nVidia is out with its 4080 line of GPUs, I would want to have a CPU/Mainboard that works nicely with these 4xxx series cards, even if I can't afford or don't want to buy them just yet, because I sure don't want to get a new CPU again next year.
With games, the bottleneck is most of the time the GPU. At this point, the rest of your computer may well "survive" through two generations of GPUs if you're one
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Office PC's/laptops were still in short supply during the peak of the pandemic such that people found short-term alternatives such as living with a slow PC or paying to repair an existing one that's long in the tooth.
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But people often made short-term "patches" because PC's were not available during the gap. The patches will start failing over the next few years.
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Supply problems were on the discrete GPU side. Everything else is freely available and has been outside the couple of months window during the initial rush.
And now, even discrete GPUs are massively oversupplied with prices dropping rapidly as inventories are not getting moved because demand is flagging while supply is abundant.
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Yes, and there are also those preparing for Windows 10 EOL.
In large organizations where 70% of their systems don't have compatible TPMs and are required to have systems that have data encrypted at rest (CJIS, Healthcare, DoD, Defense, etc), the most cost effective solution is BitLocker.
So there's going to be some scrambling for a while to get everything up to date by 2025.
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It's going to be interesting to see if we'll see a wave of need for replacements for pandemic era machines in a couple of years, or if they will last users a decade.
Or people who are happy to ride out their current systems running Windows 10 until forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11, which "requires" newer hardware. (I'll be switching to Linux full-time at that point.) For example, all my systems are *way* too old to support Windows 11 hardware "requirements", but run Windows 10 and Linux just fine.
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I'd place my bets that the pandemic-induced purchasing wave gets most of those people buy for many years. BUT, a wildcard is how popular AR and VR become, I suppose? I could see where today's Zoom type video-chat becomes essentially obsolete. Imagine a new standard expectation of an advanced videoconference where users all appear to be in the same room with the ability to place virtual versions of real paperwork or things on the virtual desk for all participants to view.
This would require a lot of newer har
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VR and AR have been "the next thing that is totally going to break through any day now" for at least a decade at this point. Those who wanted it already have it.
re: VR (Score:2)
Maybe... I was generally not sold on all the VR hype from the get-go. I think it made some sense for niches like certain gaming experiences and simulations (such as practicing surgical procedures).
But enhancing videoconferencing is another strong use-case for the technology. The high cost of suitable GPUs and gear like headsets (which a lot of people don't want to wear anyway) helps keep it from mass adoption. I don't know when it will "break through" to the mainstream, but I think we're going to see it ha
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Cost of VR headsets has been low for many years now. They're at cost level of a typical midrange phone, use comparable hardware and so on. You don't need any external hardware for one, and didn't need it for many years, unless you want a really high end variant that has nothing to do with "simulations and VR conferencing" which are easily run on standalone headsets.
If you want one, there are several offerings in pretty much all price categories from really cheap to really expensive. Everyone who wanted one
Well.. (Score:2)
PCs last a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
The PC I am using is about 8 years old. I have a gazillion programmes (now known as 'apps') running - one of them being a heavily bloated IDE, a gazillion browser tabs open and no signs of strain. Twas never a high end machine either, built it more for small size & low power consumption (i3-4130T)
Back in the 90's if you had a PC that old it would have been fit for a museum and utterly unusable.
Re:PCs last a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
We've reached "good enough" a while ago. The arbitrary obsolescence of hardware by operating system demand ("your mainboard has to support TLA 3.0 for our OS to run on ti!") was rolled back quickly after MS noticed that nobody can, or would want to, buy a new PC just for the questionable honor to be guinea pig for their latest OS.
So what reason is left to upgrade? Games. Which suffer from a lack of available GPUs. So why buy a new PC if in the end I don't get better performance anyway?
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If anything, the reason to update nowadays is because all of a sudden a critical app you need no longer functions unless you update the OS. Which of course won't run on your hardware because of random deprecation. Microsoft al
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The biggest upgrade recently has been moving from mechanical media to SSDs. When Windows 10 came out, it did okay on a hard disk. Now, it is completely unusable on spinning media. After that, the move from SATA to NVMe.
There are a lot of minor things that are driving PC upgrades. The move to 4k displays as a standard is one thing, where HDMI just doesn't cut it when one goes above 60Hz. People using multiple monitors is another, which has changed. For security, having always-on BitLocker, either hardw
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Many people that find Windows 10 slowing down will just get a friend to help them switch from HDD to SSD instead. I just did it for my wife's laptop ($50 - 30 minutes) and it easily rejuvenated her laptop.
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I've noticed a lot on Win 11: I have both Win 10 and 11 VMs on my PC and the 11 one runs a lot slower. Both virtual HDs are on a mechanical HD
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YMMV, my 8 year old MBP (I7 + 16 GB RAM, 500MB SSD) is excellent for general usage, not so good for compiling anymore, takes around an hour to update Pentoo. Desktop side of things, a spring tab on the IO plate on the desktop popped off the 6 year old desktop, into a USB port, and then the MB was dead (8-9 year ago cool hardware), time for a rebuild. Current hardware, not next gen but current common hardware (Radeon 5700x, 32 GB RAM, B550 MB, SSD) smokes the old box's performance. 1.5 hours to compile Li
This Gartner that we are talking about (Score:4, Insightful)
They also predicted in 2011 that by 2015 Windows Phone would own more market share than IOS, trailing Android alone - see https://www.macobserver.com/tm... [macobserver.com].
Had they used data generated by a chimp throwing darts at a board their predictions would not have been much worse.
Re:This Gartner that we are talking about (Score:4, Funny)
Why do you think that's not their data generation method? It sure looks like it is.
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They also predicted in 2011 that by 2015 Windows Phone would own more market share than IOS, trailing Android alone - see https://www.macobserver.com/tm... [macobserver.com].
Had they used data generated by a chimp throwing darts at a board their predictions would not have been much worse.
A chimp! What a brilliant idea! You should get a patent on that or something.
I'm quite certain that they've been using trained goldfish to throw the darts. It is definitely something to see but, perhaps unsurprisingly, not terribly effective. Well, I guess it depends on the experience you were looking for.
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I would love to know gartner hit rate, because from memory alone they seem to be using a 8 ball and a D20 to make their predictions, and people pay money for that kind of BS.
Moores law died. (Score:2)
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The average company has been outsourcing their compute to the cloud. This means they (mostly) get all the processing power they need without the high cost of ownership.
The average individual hasn't needed to upgrade beyond Windows 95 in terms of basic functionality. Sure there's all kinds of video / etc. that they could have had an expansion card for, but the vast majority don't need more raw compute than what it t
Gartner can say whatever they want (Score:4, Interesting)
I still have orders from last year which have to be delivered as do several other agencies. We're now told the newest HP machines will be delivered in 8 - 12 weeks rather than the previous 16 - 20 weeks (which, as I initially stated, hasn't happened either).
So yeah, BS on what Gartner says. Gartner's "predictions" are like the Federal Reserve talking about inflation. Completely devoid of factual basis.
Well... (Score:2)
Gartner's made many predictions over the years. That 9.5% is actually the percentage of times they've been right.
No surprise (Score:3)
On a side note I do kind of feel bad for these guys, all that work to do the forecasting and it gets tanked 2 months after they release it: https://canalys.com/static/cam... [canalys.com]
I blame it on win11 (Score:2)
I don't want win11, and nobody else should either
Re: Wonder why the Mac side is still having good s (Score:1)
They are in control of much of their own movements in the markets; so donâ(TM)t always believe what you may read or hear coming from the industry press that are paid handsomely for reciting the company talking points and narratives; - and remember they can control inventory, and shipments and manufacture these forcasts to their liking to meet their investors metrics⦠and once they start doing that they end up in a vicious circle of not letting the true market tell them what is really neede
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Go red, go dead.
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Is anyone even making good laptops? (Score:1)