Five consecutive quarters of sliding PC sales mark a new industry record

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/five-consecutive-quarters-of-sliding-pc-sales-mark-a-new-industry-record/

by shawndumas • 13 years ago

33 40 13 years ago

yuhong• 13 years ago

It is funny they are taking over again after IBM sold the division to Lenovo.

ianhawes• 13 years ago

I'd bet most laptops/PCs sold in the last 4 years have included at least 2-4 GB of RAM, 60-100 GB of HDD, and a relatively fast processor. Aside from gaming, most internet browsing can be achieved with devices that came out in 2009.

If I had to guess, most consumers can get by with their smartphones for 80% of the things they need to do. For the other 20%, they can probably use their aged or shared laptop.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

>>>If I had to guess, most consumers can get by with their smartphones for 80% of the things they need to do. For the other 20%, they can probably use their aged or shared laptop.

Except for web development. I can't imagine sitting at a laptop writing code compared to dual 24" monitors.

I can agree about your spec on PC's. I'm still running a 1.7 processor with 4GB of RAM. I just upgraded to WIN8 and have been surprised with its performance. With 7, no way I could have PS and Dreamweaver open at the same time. Now, I can run both with no issues, and the only thing I changed was upgrading to WIN8.

I'm also about to build a PC from scratch and have found the prices for fairly high end parts is coming down drastically. You can get a totally loaded system (Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 2GB Video card) for well under $800.

GuiA• 13 years ago

The overwhelming majority of consumers don't do web development.

And yeah yeah, I need my dual 27" as well, but for an entire a year I wrote code+LaTeX for my entire undergrad thesis on a 11" netbook (was too poor to afford anything else). When you really need to get work done, it does the job– the rest is luxury.

pogden• 13 years ago

Yes, but you can plug monitors, a keyboard and mouse into a laptop just as well.

damian2000• 13 years ago

Is it possible the unpopular Windows 8 could be a small factor in this too? i.e. people waiting until another revision of Windows is released.

rm999• 13 years ago

I think so, I know one person who is literally waiting for a new OS and an older person who went to the store and returned empty-handed complaining he doesn't know how to use computers anymore. I believe he ended up getting an iPad.

An analyst at IDC made a similar argument:

"At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market," said Bob O'Donnell, IDC Program Vice President, Clients and Displays. "While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413

rogerbinns• 13 years ago

Windows and even MacOS is a factor IMO. When you have a device with them, you have to play system administrator. You need answers to virus scanners, backups, where your photos are, where you get software from, how you find software you installed, the never ending and frequent updates to everything and the list goes on.

With iOS and Android, the average person doesn't have to care about any of that. It is right there or in the cloud. A web browser is sufficient to do a lot of "work": banking, documents, communication, social etc. For advanced uses there is an app. Your photos are right there when you take them with the device. The amount of babysitting and micromanaging is trivial compared to Windows/MacOS.

Note that to get iOS or Android, you need to buy a tablet or phone instead of a PC.

The problem with Windows 8 is that it is still Windows. It doesn't go anywhere near far enough in the lack of babysitting/micromanaging that characterise Android/iOS and if you get the version that allegedly does (RT) you end up with a tablet anyway. And it broke what people who wanted desktop Windows expected by being different enough from Windows 7 and predecessors appearing gratuitous.

Nobody has evolved successfully - both iOS and Android started from scratch. Microsoft and Ubuntu are trying to evolve from desktop, but without much traction so far. (Of course there could be other reasons.)

genwin• 13 years ago

That's me. I need to replace a desktop PC but won't use the current version of Win8 and don't want to pay extra to downgrade to Win7.

Stratoscope• 13 years ago

If you like Windows 7, just buy Start8 for $5 when you get a Windows 8 system, and you won't even notice you're on Windows 8. It will just feel like a pepped-up Windows 7 system with a bunch of little improvements.

zmmmmm2• 13 years ago

I don't think Windows 8 is causing the decline, but what it is doing is failing to reverse it. Traditionally, a new release of Windows has been a driver of PC sales because it did new and useful things that people wanted. The problem with Windows 8 is that for a laptop it is pretty much on balance worse than Windows 7. (To be clear, it definitely does quite a number of things better, but it does about the same number of things worse, and the ones that are worse are right in your face while the improvements are mostly behind the scenes).

I actually doubt Microsoft is too surprised by this. My feeling is that they pretty much wrote off Windows 8 as collateral damage from their push into the touch screen / tablet market which they consider to be essential to future survival. They may suffer huge losses in sales from Win8 licenses but the upside is that their new UI is getting forced in front of every consumer and business professional. That is something money simply can't buy. Come Windows 9, when the actually do something people want, people will be buying something familiar.

mehrzad• 13 years ago

Everyone claims that the PC market is dying. I don't fully understand. I get that you could theoretically use Android, iOS or any other mobile OS full-time, and I would consider using one like that maybe one day. But for now, the world cannot run without PCs. Sure, car sales may decline, but they won't ever cease unless a pure replacement comes along.

The whole "PCs are dying" seems like propaganda from people with stakes in companies that focus on mobile.

rorrr2• 13 years ago

Many people didn't need a PC, but didn't have an alternative (tablet, smartphone). The market is being corrected. PCs are not dying. I can't imagine any my coworkers doing their work on a tablet, except maybe executives who basically do email, spreadsheets and lame powerpoint presentations all day long.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

I can't imagine any my coworkers doing their work on a tablet

I've been doing web dev on a tablet (Surface Pro) for months now.

http://i.imgur.com/a3vIbzH.jpg

The only difference between a 2013 tablet and a 2013 laptop is whether the keyboard is permanently attached.

stephengillie4• 13 years ago

The gaming PC I built in 2008 still handles brand-new games without any problem or slowdown. Almost everyone is in the same situation.

The market isn't dying because people aren't using PCs anymore, it's dying because upgrades have become unnecessary.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

Every decent company on the planet had PCs on a 36-48 month refresh cycle.when was the last like you heard of that happening?

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

I wonder how long it will be until a similar headline about tablets? Eventually that market will also be saturated.

bane3• 13 years ago

Theoretically, my current desktop is in bad need of a refresh. I think I cobbled it together from slightly better than middle of the road parts in 2007-ish for...oh around $1300. Core2Quad@2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 x64, GeForce 9800 GT with ~ 1GB of video memory on it, spinning rust SATA drives.

I have yet to find a piece of software, game, whatever that's not reasonably performant on it now 5-6 years later. There's some high end virtualization stuff that just doesn't work on it anymore, and a few recent Demoscene releases struggle a bit, but if I keep with web surfing, document writing, music production, photoshop/gimp, and games, it run all that stuff well enough that I don't feel any pressure to upgrade.

It used to be that to run the latest AAA game, Emulation or Demoscene release I'd have to upgrade pretty much my entire machine every 2-3 years. Now I'm seriously considering going another year with this machine or making the plunge and building another. BSNES runs like a dog on it, but I can always ZSNES or SNES9x my way to good-enough-ville.

The churn just isn't there. Windows 7 is rock freaking solid, $500-700 desktops at Costco are better than my current desktop in every respect. If you buy a computer today, you can probably happily use it for the next 10 years and never feel the need to upgrade your system for any reason.

Software used to drive this stuff, but CPUs aren't getting faster in ways that users care, and cheap GPUs make up for the rest. There's no Doom or Quake or Crysis to force an upgrade (hell, most AAA PC games these days are just ports off of far less powerful consoles). Casual gamers are on WoW capable machines (an almost 10 year old game!) and have no reason to move.

The market is simply at saturation not death. It's become like telephony or indoor plumbing. Everybody who's ever going to get a computer (except for kids) has at least one. Hell, my 80 year grandmother finally bought a laptop so my mother can play out of copyright mp3s for her while she cooks.

UberMouse• 13 years ago

For gaming that will change with the new console releases. The Xbox One is >4x more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PS4 is >6x. It might take a few years, but the slump in increasing processing needs will probably die off.

batiudrami2• 13 years ago

I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers. The optimisation tricks which can be achieved on console mean that spec-for-spec, a much more powerful PC will be required to run current gen console games in the next few years (just like this generation). The money is going to be in the gamers, and I would expect to see Intel make a push there (AMD is already in the market with their ATI purchase).

But I agree, for every other computer user, a PC they bough 5 years ago is most likely still completely fine, unlike those from the 90s and early 2000s, where after 3 years they frequently became near-unusable. A great development as a result of the slowdown of the spec race is the push for smaller/lighter/better battery life which is occurring - new laptops have near hassle-free portability while still being fully functional PCs.

stephengillie4• 13 years ago

I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers.

This has been true for the past several generations, but this round is somewhat different. Next generation's consoles aren't even using the best graphics hardware currently available. Video games aren't pushing the cutting-edge of hardware anymore, CUDA is. The money isn't in gamers anymore, it's in coinfarmers.

bane3• 13 years ago

I think you are correct. This soon-to-be-past console generation was particularly protracted and I think that reflected in the PC gaming market.

The PS3 is 7 years old

The 360 is 8 years old

The Wii is 7 years old

Games written for these platforms and then ported to PCs (or written with cross portability in-mind) just aren't stressing modern PCs at all. I built my system to be as-good as or better than any of those consoles and it's more than kept up.

UberMouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023957) mentions

"For gaming that will change with the new console releases. The Xbox One is >4x more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PS4 is >6x. It might take a few years, but the slump in increasing processing needs will probably die off."

Which is also true. Ports from those consoles will definitely urge me to get a better machine. Not only are the CPUs and GPUs better, but the games will be written assuming more RAM is in place.

glogla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6024693) is also correct that dropping in an SSD would ramp up my system speed noticeably (my rMBP is twice the computer my desktop is without SSDs, with SSDs it chews it up and spits it out...it's almost absurd using my desktop these days to be honest). At this point I'm also noticing that my primary computer use (web browsing) is eating up more and more memory. I'd also need more RAM, which in my case means a new motherboard, which implies new CPU etc. The truth is my machine is so old now that it's kind of reached the point where I can't really just upgrade 1 part, or add a bit more of this or that. And I definitely want my next system to have at least a 5 year lifespan.

Things I was waiting for:

- SSDs to drop below $1/GB @ 500GB or more sizes

- A selection of sub $150 motherboards to support 16-32GB of RAM

- Waiting for the CPU core wars to stabilize (It looks like we're good there)

- Some of the AMD/ATI merger stuff to shake out. I was an old AMD fan, so I wanted to see what if anything they'd end up offering

- The PhysX, CUDA, whatever world to mature a bit and see how it all gets pushed down into consumer-level video cards

I think it's time and I'm starting to price out parts and research stuff. But like I said, I'm not feeling any particular pressure to do it today and the beauty of technology is waiting a while just makes things cheaper.

chipsy• 13 years ago

I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but also points to a change in what drives the market.

The old one was a lower end machine of its era (Lenovo model 4446, Intel T4200, 2Gb stock) and clearly becoming too slow for some applications; higher-end video could not play at full speed, and streaming apps like Google Hangout were essentially non-functional. Add to it the fact that the battery was shot, the keyboard was dead, the fans were dying, and the CCFL backlighting occasionally flickered to half-brightness; there was a pretty good case for me to make the move before it stopped booting altogether.

While the new one(Lenovo model 20182, AMD A10, 6Gb stock) is definitely fast enough to do everything, including the majority of games, this aspect feels more like "pain relief" than "improvement" - the positive differences in upgrading are most visible in physical aspects of the package - screen brightness, build and weight, average heat output, keyboard and touchpad feel. Mostly better, although I dislike the touchpad - the multitouch is not as accurate as the older ones, even after disabling all the features.

And this is not a top-end laptop - it's a <$600 machine from late last year, purchased at $100 off as a refurb. The biggest bottleneck in its performance profile is the use of spinning disk storage(which, I should add, is more than I'm ever likely to use as long as I have it). And, I should reiterate - the performance problems of the previous one only came into play with some newer apps, mostly those that relied on GPU acceleration for video or 3D. To a lesser extent it had problems on CPU-hungry stuff(music production) as the fans gave out, but it was a very gradual degradation.

I think the most intriguing part of the new environment is in how it is informing how we write programs - a huge "style gap" has emerged between applications that can never get enough power, and those that can be unfathomably wasteful of power. For a lot of things, we can really say, "Given unlimited computational resources, how do we best solve this problem?" And the benefits of that thought process turn out to uncover new optimizations at the same time that they improve the code quality.

eruditely• 13 years ago

Oh come, you cannot find a game that is not reasonably performant on your "Core2Quad@2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 x64, GeForce 9800 GT".

How about any major game since 2010-2011?

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

You should be able to run Skyrim on that, probably not on the absolute highest settings of course but most games look good enough on medium these days.

glogla• 13 years ago

The PCs are actually improving, but they are improving in things that are not immediately visible. Mostly, this is about, how

- IPS monitors are now way cheaper, so people can get nice 27" FHD IPS monitor for the price of 23" TN monitor few years back. And if you're adventurous, you can get QHD one from Korea for good money.

- SSDs are becoming standard. I know that "everyone who used it will tell you it's awesome and will want to have it for all time" sounds like fanboyism, but with SSD, this is really true. They add incredible responsiveness to any computer they are installed in. It won't actually compute any faster, but you will spend less time waiting and doing nothing, and that's worth it.

- While I can't say what users really care about, the CPUs are actually getting faster. Not only quad-cores trickled into midrange and AMD is now putting octa-cores (with slower individual cores, however) into upper midrange, but the CPUs are actually faster. Look at this benchmark [1] comparing Core2Quad 2.4 Ghz with current upper-midrange i5 4770k. The new CPU is about little less than three times faster.

So the PCs are evolving. And IMPO, SSD and IPS monitor is more important than new CPU anyway.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=836

rednukleus• 13 years ago

And just to extend that point - people can upgrade to an SSD or a new monitor without buying a whole new PC (unless they have an ultrabook or all-in-one, and they are relatively new categories). Its not like the old days where you needed to upgrade your whole architecture (or buy a new machine) every couple of years.

hatu• 13 years ago

I think the biggest problem with PC makers will be that a 2006 computer still does everything that a normal user needs very well. You can watch Netflix, browse Facebook, check your email, skype, play music etc. without any hiccups or reason to think that maybe you should upgrade. My mom doesn't need a IPS monitor, a SSD or a newer architecture processor and that kind of people getting a PC brought the growth of PC sales in the last 15 years.

zv• 13 years ago

Compiling, virtual machines etc. With your setup it's SO slow. Not that it is bad, it's just you have your requirements which don't change.

bane3• 13 years ago

Absolute true. I end up doing all that stuff on my work issued machine which is a nice modern rMBP with 16GB of RAM and SSDs, so that kind of work screams on it.

Axsuul• 13 years ago

PCs may be dying for the average consumer but this certainly doesn't affect the enthusiast and gamer market. I would expect the market for enthusiasts to only grow as more of its users will have to resort to building their own.

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

I think that a "PC" is a sort of weird limbo between a focused device like a kindle or iphone and a truly general device.

The way that I use my PC is mainly as a host for virtual machines, be they JVM or vagrant instances etc. I don't really want to have an "operating system" so much as I want a hypervisor and a windowing environment to tie everything together.

It would be great to have a system where I can just slot in arbitrary stuff, for example: If I want to develop mobile applications I'd like to be able to just pop an ARM system into my case via a PCI card or something and just have certain software execute on that.

Maybe if I want to edit video, I'd like to be able to rent a bunch of high end CPUs for a weekend and just slide them in there and then take them out and return when I'm done.

This is sort of what I hoped the new Mac Pro would be, but they seemed to go in the opposite direction.

stephengillie4• 13 years ago

As the PC was the original computing device, it was indeed very general, and many remain this way today. I also host VMs on my main PC, as well as gaming client and server, media center, social terminal (fb, hn, email, text & voice & video chat, etc) & main programming environment.

But at this point, I'm about ready to fragment these roles into dedicated hardware -- dedicated server for VMs, RasPi for media center, phone for social terminal, laptop for programming environment & admin/control for all the other devices.

The only thing really holding me back is that there really isn't a good replacement dedicated device for PC gaming. Even though some consoles use PC-grade hardware, and keyboards and mice can be made to work on some, it's just not the same.

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

Kind of, I'd just like to be able to orchestrate it all easily from one terminal and set of monitors so as to have seamless copy/paste etc.

Five consecutive quarters of sliding PC sales mark a new industry record

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