According to analyst firm Gartner, PC shipments have declined for eight consecutive quarters -- "the
longest duration of decline in the history of the PC industry." The company found that worldwide PC shipments totaled 68.9 million units in the third quart of 2016, a 5.7 percent decline from the third quarter of 2015. The Verge reports:
The firm cites poor back-to-school sales and lowered demand in emerging markets. But the larger issue, as it has been for quite some time, is more existential than that. "The PC is not a high priority device for the majority of consumers, so they do not feel the need to upgrade their PCs as often as they used to," writes Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa. "Some may never decide to upgrade to a PC again." The threat, of course, comes from smartphones, which have more aggressive upgrade cycles than PCs and have over time grown powerful enough to compete with desktop and laptop computers at performing less intensive tasks. Tablets too have become more capable, with Apple pushing its iPad Pro line as a viable laptop replacement. PC makers are feeling the pressure. HP, Dell, and Asus each had low single-digit growth, but Acer, Apple, and Lenovo all experienced declines, with Apple and Lenovo each suffering double-digit drops. Meanwhile, the rest of the PC market, which collectively ships more units per quarter than any of the big-name brands, is down more than 16 percent. Some good news is that 2-in-1 devices have experienced year-over-year growth. Kitigawa also notes: "While our PC shipment report does not include Chromebooks, our early indicator shows that Chromebooks exceeded PC shipment growth."
Re:$$$ Workstations
By ShanghaiBill
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2016-Oct-12 00:11
• Score: 4, Funny
• Thread
EM simulation of millimeter wave antennas and circuits.
Cool. I envy you.
Well, I have to go. My boss wants me to slightly change the shade of blue behind our company logo on 187 webpages ...
Fetch my fainting couch
By Graymalkin
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2016-Oct-12 00:40
• Score: 3
• Thread
Are declines in PC sales in any way surprising? Frost the past decade and a half a larger and larger portion of PC sales have been laptops. Schools from junior high through college practically (or actually) demand them. The proliferation of WiFi means just about anywhere with a roof is going to offer some internet connectivity. Besides ubiquitous internet access laptops have gotten way more consumer friendly by getting ever cheaper and lighter. For just about everyone a laptop is the form factor to buy.
For most of the past 15-16 years laptops were getting faster CPUs or way better GPUs every two years or so. Battery life didn't improve much but at least the machines got more powerful. The past 5-6 years though the landscape has changed. Fewer laptops ship with discrete GPUs as Intel's have increased in capability. Even low end laptops have SSDs and 8+ gigabytes of RAM. The usable lifespan of laptops has increased significantly. Even a change from an average of two to three years means fewer sales for manufacturers. There's a non-trivial portion of the laptop market that's seeing a replacement cycle of over three years.
In addition the sort of things people needed a laptop for ten years ago can be as effectively or more effectively done on a phone or tablet. Android and iOS tablets beat the shit out of Windows tablets and 2-in-1s because hey aren't saddled with a heavyweight OS that honestly is not designed to turn on and go and then back off just as easily.
Billions of smartphones and many millions of tablets have definitely sucked the oxygen out of the room for traditional PCs. With PCs not "needing" more regular upgrades is choking the PC industry. The PC market is saturated and is not likely to grow again. Emerging markets are not a savior because they don't have the same infrastructure as developed markets. They aren't going through a dial-up landline internet connected to a beige box phase. They're going right to smartphones, tablets, and other highly mobile devices that fit better in their infrastructure.
Industry has much to learn
By orlanz
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2016-Oct-12 00:48
• Score: 3
• Thread
PCs and laptops are a commodity. Either the industry doesn't know this or doesn't understand the meaning of it. I am talking about the general market, not the DCs, gaming rigs, or cloud computing. Commodities don't fund your expansions, setup new factories, nor pump your stock price up. They keep the lights on, employees paid+benefits, factories humming at an efficient pace, and fund regular dividends. In a commodity situation you make money from volume, brand, services, and driving internal costs down!
The industry players need to figure this out, especially the last part! Stop trying to be the BMW of laptops. Try to think like Toyota, but really you should be thinking like toothbrush makers. Think about the value BMWs would have if the engine, chaissis, interior design, breaks, tires, and electronics systems were all developed by single industry wide suppliers. BMW would design the exterior look, the headlights, and stick that circle on there. That is basically the PC market!
And yet, each of these idiots spend tons of money redesigning the look and feel of the laptops at least every 3 years. They take standard interfaces, rearrange them to make prior peripherals obsolete. That means money for R&D, QA, factory retooling, replacement parts inventory management, new end user HowTos, support retraining, redoing logistics & sourcing, present model inventory write offs, peripheral redesign, marketing, and sales training.
All that is a massive internal cost that can be completely avoided if they just stuck to a conservative design philosophy where they continued to just improve what they have. This will also help with aftermarket resale, which is a good thing in terms of customer loyalty. Think how old the Toyota automatic window opener is. That small part has been around for a good 15 years! Think how long the power button has been around on the Lenova's!!
That is the level of cost cutting these providers need to follow. They need to become like toothbrush makers. They need to switch from macro design changes to micro ones. Such things as heat flow management, battery life, port placement, standard peripherals, serviceability, etc.
Till then they will continue to lament the shrinking market and wonder how to stay afloat.
Also, lack of money
By master_p
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2016-Oct-12 01:50
• Score: 3
• Thread
Perhaps not valid for the US, but here in Southern Europe the economic situation is such that it makes it very difficult to buy new PCs. We do want to upgrade, we just do not have the money.
Re:$$$ Workstations
By hairyfeet
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2016-Oct-12 02:08
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
The problem is they are reading the data incorrectly, they are taking data from a BUBBLE and trying to claim that was the norm when in reality it was no different than the housing bubble, an anomaly that did not reflect the actual state of the market.
You see the bubble was caused by the "MHz wars" where a PC from a couple year, hell even a year ago at the start of the bubble, simply would not be able to run the latest software because of the insanely quick jumps in MHz. In just one 4 year period during the MHz wars my personal PC went from 400Mhz to 2GHz, 5 times the power in just that small amount of time! The consumer didn't WANT to replace their PCs that often but they did not have a choice because this years software simply ran like ass on last year's machine and probably wouldn't run at all on a PC two years old.
Now compare this to today, what mainstream software is there out there that won't run on a C2D or Phenom II X2 from 2008? I have a C2Q Media Center PC I use at the shop as my desktop and to do analog to digital video conversion...its got 4 cores, 8Gb of RAM, and a 2TB drive...why would I need to replace it? Even video gaming isn't immune to this as there are plenty of videos (and I have plenty of customers who can back this up) of playing the latest and greatest mainstream games on C2Qs and Phenom II X4s and they play at 1080P just fine, no issues.
The simple fact is even grandma has the equivalent of a fire breathing funny car for a PC which is spending a good 90% of its time in idle, so what would be the point of replacing it? Before my father passed away last year I looked into replacing his office PC, it was a 2.3Ghz Phenom I quad and I had a batch of newer systems in, surely he needs more power running his office than a PC from 2006, right? After collecting data for 3 months I found in reality most of the cores were parked most of the time and the system never got above 50% utilization...replacement simply was not needed.
The only reason you are seeing replacement in the ARM space is they are in the middle of their own MHz bubble which I would argue is already coming to an end as they too hit the thermal wall and users find they can't "feel" any difference between that quad core tablet or phone they got 3 years ago and the new octocores sitting on shelves. Bubbles pop folks, what we are seeing is NOT the "end of the PC" but it simply going back to being replaced only when it fails and I have a feeling we will be seeing the popping of the ARM bubble soon and it would have probably already popped if the industry wasn't forcing upgrades by refusing to support their older products.