PC Shipments Return To Growth In the US (theverge.com) 75
PC shipments are seeing a welcome growth in the United States. The industry, which has seen a continual decline in the sales in the past few consecutive quarters, is now seemingly gaining some momentum in the United States, according to independent findings by marketing research firms IDC and Gartner. According to IDC, the PC shipments have increased by 4.9%, whereas Gartner says it has observed a 1.4% growth. From a report on The Verge: The estimates differ because Gartner does not count Chromebooks as part of its figures, while IDC cites Google's laptops as a key reason for US growth. [...] Worldwide, PC shipments are still on a decline. Gartner estimates a 5.2 percent drop, and IDC calculates around a 4.5 percent decrease in shipments. Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade comes to an end on July 29th, and IDC believes it may prompt some PC users into buying new machines. Gartner also forecasts a Windows 10 hardware refresh for businesses, that it expects to see "more toward the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017."
Slow growth? (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing a batch of cheap capacitors can't fix..
Cap plague (Score:5, Informative)
The implication is that people are having to replace PCs due to capacitor plague [wikipedia.org]. Between 1999 and 2003, some Taiwanese electronics manufacturers shipped electrolytic capacitors based on a faulty formula misappropriated from Rubycon, which caused the capacitors to fail much earlier than intended. By 2007, most affected devices should have already failed.
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See also: planned obsolescence.
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Lower quality = counterfeit. To be clear they still use the lowest quality, nothing's changed there.
Planned obsolesce doesn't work when you're forced to replace defective products.
Obviously (Score:3, Interesting)
When people started to realize that mobiles, iCraps, Nezus 9, PDAs and other monstruosities ain't built for real work (but publicity and companies catalogs), real computers are being sold again.
What does Windows 10 got to do with it? (Score:2)
Computing plateau (Score:2)
Same for my desktop, an AMD A8-3860, which was introduced in 07/2011 [cpu-world.com]. Does what I need, quickly enough.
Are these machines high end machi
Smaller market, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just as importantly, the market has shifted. There is still a stable market for computing and it will continue to exist, but it no longer includes the home/casual user segment. Those people have gone over to tablets and phones (most all of the non-tech folks that I know now have an older laptop sitting dusty on their top closet shelf, unused for years, and don't plan to replace it; only about half have even bothered to get a bluetooth keyboard for their tablet, while the rest are perfectly satisfied with the onscreen keyboard).
Business, tech-oriented people, the self-employed, creatives, and so on will continue to buy full-fledged computing hardware and to upgrade it over time, but this is a much smaller market than once existed for computing, where the market included basically every home and individual in developed societies. So some correction in sales was (and probably remains) inevitable over time.
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Business, tech-oriented people, the self-employed, creatives, and so on will continue to buy full-fledged computing hardware and to upgrade it over time
Unless the sticker shock of having to upgrade from a tablet to "full-fledged computing hardware" is discouraging people from becoming "tech-oriented", "self-employed", or "creatives" in the first place. Consider the example of a high school student given programming homework. Is such a student expected to sell his tablet and buy a laptop, as exomondo recommended [slashdot.org]?
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Do it on the computers your school has available for that shit.
If they don't provide any, don't do the homework.
Even universities provide computers for everyone to do their lab work on.
In high school it would be ridiculous to just expect every family to buy a computer just for homework.
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Universities also aren't subject to truancy law (Score:2)
Do it on the computers your school has available for that shit.
Which complicates logistics of the student's ride home if the student has to be picked up from school at a different time of day each day depending on whether he has homework that day.
Even universities provide computers for everyone to do their lab work on.
Universities also allow the student to go to the computer lab as needed between class periods, unlike high schools that enforce truancy law and require the student to be seated in a "study hall" room. In addition, universities tend to pass a much larger cost of required materials onto a student than public high schools. For ex
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I still have 2007 desktop systems running Linux like a charm, still kicking the asses of many a shiny iCraps and laptops [which are not real computers for me].
So you think Macs are not "real computers", eh?
That's not the impression I got. I took "iCrap" as referring to devices running iOS (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad), not your iMac.
Oh, and OS X/macOS is a Certified UNIX. Linux is just a UNIX wanna-be.
Unifix Linux [unifix.de] was the first Linux distribution to be certified, back in the Linux 2.0 days. iOS wasn't certified to anything.
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Unifix Linux [unifix.de] was the first Linux distribution to be certified, back in the Linux 2.0 days.
"Certified" as in "passed the Open Group test suite and was thus certified as being able to be described as a Unix system"? ("The vendor claims it's POSIX-compliant" doesn't count as "certified".)
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I'd rather have a Linux "certified" computer than Unix "certified". The world has moved on, gramps.
And I'm sure you speak for all, Coward.
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It would seem that the PC market contained passive users (people who browse, view, send) as well as active users (people who create content including programming). Over the last few years smart phones and tablets have been taking all of the passive users away
And suddenly, cost becomes a barrier for a user seeking to transition from passive to active.
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I think a lot of what they are doing with Win10 including "Windows as a service" is to reduce dependence on PC sales for Windows revenue. WinSE is expensive for example. I recommend that you read this: https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07... [hal2020.com]
On for one-fourth of the week (Score:2)
That said, if you're a business running 500+ PCs that users leave powered on 24/7, it is extremely cost effective to
As I understand it, the common case is that each PC is used only by one full-time employee, without different employees sharing it on different shifts. Does leaving the PCs on for only one-fourth of the week (42 hours on, 126 hours hibernating) change the math any?
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For corporations this changes any way: 5 year old gear is amortized and should be replaced, just because the beancounters say so.
However, I doubt you can totally offset the energy savings by purchasing new gear. Assume 500$ for a new machine (Business machines? Hell, you won't get them that cheap, but I'll run with it). I don't know how much my i7 rates, but I know it comes with a 90W powersupply. As such we can assume it uses that as a ma
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I'm on year 7 with my Dell Vostro 1520 currently running xubuntu 14.04. Does most of what I need, even plays Minecraft 1.10.2 relatively well. I never thought this laptop would last so long, I remember thinking it felt a little flimsy when I got it. But it has stood the test of time and will probably continue for a few more years.
It makes sense (Score:3)
Consoles used to be the budget alternative to PC gaming. Nowadays, the cost/performance ratio is not in console's favor. And consoles are only getting more expensive, while current and last gen PC prices remain pretty steady.
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That and more people have discovered that they're willing to settle for relatively simple point-and-click games not dependent on reflexes. These run well on tablets, phones, or otherwise outdated PCs.
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These run well on tablets, phones, or otherwise outdated PCs.
Are you implying that the latest AAA shooter targeted at consoles does not run well on an outdated PC?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't see where Gartner was only considering machines running Windows as "PCs". The computer world has a whole lot more to it than just Windows-based machines and Chromebooks.
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My point is that because Chromebooks weren't counted doesn't mean that the PCs that were counted consisted entirely of Windows machines.
They do if you pay employees' cell bills (Score:2)
Our company is increasingly getting work done in the cloud.
That's great provided you're willing to pay your employees' cellular data bills so that they can VNC or RDP into your application server while away from a desk. Otherwise, your users will have to stick to Chrome apps specifically designed for offline use. If you have programmers, for example, Google's in-browser NaCl IDE [chrome.com] is no perfect substitute for Linux- or Windows-based IDEs. Google warns: "to develop a substantial application for Native Client / Portable Native Client, we recommend you use the Native Cl
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The download, edit locally, upload paradigm (Score:2)
Someone isn't going to be in the same building as your server farm and will need to access those applications and data remotely.
But that doesn't mean said access has to be continuous throughout all hours that an employee is on the clock. Prior to webmail's prevalence, IMAP email clients were popular. These would download email from a server while online, allow the user to read messages and compose replies while offline, and send the replies the next time the user goes online. The same was true of Usenet clients. And the same is true of distributed version control: you can git merge while online, edit and test offline, git commit off
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That's great provided you're willing to pay your employees' cellular data bills so that they can VNC or RDP into your application server while away from a desk.
Have you heard of WiFi? Not to mention that any large company will typically even in a full PC architecture have files stored away on a remote server somewhere with clients endlessly accessing through via VPN.
Seriously this is a non-issue.
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Have you heard of WiFi?
Have you heard of cities whose public transit doesn't provide Wi-Fi?
Not to mention that any large company will typically even in a full PC architecture have files stored away on a remote server somewhere with clients endlessly accessing through via VPN.
Check out file while online, work on file while offline, check in file while online.
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Our company is increasingly getting work done in the cloud.
That's great provided you're willing to pay your employees' cellular data bills [for access from] public transit
Even if you never buy any data you get free access to the social networks du jour with each top-up charge
But not your company's VPN or other resources "in the cloud", which was the point. Even if Facebook and Wikipedia are part of the "Free Basics" zero-rating plan, your company's resources aren't. Except for your company's social media marketing department, your company doesn't want employees accessing Facebook while on the clock. Thus your company will still have to either A. buy data or B. use tools with a checkout/checkin paradigm in order for employees in transit to get work done. And if you have employee
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My point was that smartphones & mobile data are so cheap that it's a non-issue.
Cellular data might not be "so cheap that it's a non-issue" if your work involves making changes to files several megabytes in size. How many GB per month are you talking? And even then, you still have to issue smartphones to employees and manage them or, if you rely on BYOD, include a phone and plan stipend in their pay.
Coincidentally I pay about the same (when converted to USD 'cause our currency is weak atm) on my prepaid smartphone for 75 voice minutes + 750MB data per month
The North American cellular market is notorious for being far more cartel-like than that of, say, mainland Europe. Is there a solution, short of firing all your U.S. employees and moving yo
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We're playing by your rules here. You said "large company". Show me a "large company" who's employees do any kind of significant portion of their work on public transport systems and you will have a point.
Now back in reality any "large company" will have employees who spend lots of time working on documents mostly deskbound with the remainder in positions where they are already racking up cell bills.
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Does it count computer parts? Perhaps people who build their own are such an insignificant %, but I really wonder what they use to count it. Perhaps Windows activations?
Use motherboard sales (Score:2)
Does it count computer parts? Perhaps people who build their own are such an insignificant %, but I really wonder what they use to count it.
If I were trying to count desktop PCs built from parts, I'd use motherboard sales as a proxy. As for laptops built from parts, I see no evidence that barebooks are anything but "an insignificant %".
Perhaps Windows activations?
Counting motherboards would at least be consistent with product activation in recent versions of Windows, which uses the motherboard's identity to determine whether someone attempted to transfer an Windows license to a different computer.
Should Chromebooks count? (Score:2)
On the one hand, Chromebooks are computers that require manufacturing, so perhaps they should. On the other hand, Chromebooks are not really "PCs" as the term is usually used and occupy an entirely different market segment.
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Well, not everyone. I know a substantial number of people that don't. They consider them a category of their own.
4k video? (Score:2)
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I don't know how much it matters in other markets but seems to be a lot of interest in 4k gaming lately.
4K and VR. I haven't replaced my entire desktop in 8 years (but I have upgraded the video card twice). The video card trick only works about twice though. After that the older CPU (and especially the older CPU's memory technology) really starts to drag it down. A GTX 1080 paired with an 8 year old CPU is substantially crippled. This is the year people who bought high end machines in the late '00s finally have to budge off the plateau they have been comfortably occupying all this time. 4K and VR are bo
Some purposeful changes in PC designs (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just now in the process of replacing PCs in our school. We're buying Dell Micro PC's that you can mount immediately behind your monitor [dell.com]. When we throw in a SSD and fast-booting the BIOS, boot time for Windows 7 is less than 10 seconds.
Now that PCs are smaller and faster, and electronic storage is becoming standard, it doesn't surprise me that they're becoming more appealing again.
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I'm just now in the process of replacing PCs in our school. We're buying Dell Micro PC's that you can mount immediately behind your monitor [dell.com]. When we throw in a SSD and fast-booting the BIOS, boot time for Windows 7 is less than 10 seconds.
About 3 seconds slower than Puppy Linux [which would be a fantastic choice for a school's computer].
Now that PCs are smaller (...).
Now, my monitors are not going to get smaller anytime soon. 32" and growing.
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Electronic storage will never be as reliable as cave paintings. Keep your fancy new tech to yourself.
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M$ (Score:2)
" Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade comes to an end on July 29th, and IDC believes it may prompt some PC users into buying new machines"
They'll likely buy more machines when M$ removes this malware from them.