

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

======
bane
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.

~~~
glogla
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](http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=836)

~~~
hatu
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.

------
ianhawes
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
>>>>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.

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

~~~
sfall
i buy the fancy laptop that has a dock that can support two external displays
plus the laptop screen

~~~
australosaurus
How about HP Elitebook 8470p or HP Eliteobok 8570p?

" Two displays: 2560p, 2760p, 8460p, 8560p. Three displays using integrated
Intel graphics: 2170p, 2570p, 8470p, 8570p. Five displays using AMD Eyefinity
Technology: 8460p, 8470p, 8560p, 8570p. "

That's without a dock. All do have docking stations available.

[http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.js...](http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=5212907&prodTypeId=321957&objectID=c02948215)

------
damian2000
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.

~~~
genwin
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
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.

~~~
zmmmmm
Almost, but there are still a bunch of niggling annoyances. Eg: lots of things
(such as viewing photos) still throw you into the metro UI by default.

------
mehrzad
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
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
> 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](http://i.imgur.com/a3vIbzH.jpg)

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

------
jiggy2011
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.

~~~
stephengillie
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
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.

------
Axsuul
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.

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

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

