Interesting lot of people thought it was business cycles. Which is only partly true. There is China and PC Gaming. Both are now a huge market. For the past 4 - 5 years, if it wasn't for PC gaming, Unit Shipment would have been falling 10%+ YoY.
Many years ago people thought console would take over gaming. And it turns out Keyboard and Mouse are irreplaceable for certain type of games. You may never play PSE or FIFA on your PC any more, but many more strategy games, Online Games, FPS are still on PC. And as generation of people who grew up in gaming, there is ever increasing number of people on Twitch or other E-Sport streaming site.
Unfortunately Apple thinks Gaming is a waste of time. And therefore Mac doesn't really cater for Games Developers. iOS Gaming is still a result of iOS popularity rather then Apple making it better. We can used to argue PC gaming is niche, for nerds, Riva TNT, 3Dfx, Rage 128, Radeon, Geforce.....
Now PC Gaming is no longer a small communities, and will continue to grow into much larger in the years to come.
I wonder if some of it is about the fact that the PC demand due to GPU shortages may be only short term. In any case, the demand was definitely very sudden and there is no way that Apple would have been prepared for it.
Your comment about iOS gaming implies that it is an inferior platform relative to Android in terms of gaming. In reality despite Apples myopic attitude towards desktop gaming their mobile gaming platform is better than androids by a significant margin.
Consider the following:
1) Per user revenue in iOS out paces per user revenue in Android by so much that many titles make more on iOS than they do on Android despite Android having ~70% of the market
2) Apples hardware & os provide superior performance relative to even premium Android phones despite Apples compulsion towards thinner. (This is largely due to vulkans infancy compared to the relative maturity of metal)
3) fragmentation
4) walled garden is actually a plus for developers who worry about apk sharing
5) Apples store does business in China making Apple a one stop shop for the world whereas android requires at least one separate partner just for China.
Note: Please pardon any grammar, spelling, & formatting errors due to this response originating from a mobile device
FPS are slowly moving to consoles though, and I think most popular genres will have the same trajectory.
Once there’s enough money to be made, publishers will tackle any issue there is to move a genre to the bigger audience.
That doesn’t mean for me that PC gaming will fade away, just that it will stay a limited market where makers will experiment more freely than on the other marketplaces.
Which bigger audience? Hard to dig up exact numbers, but at least in terms of revenue it was 28% vs 29% of the gaming market in 2017, see https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-game-sales-numbers-market-share-.... PC gaming is huge, and statements projecting a move to consoles of genres or the market have been around for several decades now, and they never came true.
If that’s true basically the PC market for business has hit bottom. There’s very little traction for non-PC form factors as daily drivers in business, so there is a minimum market size just to keep every employee equipped with a laptop, and this seems to be it.
The consumer market can still drop further though. Most people are fine using ipads, and probably even better off than with a laptop when all things are considered.
I think you're conflating things. A decline in sales does not mean a decline in usage. Arguably the biggest reason that PC sales have declined is because a PC from 5+ years ago is now still 100% solid for everything outside of high end gaming and some esoteric tasks. And even in the case where somebody does want to engage in e.g. high end gaming, swapping out a video card is fine - and that's something that's not reflected in these reports which only count buying new preassembled machines from first party manufacturers.
PC sales were at their peak when machines were outdated in 6 months and obsolete in 2 years. That era is completely dead. At this point there are likely literally billions of reasonably high performance machines out in the world. And I think also more people than ever have realized that 'building your own computer' is about as difficult as putting together a 10 piece lego toy, and you get exactly what you want, and you likely save a reasonable amount of money.
I was with you until your last sentence. Speaking as someone who built PCs for years. My impression is more along the lines is that you still often run into the same weird incompatibilities that you always did and that cause you to ask yourself "Seriously? What made you forget the two days you spent debugging that weird GPU driver interaction LAST time."
As a result, the last time I decided I still needed a Windows box but both my old DIY systems were down for various counts, I just bought a 17" Alienware laptop which worked, reduced the clutter, and is just fine. (And I'm not sure it cost more than I'd have ended up spending.)
No one is going to sell me a pre built machine running arch linux as the host, with Windows 10 in a virtual machine with a vfio passthrough GPU and usb controller so I can utilize VR hardware. Did it take me 2 days debugging USB controller and threadripper pcie bugs in the linux kernel, yep, but totally worth it once I strapped on my VR headset and it worked flawlessly. Also the peace of mind that Microsoft is isolated from most of the hardware in my machine.
No... the Intel conveyor belt of improvement has been stagnant for 5 years. You actually have to be careful to not buy slower computers when you refresh these days.
Now Windows 10 is driving an upgrade cycle by arbitrarily dropping support for old stuff and shipping every 6 months. Microsoft will continue to squeeze until people leave the platform.
A modern cpu from the same price class as five years ago is twice as fast. NVMe storage is also many times faster than SATA, and five years ago hdd’s were commonplace anyway. I’m not even going to discuss graphics.
Windows 10’s hardware requirements are quite low: 1 ghz cpu, 2 gb ram, 20 gb hard drive. That’s 10 year old hardware. How much older do you expect them to support? Should it run on 20 year old hardware? To be fair 5 year old laptops might have driver compat issues on w10, but more likely the reason for the business uptick is just that pc’s only last so long before they need to be replaced, and for convenience of support they tend to replace in bulk.
Windows 10 hardware requirements are a dark art. I know of a place that has an analyst type person spending about 50% of her time tracking the various dependencies between office, Windows and hardware.
Tablet sales have yanked though, and touch keyboards suck for writing anything longer than, say, this comment. (Actually, even this given the incidence of typos... Count them!)
If your job involves wound emails, you probably need a laptop.
what the OP meant by “consumer market” is home users I think.
The intersting dynamic is that people tend to spend more time mastering their phones (for instance installing printing apps, dropbox etc.) and don’t want to maintain another completely different device they’ll only use occasionaly.
This means people with old PCs won’t care much if it’s slow and clunky, as they won’t use it much. People without a PC yet might bail out completely and use their work computer when they have stuff that can only be done on PC.
(note: total PC shipments are 61 million, business users included, while iPad sales for 2017 quarters were a about 11 million. People turning to the iPad for “big screen” tasks is a big enough trend I think)
Gamers and even some shops aren't buying "shipped computers". They're buying parts and slapping them together to make purpose build computers. My home PC has 2 GFX cards and a 6 core 5930K core (4ish years old now, first consumer level 6 core from intel), while my work PC has no GFX card, and a 6 core 8700K.
I assembled both, and they work quite well at their tasks. I would never want to work with a pre-built computer again.
I wouldn't say none. The massive increase in GPU prices did spur some to buy prebuilt where otherwise, they would have built a custom machine. Many large companies that sell higher end machines didn't jack up their prices nearly as much as the graphics cards alone.
Also, some miners were buying prebuilt systems to harvest the GPU, then out a cheaper GPU in it and sell it.
I think the interest in PCs grew, especially amongst the younger generation. With the new budget CPUs offering real good performance (a 8th gen i3 can offer approximately the same performance as a 7th gen i5), you can get much higher performance for your money than laptops. The price gap is much more evident when it comes to gaming.
Among my friends in their 20s, most of them want to build a PC. It could be the case that my generation didn't experience the growth and the decline of the PC market and we don't appreciate the value of laptops yet. The hype for building a custom PC certainly exists.
But from a consumer's standpoint, I also think laptops win in most cases.
Correction: Thanks to the reply, I noticed that "PC Market" statistics included both Laptops and Desktop PCs. I am leaving this post as is, as it represents my ideas on why there is still a -possibly growing?- interest for desktop PCs.
I think the interest in PCs grew, especially amongst the younger generation. With the new budget CPUs offering real good performance (a 8th gen i3 can offer approximately the same performance as a 7th gen i5), you can get much higher performance for your money than laptops. The price gap is much more evident when it comes to gaming.
The growth in the PC market had nothing to do with the consumer market.
Gartner reports that the growth was driven by increased business sales and that consumer shipments declined. IDC similarly pointed to the "business-driven refresh cycle" as a reason for the increase. This mirrors Microsoft's financial reporting; the software giant distinguishes between business and consumer sales of Windows and Office, and the general pattern over the last few quarters is that business sales have been robust even as consumer demand continues to soften. Enterprises are migrating to Windows 10, and they're buying new hardware to do so.
I went the other way, I was a PC gamer and 'only true programming PC consumes 700W and acts as a space heater' type for nearly two decades and then somewhere along the line laptops got fast.
My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free.
When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa.
So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987.
Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.
I had/have an i3 2.5GHz (M380) laptop, IIRC from around 2011, which I had tried to upgrade recently with a top of the line SSD, Windows 10 and 8 GB RAM to extend its life. While Windows 10 was definitely better than I'd anticipated, overall it's still painfully slow browsing the web (except for HN of course).
So I broke down and got a new laptop with an i7 8650U, and it is disturbing how much faster it is, considering the base frequency seems to be significantly lower (1.9). I am wondering whether there is some now-ubiquitous function, perhaps relating to encryption that is accelerated on newer processors. Single threaded benchmarks only indicate it should be 2x as fast, but there is far more of a difference than that. Without identifying what the improvement is, I have the nagging doubt I should've identified a software problem on my old computer. I did try Linux on it, and that was not stunningly fast either.
So I would be happy with my new PC, except that I'm wary I'm being flim-flammed with software that makes old hardware run like crap, and the performance is an illusion. But hey, maybe the hardware has improved in 7 years. I remember when that was an eternity.
"PC shipment" seems to include desktops and laptops.
Gartner describes the data[1] as "Data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs and ultramobile premiums (such as Microsoft Surface), but not Chromebooks or iPads."
Maybe it’s because of intel’s shift of 2 -> 4 cores, and 4 -> 6 cores for their consumer line of cpus. It’s relatively a bigger performance jump than in the past.
From the source article linked in the first paragraph: "PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment”
i'd guess that aggregate growth has outpaced other 'stagnating' factors which led to state of non-growth, aka the growth curves have adjusted for laptops, tablets, and smart phones
I started playing first person shooters again last year. Player Unknown's Battleground. It takes a beast of a PC to play.
Other players I play with online are always talking about upgrades and saving up for a complete new system with all the latest hardware.
So I think fortnite and PUBG have definitely driven some growth in Gaming PC sales/hardware sales. Also the popularity of youtubers and streamers are driving kids and teens to ask for gaming PCs too.
Now that PUBG is on Xbox there is a new influx of players who started playing it on console but wanted to move over to the PC version.
Shooters on PC are much better than playing on a console, plus you usually get the features, updates and new maps first. But the feel of playing with a mouse and keyboard is way better on PC. Console ones are fun but I much prefer playing on a PC.
PUBG does require very high specs, but afaik fortnite has much lower requirements (owing to a competent development team, fewer polygons, and smaller textures) and will run on any potato. Haven't actually played either, but that's the impression I've gotten; I don't think people are rushing out to buy pcs for fortnite.
I wonder where the high demands of VR are driving the change. If I wanted to do VR I would finally have to upgrade my 5year old PC desktop that had been great. Aftermarket SSD and GPU greatly expand it's life.
I suspect that might have something to do with it coming back to the ‘cool kids’ corner’. I’m a designer, and a) being interested in ML / AI enough to the point that I needed neural nets running, b) and VR kits not struggling so I can keep an eye on that emerging market were the first two things in more than a decade that made my hardware feel just not up to snuff. The last of such ‘I need real hardware’ feeling was the jump to Core 2 Duo that made every developer seemingly assume overnight that they had access to multiple processors.
I haven’t even owned a Windows-based PC in 10 years and I’m on the market for a liquid cooled GTX 1080Ti and AMD Threadripper — guess what is old is new again. Fun times!
I'm less skeptical than the other responders. VRChat in particular has been quite a viral sensation with a few popular memes, and a lot of twitch.tv activity.
VR is what got me to build my own PC after a decade of exclusive mac use.
Immediate business expensing courtesy of the US tax changes.
HP + Dell added 1.7 million units vs the prior year. A substantial boost for them.
From April:
"Tax Windfall Going to Capex Way Faster Than Stock Buybacks"
"Among the 130 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results in this earnings season, capital spending increased by 39 percent, the fastest rate in seven years, data compiled by UBS AG show."
Still shocked how many PCs are sold today with traditional 1 TB 5.6k drives. SSD is still often treated like a special request part, which is insane, given a business PC only needs a 128 GB hard drive. (As all data belongs on the network.)
I tend to agree with you, but it depends a bit on the kind of data. Office documents are fine in a network share, but I prefer my Git repo locally. For audio/video it really depends on the network setup.
On a given standard desktop PC load, you need about half of a 128 GB hard drive. Feel free to use the other half for staging files you're working on. :)
Obviously, this spec is not the same for say, a video production system or the like. I would point out that most workloads have a negligible to non-existent network latency on a good internal network.
(Also, note that on a 1 TB 5.6k drive, your drive latency is worse than my network latency.)
There is an extraordinary amount of full employment at the moment in 'b*s4it jobs', those pointless jobs that don't really matter but somehow exist. Small to medium sized businesses just bloat out with these positions over time and only a harsh recession means that these jobs get systematically culled. With these jobs you need yet another PC. You can't buy fancy laptops as there is status value in those things and a PC is as glorified as a phone on the desk of someone doing one of these make-believe-jobs of inane pointlessness. Demand for stationary cupboard supplies is probably also up 1.4% with BIC taking a few sales from PaperMate in an otherwise flat market.
This is the sort of headline you get when the housing market needs a 'boost'. Anecdotally you may know that nobody has been able to buy/sell for ages and that prices are not going up, however, some survey that is independent but paid for buy a building society/bank comes out to give the impression that the market is moving again.
The Update in the story cites another report where the numbers for HP and Lenovo are different, so the headline 1.4% is margin of error, not a genuine sign of a market on the move.
Is it in the developing world? Mobile is very limited due to small devices and more importantly crippled by design OSes. I've thought for a while that mobile's adoption in the developing world would be a gateway drug for computing and that PC adoption would follow after wages rise and/or PC prices drop.
Most people in developing world use mobile devices purely for communication and music/videos, i don't think that these uses will drive rise of PC usage.
Following the source chain back to Gartner their conclusion on the data was:
"PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment. In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC. In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes. PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off."
I think it’s a blip caused by people upgrading their cpu due to spectre and meltdown. Not always because their cpu may be exposed but also as an excuse.
Or Macbook/iMac prices. My desktop has been a Hackintosh for the last 7 years. When my 5-year-old Macbook Pro dies I'll be looking for a Hackintoshable PC laptop.
Really I'm responding to you and the GP, but based on the article:
> Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer.
Interesting that, while the rest of the market is still significant, it's shrinking pretty rapidly compared to the leaders.
The Apple numbers are always a useful reminder of what a bubble I'm in. While 7% isn't trivial, any event I attend has a lot of Macs (and more of the other laptops are probably running Linux than Windows).
Many years ago people thought console would take over gaming. And it turns out Keyboard and Mouse are irreplaceable for certain type of games. You may never play PSE or FIFA on your PC any more, but many more strategy games, Online Games, FPS are still on PC. And as generation of people who grew up in gaming, there is ever increasing number of people on Twitch or other E-Sport streaming site.
Unfortunately Apple thinks Gaming is a waste of time. And therefore Mac doesn't really cater for Games Developers. iOS Gaming is still a result of iOS popularity rather then Apple making it better. We can used to argue PC gaming is niche, for nerds, Riva TNT, 3Dfx, Rage 128, Radeon, Geforce.....
Now PC Gaming is no longer a small communities, and will continue to grow into much larger in the years to come.