A few things happening in the PC world that are likely hurting sales:
* Graphics card improvements have largely stagnated. It's been awhile since the latest gen cards, and the new ones just announced (4090, 4080) are now ridiculously expensive.
* Price overall of PCs have gone up. DDR5 is still more expensive. Motherboards are more expensive. So desktop PC component cost has gone up, which naturally must drive higher prices to consumers for marginal gains.
* Laptop manufacturers (besides Apple) are limited to using x86 processors, so their battery life vs. performance still seems to fall behind. Consumers notice that.
* In general, processors have gotten 'good enough', so you care more amount battery life or power consumption, rather than raw compute power. Why upgrade, when the old one works just fine?
I moved from a ThinkPad T450s upgraded with RAM, SSD and a battery to an AMD Advantage Edition laptop from Asus last year.
Key takeaways for me were:
1. Increased display resolution and display rate
2. Better battery life (99whr battery). I get about 10hrs just browsing and around 7-8 if I watch a movie
3. Better thermals, rarely notice the fan kick in
4. Nice coterie of ports: I get 1 HDMI, 1 USB-C, 3 USB-A, 1 3.5mm, LAN port
5. Good GPU (6800M) for occasional gaming and messing around with plaid-ml
6. I really love the processor, everything screams on it!
7. Mood based lighting (haven't tinkered around with it much, but my infant loves it)
8. I love whatever Asus has done with its 2 way Noise Suppression AI. I have my infant screaming and neighbors dog barking, but the person on the other end generally gets a very crisp voice. My boss has a few dogs barking all the time and I won't generally be able to notice them in meetings.
9. Upgradable dual RAM slots and SSD. The first I didn't find on a lot of laptops for some reason.
The only cons that I have are:
1. Lack of a webcam. I do have an external USB Lenovo 300FHD cam that I adore for it's privacy cover. I also tend to unplug its USB cord when I'm done with the meetings as well
2. Noise suppression thing seems to work on windows only
A few things happening in the PC world that are likely hurting sales:
* Graphics card improvements have largely stagnated. It's been awhile since the latest gen cards, and the new ones just announced (4090, 4080) are now ridiculously expensive.
* Price overall of PCs have gone up. DDR5 is still more expensive. Motherboards are more expensive. So desktop PC component cost has gone up, which naturally must drive higher prices to consumers for marginal gains.
* Laptop manufacturers (besides Apple) are limited to using x86 processors, so their battery life vs. performance still seems to fall behind. Consumers notice that.
* In general, processors have gotten 'good enough', so you care more amount battery life or power consumption, rather than raw compute power. Why upgrade, when the old one works just fine?