I wonder ...
could this just be a case of market saturation, and people realising that the online content they are being urged to buy into is just a load of YouTube videos of skateboarding dogs ?
The UK PC market could be bottoming out after most of the major vendors posted sequential quarterly growth, abacus stroker Gartner has claimed. However HP, Acer and Dell PC sales are still in a nosedive compared to last year's shipments. The final market stats for Q3 2011 were baked and served today by the beancounter, with UK …
One reason for the slow PC sales is that a lot of people have chosen to buy a tablet instead of upgrading their desktop or laptop PC.
Also, there is very little you can do on a new desktop/laptop that you can't do on a 2-year old ditto, so there is less incentive to upgrade every (other) year than there used to be.
Take an old dual core system and slap an SSD in it and you'd think you had a new computer. If you have more than 2GB of RAM, you're even better off.
Hard drive supply hitting zero will likely cause the next couple of quarters to report very bad numbers.
The fact we're teetering on another economic decline doesn't help much either.
Its a little vague without some market segmentation. Are these figures consumer or corporate? Laptop or desktop, or both? Does it include tablet sales? You need at least three quarters of financial information to draw any conclusion. I agree with Torben though, the traditional upgrade cycle is changing and may well have plateaued.
Firstly, I suspect that the increase in the use of on-line applications & media has reduced the need for ever-increasing computing power.
Secondly, could it be that large numbers of machines are already vastly overpowered for their owners' needs? If Joe Normal's system carries on working and being useful for 5+ years, why would he want to go through the hassle of replacing it?
Well, I assembled it from components I bought from about 6 different online stores. I paid just over £600 for a machine that kicks the crap out of a £1000 PCWorld machine.
Other than the cost, and the screwdriver fun, the big advantage of a DIY system is that you get exactly what you want
I've got a 4 year old intel core duo quad core processor in my pc, and since I upgraded to an SSD to boot from , well its quicker than me.. So why would i need to upgrade ?
Beyond power sapping games run at billions of pixels, PCs for most people have been more than quick enough for a few years now . SSDs, along with faster broadband, seem to be the final part of the jigsaw of the slow components that needed improvement.
What non-gamers really need a quicker processor ? They need a "killer-app" that needs octo-core firebreathing to run it to get a lot of people to upgrade otherwise working machines.
So this side of A.I. on my PC , I'll only replace my it when it breaks.
At home, I actually am pondering on upgrading my PC.
But that's because I'm planning on setting one single PC with 4 VM's, and having everyone else use said VMs instead of building four separate PCs.
I'm going to do that as soon as spice comes out for ARM. The rest of our "PCs" are going to be thin ARM clients...
Or am I the idiot who falls for the fad ??..... My tablet is a laptop replacement - to do casual browsing on the sofa while watching telly...... My laptop (shared with the lady) is actually a PC replacement - 17inch and whatnot. Hard to curl up with while slouching on Sofa...... My PC (for work) is actually a server running Ubuntu with several VMs......So actually I no longer own a generic PC anymore like I did a decade before.
(I understand that the biz part of PC makers bundles PC & laptop revenues).
Paris, coz she was a fad thats fading.
Aint no way I'm gonna substitute 2x 24"LCD's for an anything-pad with a 10" screen.. Granted some home (L)users will buy a something-pad to replace their electronic desktop game of patience, but if you actually need to work on puters all day, the fondleslab is not a replacement.
Beer cause its summer, hot, and I'm stuck inside looking at big LCD's..
To be honest, if it wasn't for regular installments of Battlefield games, I wouldn't own a desktop at all. My media consumption is generally via tablet (Galaxy), I have a work laptop and a netbook I rarely even switch on any more, (and neither will need an upgrade for anything I do workwise) and a smart TV is on the way which will become the the focus of iPlayer, Skype and Youtube (Elmo vids for the baby you understand). I don't even store much on the desktop as there's a NAS whirring away under the stairs. Its only because I can't bring myself to play FPS games on a console that I have my own PC at all.