back to article Samsung leaps out of volume PC game as UK market crashes

Samsung withdrew from the fight at the sharp end of Blighty's PC market last quarter, figures from Gartner indicate. The Korean firm saw shipments plummet 85 per cent to 30,000 retail boxes, down from 215,000 in Q4 a year earlier. No business systems sales were reported, the analyst said. The net impact is that Sammy's market …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Surprised/Not Surprised....

    Consolidation in the PC sector isn't surprising. The suddenness with which this is happening, and the rate of consolidation is, OTOH, utmost surprising. How long before it's just HP and Lenovo, with perhaps the Taiwanese players hanging on?

    1. Jonathan 29

      Re: Surprised/Not Surprised....

      I suspect most manufacturers were waiting to see if there would be a sudden surge of interest in new Windows PCs over Christmas and New Year. As this clearly failed to materialize now is the perfect time to shutter things up.

  2. Paul 135

    Sinofsky 's victims keep piling up!

    1. Aitor 1

      Back to the white box

      I guess many people remember a time where most consumer PCs were assembled in small shops near you.

      Then the big companies, started selling them at quite decent prices in megastores.

      Now they seem not to be interested anymore.. so the white box (black now) will come back.. along with some chinese brands.

      As for the "fat margins"... well, those margins have been mere illusions for the las 20 years, except if you were a huge company and got nice rebates.

  3. The Godfather
    Coat

    I'm out...

    Consumers have long since deserted the PC and business users are now ebbing away or simply not buying new ones. Makes absolute sense to kick it into touch, more so when you can't make any money. Marginal OEM's may see some traction but this will be short lived and they too will suffer.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New PC? No thank you

    I have a, mostly, 10yo home-assembled PC. (confession)

    I bought it to play games, surf the 'net, do home office work and tinker with.

    Reasons as a home user not to buy a new PC:

    - There are no current PC games that whet my appitite and a upgraded OS would have a high risk of making the games I do have unusable.

    - My current PC is still capable of office & internet tasks.

    - My current PC also has a clear divide between local storage & the cloud.

    - Vista may not be the best OS, but it does alow multiple windows to be opened and operayed on the screen at the same time. It also has a logical hyrarcical file system, no single screen with a tiled view of everything.

    - I can use it to move or stream files between multiple platforms without the files leaving the local network or lock-in "compatibility" issues.

    - Win8 & Office360 have to many "value add" features which asks for a subscription, free for the first x, which undermines any trust that you won't be paying extra later on.

    - I find Chrome OS creepy, lacking in user control & impractical (see above).

    I'm hoping Linux will save the PC, but it needs a single mass appeal & robust OS to do so.

    This starts with vendors supplying an industry wide & agreed upon "standard" OS as a Win8 replacement.

    As it stands, Win8 is going to kill the PC market.

  5. Richard Jones 1

    New PC? No Thank you - Correction Required

    You Wrote

    - Win8 & Office360 have to many "value add" features which asks for a subscription, free for the first x, which undermines any trust that you won't be paying extra later on.

    I think you, like me see this as undesirable.

    Suggest to replace "value add" with "value reduction", or "value removal", replace "features" with "miss steps".

    Other than that I feel Windows H8 was a mess that succeeded in turning off too many people rather than achieving any positive and I was poised to get three copies. I even tried out the preview until I encountered its "our way or no way" approach. Windows 7 being superior IN MY CONTEXT will suit me just fine. If MS rescue something more usable then I 'might' reconsider, but only if I do not again suffer more orphaned hardware issues. Oh remove cloud insistence and forget the touch rubbish for those of us who find it user hostile.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re:New PC? No thank you - corrections

    I think "value add" is from M$` point of view and has nothing to do with the user experience.

    I agree that it is now a user hostile enviroment out there.

    Google turn you, your work and your identity into a product without property rights or privacy.

    Apple lock away your work, property and your indentity so that it'll be unusable on anyone elses hardware / software as well as ransoming it back out to you under the guise of a premium rate.

    For M$, these tricks aren't new (see their failed subscription based licensing for NT) it's just that people are now happily getting suckered in.

    Ubuntu's collaberation with Amazon may well of undermined that OS too.

    All I want is a decent toy / tool that won't constantly try to sell to me, sell my photos or hold my work to ransom.

    As for games, I WANT TO OWN WHAT I PAY FOR!

    Sorry.

    Think I've got a bad case of old-man syndrome.

    Must stop ranting...

    1. c:\boot.ini

      Re: Re:New PC? No thank you - corrections

      >Apple lock away your work, property and your indentity so that it'll be unusable on anyone elses hardware / software as well as ransoming it back out to you under the guise of a premium rate.

      How do they ransom you ? What do you mean with lockin ?

      Don't get me wrong, I am not a fanboy, but seriously what do you mean ? I use Openoffice on all my platforms at home (Linux, Mac OS and Windows) and never had any issues with work/property/etc ... My music is in flac and vlc plays that pretty well, along with all my mkv's and vob's (from purchased DVD/BD's) and some in other formats purchased online.

      Platform independence is possible with FOSS software. Funnily enough, Mac OS X and Linux beat the Windows boxen when it comes to NAS I/O, considering it is SMB.

      Vendor lock-in these days only occurs because you choose it. Try and use a PST file on Linux, yes, there are tools, but still - troublesome. MBOX? no issues whatsoever ... think different, think FOSS.

      Totally agree on Google/MS, though.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re cubed:New PC? No thank you - corrections

    All based on personal experience when transfering, sinc'ing and porting stuff between various family members cornucopia of gadgets.

    i-crap really doesn't like anything other than other i-crap or i-tunes.

    True, they do use open formats on office stuff, but all forms of hell is unleashed if you try a cloud transfere, network sharing, ftp, usb dongle or calender / contact sinc.

    Once had "fun" dealing with a iphone, new blackberry & an impatient sister. It's helped me foster a deep resentment of all things i-, she wanted a real keyboard. This resentment has only grown with experience. For example just before xmas my father-in-law doing battle with ipad, mac & android combination for a very annoyed mother-in-law made for a unique bonding experience.

    Android and pre-8 Windows (not including specialised file formats) are pretty promiscuous ny comparason.

  8. Oh Homer
    Alien

    Save the PC?

    I'm a big fan of GNU/Linux, but I really don't think it'll save the PC, not because it isn't up to the task, but simply because nobody cares any more.

    This whole situation with PCs is starting to feel a lot like the last days of the Amiga. A few die-hards are clinging to the hope that the next version of the OS is magically going to save it, but the fact is everyone's already moved on to something else, and they've long since lost any interest in the platform.

  9. MR J

    I think the biggest reason for the slowdown in growth (or negative growth) is due to the fact that hardware and software don't seem to improve at the rate that they did in the past.

    We went from a overall speed doubling twice a year down to two year cycles, and now we are down to 4-5 year cycles. The performance per watt value keeps increasing, but for many users this isn't going to be a huge deal. 100w to 75w was a great jump, 12w to 9w is the same improvement, but it doesn't really shout out wow!.

    Most people I know who have laptops are more than happy with them. If you have a c2duo mobile laptop from 2007 then it is probably still chugging along just fine.

    I expect phones to hit this limit soon, as it is games on phones are currently looking pretty good (read, near console quality). We will see consumers slow down once the hardware increases seem to do less.

    I don't think the platform is dead, it may move to a easier to use modular system one day, but I expect it to survive for a while yet. Throw in a £300 video card in a 5 year old computer and you have ps4 quality gaming, this will keep some users attached for a while. Would I much rather dump my box for a phone that talks to input devices, speakers, and monitor all wirelessly, damn straight... Do I think a phone is going to be "good" at that anytime soon, No.

    1. druck Silver badge

      I agree in that for most users there isn't the performance improvement to make upgrading worthwhile, there also isn't a huge difference between laptop and desktop performance for real world tasks either. I have a very modest i3 laptop to which I added an SSD, and since then I really don't notice any difference between that my a i7 desktop for more things. In fact I'm having to run 4 Linux VMs on it, so the 8 threads and 16GB of memory have something to do.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    it's windows 8...

    I honestly think there is still a market for PCs, but people simply do not want Windows 8. I know a lot of people, myself included, who want or need a new PC but a trip to the shops to buy one just induces a depression. No one wants to pay out several hundred pounds for an unusable piece of cr*p.

    Windows 8 is awful.

    All the pros I know seem to be resorting to Macs and installing Windows 7 on it via dual boot / parallels.

    The latest Office is pretty sh*t too, it's definitely been Sinofsky'd.

    Kill metro repeatedly until it's completely dead, make 9 just a version of 7 with the 8 kernel, and the sales will come back. Oh and have an "absolutely no skydrive/azure/live integration at all" option on both office and windows. Simply put - the platform (either Windows 8 or Office) is intruding on what the user wants to achieve and that can't continue.

    1. Obvious Robert

      Re: it's windows 8...

      I want to upvote you 100 times!

      I work in tech support for a large ISP. Customers who have Windows 8 are few and far between, and the ones who do have it generally tell me they wish they'd never got it. There are the odd exceptions, but I'm talking genuinely 2 or 3 people in the last year telling me they actually like Win8. I really believe it's a massive part of PC sales being so poor, because when it comes down to it tablets are pretty crap for anything except consumption, even typing a forum post of this length is a major undertaking on a touchscreen.

      Being that your average Joe will only ever use the OS their PC came with, I think there's a fair chance lots of people are weighing up the awfulness of Win 8 and finding no other affordable option, so waiting it out for a new PC and getting a tablet to tide them over. Most people can't justify the cost of a Mac, but I could guarantee you that if Apple released a budget 15" Macbook in the £400 range they would completely clean up. They'll never do it, but if they did then their PC market share would rocket overnight. I think people still want affordable laptops, they just demonstrably do not want Windows 8.

      And for the rest of us of course, there's Linux.

  11. grabme

    The only thing to save Windows 8 is a significant price drop on the Surface tablets.

  12. Green Nigel 42

    Bricked up Samsung

    Although they have probably patched a fix, the loss of trust that Samsung's UEFI firmware bug introduced, that bricked up many of their laptops when adding Linux or a different Windows release put these on my naughty list. This and other personal experience of short lived other products, the introduction of region locking (Note 3), have placed a doubt in my mind to their quality image.

    Samsung leaving the PC market, never mind!

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