Phablet?
Ok, I give in, WTF is a phablet?
Hewlett-Packard has stayed at the top of the PC industry, fending off competition from Lenovo to remain the biggest PC vendor in the world with 16.2 percent market share. But the industry as a whole is shrinking, and new stats from research firm Gartner confirm the gloomy prognosis from IHS last week. Dell performed badly, …
90 million PCs per quarter works out to 360 million per year. I already have two of them, so I don't need to buy another until my second one gets so old it's useless, and the new models are enough better than my quad core i7 to be worth an upgrade.
The point is, they are still selling a lot of PCs, and the market is getting saturated. Unless the hardware makes a great leap forward, existing models are good enough for many people.
"it appears that people are buying tablets instead of replacing their PCs and"
Excuse me Reg, I know that without this push for ever new gadgets, you would have to layoff staff, and you may have lower your Webpage counts. But….! No, honestly, you can’t judge a market purely by the level of sales during a recession. All that tells you is the number of well off gadget addicts who have money or credit to burn. There’s still a whole army of PCs in people’s houses, and laptops being thrown about in kids bedrooms. The tablet thing is just hype! I just can seriously buy into one, just for the hell of believing media sites like you and market promo.
Don't be obtuse, you know exactly what he was getting at. People have tightened their belts and have cut large bill items. They're happy to buy cheap tablets because it turns out that they didn't actually need a computer. Who would have guessed that you don't need a computer for doing emails and shopping online!
I'm not being obtuse, you're just saying exactly what I did. If you only need a £250 tablet, why buy a £1000 computer, recession or not? Likewise, if you need £1500 of twin-head processing power then buying a £250 tablet because you've tightened your belt is just £250 wasted, since it won't do the job.
The only difference the recession makes is that people might buy fewer gadgets just for fun. That's going to affect sales of everything.
Why, what do you buy in a recession?
Err, food, fuel and things around the house that needs mending. I don’t buy a monthly or quarterly stock of iPhones or iPads. I don’t dash out in an emergency to pick up a small tin of Desktop goodness, just for the hell of keeping up the image of being Technology affluent. This talk of PC sales being down, is like the talk they have about Tesco and Asda sales being down; and "poor old Morrisons, just made it 4th place."
Honestly, I build PCs, and despite my yearning to splash out and have CityLink drop off the latest Motherboard with USB3 as standard, I realize I still have the choice of ignoring the hype and keeping my feet firmly grounded in the real costly-world. Economies should not be built on PCs, tablets and computers: and people should be allowed the dignity to think – computers are not the be all and end all – worth-while quarterly investment the market men seem to want us to believe. [Dell going private sounds like a reality check gone right for once]
What £250 tablet, it seems most people are buying iPads and the current version starts at £399 and tops out at £659. You can get a laptop that will do what most people want to do for £399.
I do have a cheap tablet, a Nexus 7 but I don't use it instead of a computer, I use it as well as. I could not do what I need to do with a tablet, even a much more expensive one. But I can do more if I have both.
If I wanted Windows 8 I'd have bought the upgrade, anything that can run 7 can run 8 since it's been optimized to run on crappy tablet hardware. The only people who are going to buy a new Windows 8 computer are people who had their old xp box die and need a new computer, or execs who want a new shiny touch screen ultra book to run their powerpoint.