You have be careful old chap..........
........... anything that suggests that Win 8 has not sent the entire PC-market down the toilet will get you absolutely hosed.
Thought the UK PC market was like a dead mule? Wrong. There's life yet in those age old desktop and notebook nags, according to distributor shipment data. Numbers from venerable analyst Context, the gentle purveyor of sales-out figures - the stuff that users are actually buying - showed Q3 was not bad, not bad at all. The …
"How do we make ready-built PC sales figures look like they're increasing when people are buying tablets instead?"
"Let's combine tablet sales with PC sales!"
To be fair though, a lot more people are savvy with building their own home desktops these days, perhaps they should count system sales by total motherboards sold in the country, which would take in both home built machines and those sold at PC World/Dell/etc.
> I would hate to think what your leccy bill
It's not 2003 anymore. Powerful desktop CPUs aren't nearly as bad as they used to be when it comes to power management. The marginal improvement represented by a PI is probably not nearly as good as you think.
Not that the electrical bill would be that bad anyways.
Plus you can actually do some computing on your CPU rather than needing some other real PC shoved away somewhere to help you get over the lameness of ARM.
Not just the leccy bill.
The main reason I gave up on PC gaming was that I seemed to be running to stand still to keep up with game's system requirements, each incremental upgrade costing hundreds of pounds.
A console isn't as powerful or have as high a resolution output as a PC with a decent video card and monitor, but the outgoing gen consoles could've been bought in 2005/6 and still function with the latest releases - GTA5 being the big sendoff.
(And even the PS2 is getting it's last FIFA outing)
Armchair analysis here....
I think there are several reason that PC sales are down, but one is that that most PCs are now quite good performance wise and getting the newest model does not give a massive improvement for many ordinary users - (email, internet browsing, media consumption)
Many ordinary users I know, tend to get a new machine as they think their old one is getting worn out when if fact it probably has a full hard drive and simply needs a tidy-up or a bigger hard drive.
I say this as a contented user of a 2008 Macbook - it still seems plenty fast enough for everything I do including video editing and transcoding. My wife has a much newer Macbook Air and as much as I'd like it* I have not noticed it being much snappier.
*Can't afford any new CE at the moment.
> My wife has a much newer Macbook Air and as much as I'd like it* I have not noticed it being much snappier.
A MBA is a latter day netbook. It's no surprise that it doesn't seem any faster than your older Macbook. It's simply not a performance machine. That's not what it's sold for.
'A MBA is a latter day netbook. It's no surprise that it doesn't seem any faster than your older Macbook. It's simply not a performance machine. That's not what it's sold for.'
Really - an i5 vs a core 2 duo, faster RAM, better graphics, an SSD instead of spinning disk and a 2012/3 vs 2008 design?
Depends on the segment of the market, with operating systems not consuming as much of the system as they used to and most performing relatively light tasks, going from an i3 to i5 will make little difference.
The bulk of the performance loss is in the disk acess (a machine is only as fast as it's slowest part).
Hence why SSD's offer such a boost.
However heavier duty users e.g. Gaming, Photoshop, CAD etc will observe a benefit.
PC gaming is back on the rise, too. After the original Xbox One announcement I heard plenty of voices within the gaming community saying "right, that's the final straw, back to PC". Steam has apparently just eclipsed Xbox Live in terms of active subscribers, and the PC platform has really been leading the way in gaming in recent years, more so than usual. Better online services, cross-platform gaming, cheaper prices, more games, more peripherals and huge support for a thriving indie scene full of interesting ideas.
Given that my preference has always been for the PC platform, it's great to see the revival happening, especially after a period of time where it looked like PC versions of games were either going to be half-arsed across the board, or abandoned altogether.
Yeah, 3 years ago I wouldn't have ever believed I'd be writing a title like that. But the fact is that outside of business and creative tasks such as photography, videography and music (high tend gaming as well) there is little need for a desktop, or even a proper laptop.
If all you do is consume, rather than create, then to a large extent the traditional high powered laptop, or desktop becomes for the most part redundant.
Take my mother for instance - she was always upgrading her computer every 3 years, because that's what you do when you've got two sons in IT. When she visited me last year in Zürich we found some bargain basement iPad 2s and bought a couple of them. One for me and one for her. Since then the only time she actually turns on her PC is to backup the iPad, or install new apps or new iOS versions.
There are millions of people out there that simply require web, email, Facebook and Twitter. Previously you needed an expensive computer to do that, these days you only need the cheapest android device that you can find.
The PC as a device in the home is facing death.
Wrote :- "There are millions of people out there that simply require web, email, Facebook and Twitter. ... you only need the cheapest android device that you can find. ....The PC as a device in the home is facing death."
There are also millions of people who do more than look at email and Facebook, and it's more than a niche market. Sure, many people will find a handheld enough, but many won't. I'll use a handheld when I am out, but prefer the comfort and experience of a big screen at home and in the office, rather than making my eyes ache looking at a small screen, thanks.
These things go in fashions. When the Austin Mini came out in the 1960's people went crazy about it, and excited journo's predicted the death of all larger cars. But cars got larger again after that (today the "Mini" itself is larger), now 50 years on cars are geting smaller again. What goes around comes around.
"prefer the comfort and experience of a big screen at home and in the office"
You and lots of other people.
Of course the sensible way of doing that for most folk is to plug a non-PC handheld into an HDMI monitor, and connect it to a keyboard/mouse that suits their needs, and maybe connect a USB hard drive of their choice for archival/backup if "the cloud" is no longer as attractive as it was a year ago.
"many people will find a handheld enough, but many won't"
As the numbers needing a classical desktop go down significantly, the unit costs will go up significantly. The price increases will further decrease sales as people delay replacing, or as they go down a different route. Those that need Windows-specific software (why else does anyone *need* a PC?) will find themselves increasingly isolated.
I'm not trolling, nor trying to be snobby, but I look forward to the day when this will be so.
It'll be like the early to mid 90s, when a PC was something special to behold, rather than everyone buying Currys specials that you're trying to get spyware off.
It'll be back to a power user / enthusiasts machine, facebook and twitter consumers will be happy with tablet devices (handy machines for living room browsing admittedly).
A few years ago I got involved in a lot of research online for a product we were developing, as a lot of comparison of images and information was required we hooked up a pair of screens in tandem. Now even at home I like to use two monitors so I can research, have emails open, read a book keep my notes going and pipe some TV through. I tried running a pair of laptops by borrowing the wifes, she was not very happy and it doesn't work very well.
I also use a netbook, a large smartphone and a slab but the desktop is the one I really like so I am about to rebuild, a stronger faster machine with a couple of really nice monitors.