Even China can't halt PC sales decline The powerhouse of the global PC market, the Asia Pacific region, has finally succumbed to economic volatility in other regions with Q2 shipments set to decline, according to analysts. IDC’s latest forecast for the period put shipments in the region (excluding Japan) at 30.7 million units, down one per cent from the same time …
Hit the nail on the head there. Unless you're gaming or performing some computationally intensive tasks, there's usually no need to constantly renew hardware. My old P4 still does sterling service as a general use PC with upgraded RAM and disk (it's not quite Triggers Broom - yet ;-). I'll buy a new one only when needed.
That's not to say I don't *want* the latest whizzy hardware of course - just that until it blows up or my needs change, the old stuff does perfectly well :-)
@Jake.
Jake runs DOS 6.22, loves Norton Commander and is hoping that one day he will be able to eradicate Interrupt conflicts between his Sound Blaster Clone and his Hercules video card.
The large rubber ball on the mouse has lost too much diameter for the little hair covered plastic rollers to have any effect on the cursor position, as we can imagine Jake is extremely efficient with the keyboard.
If it wasn't for the Interrupt conflict Doom 1 would almost be running correctly but thats OK because Jake hasn't quite finished playing Zork yet but is hopeful that one day he will leave the caves.
Why should he change an 8 year old laptop. With a little luck his Chiropractor will offer him a rebate this year.
4 kg of laptop is starting to make him "list" a little.
True, unless you want cutting edge, and how many programmes need cutting edge? Most program's are scaled to work on quite low power systems. So if it ain't broke why fix it?
They need to produce something so amazing the consumer has to upgrade to have it, apparently that may be be the idea behind Windows 8.
No I said amazing.......... And that just doesn't cut it.
It goes further than that.
Since Intel released the Core 2 Quad 5 years ago, CPU power hasn't increased dramatically in that time, sure we have newer, lower power chips that do make *some* difference, but not enough to warrant the expense of new motherboard, memory and CPU.
The other reason, the big driver behind bigger, newer, better, faster PC's in the home was gaming and almost all AAA games titles are optimised for consoles, usually the 360 which renders most games natively at 720p and upscales. If the game manufacturers aren't pushing for the hardware, why do users need it.
You've also got the pressure on Microsoft to write an OS that *doesn't* require massive increases in hardware - after the many complaints of Vista, due to it's out the box settings requiring much better hardware, Win 7 runs on hardware not much different from XP.
So, if the drive for hardware doesn't exist, why would people buy it until the current system breaks?
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