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back to article Seagate's bottom line smacked as users bin desktops for tablets

Hard drive-maker Seagate's third quarter profits slipped by a whopping 64 per cent year-on-year as the company's bottom line was hit by users deserting desktops for tablets. Revenues for its third fiscal 2013 quarter were $3.53bn, 20 per cent down on an annual basis when revenues were pumped up through Thai flood drive …

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  1. pPPPP

    People aren't ditching desktops

    People aren't ditching their desktops. They're just not replacing them. Ditto laptops. If there's nothing wrong with the one you've got, then why buy another.

    Contrast that with those who absolutely must thrown their money at the latest thing. They're the ones buying the tablets, along with those who simply see the value of having a tablet as well as the existing laptop/desktop/whatever.

    There's also he stupidly inflated price of HDDs to consider. They're still not back to pre-flood levels.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: People aren't ditching desktops

      Second the price comment, something does seem to be fishy about the pricing. I smell a cartel going on.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: People aren't ditching desktops

      Seagate deserves every bit of punishment they get.

      First, they still make too many drives that clatter like disintegrating jet engines from Rolls Royce.

      Second, they've started to obscure drive labeling, where you end up buying drives with different number of platters and a massive speed difference under identical SKUs. see

      amazon com/review/R205L2P2CHJ02D/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005T3GRN2&nodeID=172282&store=electronics

      Lastly, add price fixing and lack of effective regulatory oversight and these are the results.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Too Expensive

    I bought a Maxtor 400GB external drive (had a Seagate Drive inside) 7 years ago, it cost £65 in Maplins. If you were to buy a 500GB external drive today you would spend £70. So after 7 years of development storage technology doesn't seem to have moved.

    I've built a Home NAS, it currently has a number of older drives, I would love to buy a couple of low energy 2/3TB drives. But at the cost of the drives, it isn't worth it it would take years to recoup the energy saving costs. At £45 for a 2TB drive I would impulse buy at £70 I can make do without.

    Considering the number of people buying Raspberry PI's and the number of posts about building a NAS Seagate etc.. would realise there is some serious money to be made if they can hit the right price points.*

    *Still waiting on a low power ARM board that supports SATA Raid, it doesn't need to be much more powerfull than a Raspberry PI. But it does need to be cheaper than buying a dedicated NAS unit.

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  3. PLAzmA

    SSD Anyone

    Ok people moving to tablets has probably hurt their bottom line, but after the floods and a large amount of fixing (sorry correction wrong word), inflating the price of drives for so long to keep things profitable. Many people i know said we i dont really need all that space, i might as go with an SSD instead.

    2 years ago, 1 in 20 system i built had an ssd, currently its like 60 - 70% of systems go out the door with just an ssd or an ssd as a boot drive.

    Also i suspect due to the increased price's of drives post flooding many people were RMA'ing bad drives which would normally have been canned, due to the resale cost.

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  4. Lloyd
    Thumb Down

    Reliability?????

    Now, I could be wrong on this but as I'm in the market for some 3TB drives for a home media/backup server, I've read up on the current crop of Seagate (manufactured in China) drives and the reliability is awful, could that and the disparate pricing have anything to do with the drop in sales?

    Personally I'm waiting for the WD Reds to come down to around £110.

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    1. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: Reliability?????

      My 3TB Seagates seem to be fine. The era of their drives being total crap was like 3 or 4 years ago. They aren't nearly so bad now.

      Perhaps the fact that Seagate's name continues to be mud has something to do with their problems.

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