Windows 8 fails to revive world CPU biz IHS iSuppli, a market watcher, has admitted that its expects world PC sales to fall this year even further than it previously thought they would. Whatever the degree of decline, it will mark the first time global personal computer shipments have fallen in 11 years. In a discussion of world chip sales posted yesterday, iSuppli …
Pretty much here already, for well under £100. With a rather more upmarket processor than the Pi, which is aimed at a slightly different market.
You probably won't have heard the brand names, and you probably won't be buying them from well known dealers, and they'll be based not on Tegra but maybe Allwinner A10 and Rokchip, and they will be 1024x600 or worse (etc).
But for around £60-80 quid, will anyone care?
If you want one from a dealer with relatively well known name, with a spec somewhat behind the curve, they do exist, e.g.
http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/product_detail/13426/Jazz-C725-7-Android-4-0-Tablet-PC-1-0GHz-ARM11-4GB-WiFi-b-g-n/ for £70 (caution: 800x400 screen - look around for better screens at the same price, but you'll have to trade off against something else e.g. noname dealer).
and have done for a long time. But its serious crunch time. PC's today are in general at the low medium and ultrabook ends - just rehashed, warmed up shit. Its little wonder that people have tired of buying the same rehashed, reheated garbage ever x years. Some people say a PC is enough, but brutally I personally have not found it to be thus. Today if you wish to work on or study on the enterprise software levels (example, 16GB for exchange) then you start to reach a point where you need fantastic monster machines. And who provides these - not many options, and very little in the medium range. So, people more and more find tablets equal to rdiculous ultrabooks. And who can blame them. And on the server side, given the vast cost and nightmarish levels required for working on serious server level stuff (Hi Microsoft, welcome server 2012, powershell, windows 8, and..) its little wonder there is a run taking place to move cloudwards. And not to azure either.
AMD could save itself. It could simply up the spec on its motherboards and oem's (LAPTOPS). Why not put 4 dimm/simm slots on every laptop chipset. Guess what, I'd like a machine I can put a lot of ram in without a nightmare price?? Oh look, you've just created a bioundary layer where a PC is again bigger, badder and better than tablets.
I'll say this to every single PC vendor out there. You are not going to out tablet the ARM platform at tablet level, and certainly not on rediculous over priced garbage ultrabooks. If I want a thin mobile device with mobility at its core, I am not going to pay your price. End of. However, I still want the PC of tommorow. Something powerful - capable beyond the tablet or cloud. And I'm willing to pay good money for it. But its graphics, and its cpu and its storage and its memory must not just be another reheated hash of the last gen over and over and over. Yes, I want a 1TB drive, yes I want 16GB, yes, I actually want a decent GPU not just rehashed junk intel gfx. And if you don't want to build that machine, thats ok, I don't have to buy the crap you're shipping today thats junk. And by the figures no one else wants that stuff either.
The PC isn't going to win the war in mobility. And its not going to survive in the areas like battery life, convenience or light usage that the tablets rightly dominate in. The bulk of its software library isn't even built for that paradigm. Built the powerful PCs of tommorow and start doing it today. You will in either case have lower sales figures, but the powerful PC will always hav e its place, and the junk models won't.
People are dropping the PC - because the last 2-4 machines they bought were junk and they are reaching a tipping point where they don't want to have that complexity + junk again when simnplistic tablet platforms answer more of their desires.
Lastly - ultrabook - a huge nail in the coffin of PCs. Intel lost the plot on this. Its taken its quite marvellous Ivy bridge and sandy bridge lines, and crippled them in the worst chassis. With limited connectivity (Its a PC - PC's soul is plugging things into it, not removing the connectors) and heat induced crippled perf - one can only marvel at this dirge. At huge price as well.
In the meantime, PC gaming is screaming for a vendor to step in and bring it. The games are at a surperior level to consoles or tables - assuming the right hardware is applied. And the window to catch it right is now.
This failure is going to result in the death of a very large part of the PC industry. Thats going to bite all affected. Would be much better to attack the issues in a unified way. That way is not the ultrabooks.
Well I installed win8 on an old Athlon64 x2 running at 2ghz. With 4gb ram. It runs perfectly. Think of thee new UI as a big start button and no problems with usability. The kids like the MS store.
If anything it has fewer problems in terms of stability than Win7.
Ok I do hate IE10 lots of compatibility problems with lots of sites, but a quick chrome install fixed the issue.
Not need to buy a new PC at all though. Run faster than XP or Win7.
Not an MS fanboy also run an iMac and a Solaris workstation at home.
Windows 8 may be dirt cheap (relative to MS usual end user prices) but
Why bother at all if the benefits aren't visible in comparison with today's setup
Why bother at all if the upgrade assistant says "you need to upgrade x dozen apps"
As for VMs:
1) My former favourite, VMware Player, is no longer zero cost afaict. Does Player 4 support Win 8 (it doesn't sound like they work well together, from a quick look around)?
2) Do the cheap Win 8 prices apply to fresh installs, or just upgrades? If just upgrades, can I move from Win 7 on a real PC to Win8 in a VM on that and still only pay upgrade prices?
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"VMWare player is free (or was when I downloaded it recently)"
It's still free to download. Player 4 was free to use, for personal or commercial use. For Player 5, when my copy starts up, the startup screen window title says "VMware Player (Non-commercial use only)" and the window body text includes "This product is not licenced and is authorised for non-commercial use only. For commercial use, purchase a licence. Buy now.". "Buy now" goes to a web page which includes the text "VMware Player is free for personal use. VMware Player is now available for commercial use with support offerings as a component of VMware Fusion Professional."
Nice, eh?
Or you could have a look at Section 8 of the EULA:
"VMware Player is intended for your own personal non-commercial use only. Player may only be used commercially or be re-distributed with written agreement from VMware."
And from the Player 5 Release Notes:
"VMware Player is also now available for commercial use. A commercial license for VMware Player 5 is included with VMware Fusion 5 Professional to enable customers to run virtual machines on Windows or Linux PCs and on Macs using a single license key! "
The way I read that is that commercial use of Player was free with V4 and isn't free with V5 (you need a paid-for licence, bundled with Fusion 5 Pro). Correction most welcome.
VirtualBox GPL Edition it shall be then, at least at work.
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Nah, I got the agreement. You can use VMPlayer commercially for free, as long as I do not distribute it. In other words I can virtualise to my hearts content internally as long as it's all inward facing. The latest VMPlayer is limited to 4 virtual CPUs and it has all the necessary bits to define and set up the VMs. Works a treat.
There are many factors contributing to decline of PC sales, of course, but one I have not seen mentioned yet is the longevity of the current console generation. Since most PC games are not PC-exclusive but are designed for consoles as well, and since the leading consoles have been around for such a long time, games no longer require anything more than a cheap midrange computer. I bought a fairly cheap video card nearly three years ago and I have still been unable to find anything I cannot run at maximum settings.
Yes, yes, yes. SO many people are posting here saying that they have machines that are easily good enough to support what they need. I can say the same. I upgraded to a Phenom II x6 a while back and, while this is easily powerful enough for W7 and anything I'm likely to need to run, it does raise one point.
Windows 8 is, at least in the traditional PC world, an "upgrade" to W7. It consumes no more than W7 did, and therefore needs no hardware change for those of us that have W7, if we actually decide that we really want to go in that direction. The only realistic target there is for remaining Windows XP users (I doubt that any Vista users will have any more problems than do W7 users) who will likely be using older hardware.
However the problem there is that WXP users won't necessarily switch to W7/8. With the expiry of WXP coverage getting closer, the people still using WXP will increasingly be either hard core users who do not like the idea of shifting, people who can ill afford the shift for whatever reason, and corporate users who are likely to go to W7 only when the existing machines are getting near to their end of life.
I'm not convinced that the tablet is going to replace the PC everywhere, but it does have an advantage in the home market at least, not least because a cheap tablet running a reasonably recent version of Android can undercut anything in the Windows market, and W8 has yet to really catch on with the great unwashed. If it every does.
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