TWO BILLION PCs to sell in next five years

'laptops now can have external graphics card upgrades housed in little mini-PCs'

Recommendations...? - Want to keep Win7 Laptops alive for as long as possible.

(But had heard laptop graphics-card upgrades were mostly vaporware or required ninja skills connecting to motherboard etc...)

Re: I think most of el'reg owners could become "analysts" for a lot less.

Presumably near zero of them will continue to run Linux...

Re: I think most of el'reg owners could become "analysts" for a lot less.

"The PC market is more or less at saturation" that is to anyone like yourself with a couple of functioning brain cells. All markets will reach a point where most of the sales is replacement sales whether its soap or computers. With computers, neither hardware nor software is likely to have a compelling new feature that all existing gear needs to be replaced asap. For example, I have an old (~20 years) CRT TV that was more than adequate for what I was using it for that was just replaced with a flat screen after it just recently croaked. With computers, much the same is occurring, it will be replaced when the user decides it is past useful repair/upgrade and that may be awhile.

Even when people switched from desktops to laptops they were happy with 3 year old Dell ones from the commercial churn. The E6410 with W7 are still good solid machines - and cheap to buy.

The E6410 was pants by the way, the companies that have held on to kit will find more parts dying in the next two years and so will replace them with a timely hardware and Windows 10 roll out before 2020. Those buying kit recently may well go for a straight upgrade if they don't need fancy bells and whistles e.g usb type c and touchscreens.

Re: Do we need to replace Microsoft to fix this?

At some point I would consider upgrading from my desktop Core i7 870 to a faster new Intel architecture. However that would probably not be supported on W7 - so would need me to have migrated my applications to Linux Mint. No way do I want W10.

Re: The market is saturated

Well, she's nine years old now my dear workstation and I will shed tears when this old dual quad core baby goes down and I can't fix it! Keep them cool, they live longer.

Re: The market is saturated

While for many what you saw will be true, there will always be plenty of exceptions.

Take my use case for one.

I have currently 123,000+ Photos in my Archive. This takes up close on 2.3Tb of storage space.

No, this is not going into the cloud so don't even suggest it.

The thing is growing at at least 20K images per year now that I have retired.

So I have that monolith sitting on my desk. it is a 27in iMac with the 5k screen. There is a 27in Dell 4k screen attached as well. A Thunderbolt Disk array holds all the pictures. Backups are to some USB3 HDD's (4TB).

I'd love to get that on a tablet but I may be pushing up daisies before that happens. Oh, and a stylus/pen is essential ehen editing down at the pixel level. Fingers just won't hack it.

Yes, you make a good case for using portable devices only in the future but there will be exceptions naturally. Most current portable devices (phones/tablets etc) are also very limited with storage so I am often asked to backup people's photos to somewhere else. If they don't want them in the cloud then a small Linux powered server is ideal. Makes a great media server as well if like me you are not going to stream everytning that you already have in your collection.

Re: Propaganda

"[...] so I'll save my spare cash for the future and perhaps treat myself to that nice holiday that takes me out of the rat race for a couple of weeks."

Not needing any tech refreshes meant that the local scouts had their hut rewired. The local food bank also benefits every year.

Re: You know what would increase PC sales?

I think this argument has been and gone: Windows 10 is "good enough" for the average consumer. In the meantime they've learned to love their smartphones and smart TVs and hardly ever need anything else.

Re: You know what would increase PC sales?

I think Microsoft know exactly how much value people place on Windows 10. That was why they made it a free upregrade and rammed it down peoples' throats so hard they got sued. Despite their best efforts to infuriate their customers, they are still getting a net profit of a about $1B/month. They can afford not to care.

Re: Improvement?

What would faster processors do for you, really?

We're already at the stage that vendors are putting slower but less power consuming chipsets into phones because most users won't notice the speed but will notice the battery life.

I think 2 billion is optimistic; it assumes that the way people use computers won't change much, and given what has happened to the smartphone and tablet markets is just 5 years, that isn't a given.

Re: Improvement?

Only IBM is able to make faster chips; all x86 can do is add more cores, cache and SIMD instructions. So, no, except maybe for video encoding (and here you might as well use your phone) you probably won't notice any difference.

Re: Improvement?

Er, haven't AMD actually just done that?

Re: Needs a big app

"All it needs is an application that requires a huge box. 6k Gaming comes to mind."

What percentage of the world population is going to be able to afford it? What percentage of desktops are serious gaming machines? Computing is getting a bit like cameras did; "the best camera for the job is the one you have with you". If 5g delivers - a big if I grant you - then the big stuff is still going to be in server rooms.

The main difference now between a "midrange" and a "flagship" phone is the GPU, and I suspect that this is where the action will be - the phone as, in effect the X client and display device. The heavy lifting is on the server which distributes a lot of computing power on demand among numerous clients. I know there will always be people who want honking great desktops but I doubt they will save the industry.

Re: They are still predicting PC sales to increase

And no one has done a dual-screen clam shell that does not suck(Nintendo, I'm looking at you), which I would like to have. Or how about a screen that wraps around to the other side of the device?

The problem with PC sales is that PC manufacturers still think they are more than commodity box providers with varying degrees of shittyness. Like Alienware or even Apple; it's a x86_64 box with some extra crap on it CUT THE PRICES ALREADY!!1! I should be able to get a 3GHz+ Core i7 7th gen/16GB/1TB system in a case, WITH A POWER SUPPLY, everything, ready to go, sans K/V/M for less that $300. Putting a fancy Brand Sticker on it does not make me think it's worth $1200. Fucking stop the madness, or we're buying Raspberry Pis! I MEAN IT!!1! THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING!!1!

Re: They are still predicting PC sales to increase

t can't keep dropping forever, but it could easily keep dropping through 2021.

They certainly can keep dropping forever as PCs get replaced by other devices: docking stations for something even more mobile than a notebook.

Tablet sales, I have no idea about, I think bigger phones have been eating tablet sales and if they start doing folding phones so the screen gets 2x the size it'll eliminate more potential tablet sales.

Beefed up tablets will replace notebooks just as notebooks have replaced PCs. If phones continue to grow in size then any difference between them and tablets becomes moot, either way it's fewer PCs being sold.