The Death Of The PC Has Not Been Greatly Exaggerated

This right here is what every writer of these articles fails to understand. PC's service life continue to grow. For a large volume of users who are not power-gamers or content creators like alot of us, they can still be using a late 90's PC and accomplish everything they want on it if it hasn't grenaded yet.
 
Yeah, but the PC market not growing means that, for every company the only way to continue to grow is at the expense of some other company.

This is what is meant by the market "dying." In a mature market like these margins are thin, and revenues/marketshare can change fairly quickly (depending on market changes, and price sensitivity). The more players, the more volatile things are.

You have to find a new area of growth to invest in before your PC revenues disappear, or you have to find a UNIQUE angle to get people to start buying your products, so it's not the best position to be in.
 
I've been trying to clear out my "computer room" of all the stuff I don't need any more so I've posted a bunch of old computers and things on a local yard sale page on Facebook. I was able to sell a Dell SFF desktop with a Pentium 4 in it for $10. The rest of the stuff is still sitting... a free CRT monitor and an LCD I was asking $10 for. I've mentioned to people that I work with that I have some computers I'll give them and it's like I've offered them the flu. I told me wife it's sad that I can't give a desktop computer away any more. Nobody wants them. I once sold a woman a K62-233 Mhz computer I built up for about $350. I couldn't get that for my quad core I'm using right now.
 
nutzo said:
Cloud based computing? Not happening at the company I work for, even though we have free licenses from Microsoft that I could switch people to. Virtual desktops? not going to happen for the most part either. We have a terminal server available for some users, but that's just to make some apps easier/faster to run while they are traveling or working from home. They still have a laptop with everything loaded.

When Adobe switch to cloud based software, we stopped upgrading the software. When the manager of that department got the price quote for switching to the "cloud" version, they decided to just stick with the old version for as long as possible or use other tools.
We actually ended up saving money as we used to upgrade every other version. Now it's now been almost 3 years and we are still running the same version.
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I despise cloud computing. I see it as returning us to the pre PC era where we had dumb terminals. I thought the PC era was suppose to free us, so we weren't dependent upon large companies. And I mean, look at all the security breaches that happen. Do you really want your personal computing life out for everyone to steal? (But, I'm probably wrong in thinking that, and we probably do.)

I don't think companies want you to have your own PC, and that they're actively trying to kill it. I'm honestly surprised that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc., haven't been promoting trying to get easy television out displays to supplant your PC. Or having Microsoft creating a Xbox One version of Office or Visual Studio.
 
On the upside, used computers can be had very cheap these days. Bought my mother one off newegg a few days ago for $140. This had a quad core AMD CPU, 1TB HDD, 4GB DDR3 and Win 8.1. It probably wasn't any faster than what she had besides Windows being newer, the case being a lot smaller and two additional GB but what she had was loud as hell (heatsink sucked).
 
the PC shall never die !! Its really sad to see that you cant sell old stuff for good prices nowadays.. but I guess that will catch up once they become vintage..
 
Because we live in an unsustainable market. And anything that can't grow dies. But it's not the PC market that will die in its entirety. It's individual vendors and stores. But there still be vendors that emerge as winners, when the crops have died out. In a shrinking or stagnating market they have to put more focus on attracting the customer.
 
I the death of the PC, sortof. PC are more geared towards content creation, while all the other gadgets are geared towards content consumption. And there is always more consumption than creation.

Nytegard said:
I despise cloud computing. I see it as returning us to the pre PC era where we had dumb terminals. I thought the PC era was suppose to free us, so we weren't dependent upon large companies. And I mean, look at all the security breaches that happen. Do you really want your personal computing life out for everyone to steal? (But, I'm probably wrong in thinking that, and we probably do.)

I don't think companies want you to have your own PC, and that they're actively trying to kill it.
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Coming from the dumb terminal mainframe era; What's old is new again.
 
Why don't you guys, the [H] staff, do an article that the pc is more than healthy?
 
scojer said:
Why don't you guys, the [H] staff, do an article that the pc is more than healthy?
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I am not sure if I would say healthy ... there is still a lot of money in the PC market but it is heavily centered on Enterprise now rather than consumer ... there are a number of tipping points ahead that could swing the market back to PC with a vengeance:

- home automation could require home servers in every residence and powerful setups to drive multiple screens, robots, and home configurations

- 4K and VR could require big new expansions if they ever become mass market

- expansion of the Wintel style tablets could start shifting the mobile market away from ARM and back to the PC vendors
 
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