Holiday PC Sales Slide For First Time In 5 Years

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The numbers are in and it looks PC sales fell for the first time in five years. Quick, everyone blame Windows 8!

PC makers sold 89.8 million units worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year, down 6.4 percent from the same quarter of 2011. That was slightly worse than expected by most, and the worst performance for more than five years, when the global economy shuddered to a halt and ushered in the worst recession since World War II. For all of 2012, 352 million PCs were sold, down 3.2 percent from 2011. That was the first annual decline since 2001, according to IDC, in the wake of the tech stock crash and the September 11 attacks.
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I also blame Windows 8, Apple and Ewoks

Wonder how this reports 6% decline but that other report said 20%, wonder if they were just taking a snapshot during Win8 release.
 
Computers today dont get any actual bump in performance anymore. They get tiny little micro improvements. 99.999% of users wouldnt notice a difference in performance from todays systems to one from one or even two years ago. Companies focus much more on how small they can make things and not how they can actually improve on them and make them faster.
 
Hardware-wise, there hasn't been any radical changes over the last 12 months.... Software wise, Win 8 probably scares away more potential "mon'n'pops" buyers, then it attracts...
 
Meanwhile tablet and phone sales are booming ... there is only room for so many electrical devices under the Christmas tree ;)
 
Tablets, win 8, laptops - all these things killing the PC - right - we've heard it before.

However, I often wonder how much of it is due to PCs not really being on the Moore's Law curve anymore? I mean, when I owned a 486 back in the day, it was a TREMENDOUS leap to a Pentium. That I NEEDED to upgrade because I couldn't run anything anymore. Flash forward to 2012 - my Core 2 duo I built five and half years prior was still running everything just fine. And the only reason I upgraded was because I'm an enthusiast, and God forbid I couldn't run mechwarrior online at a decent framerate. But for regular mom and pops - that Core 2 Duo is fine. In fact, I gave the PC to my sister and she's running it now, and she loves it (it's so FAST!) :)

I think PCs are just at that point - there isn't anything pushing the average user to upgrade what they already have. And for the websurfing, facebooking, stupid "tap this and wait a long time" genre of gamers - a PC isn't needed anymore.

I think this is a good thing actually. Get rid of all the crap PCs in the market, and let the survivors focus on smaller numbers of enthusiast products.
 
Okay this is further proof that violence in video games causes issues now it has caused kids to stop buying computers. :D Wanted to get off the kick Windows 8 bandwagon so jumped on another one. :D
 
mzs_biteme said:
Hardware-wise, there hasn't been any radical changes over the last 12 months.... Software wise, Win 8 probably scares away more potential "mon'n'pops" buyers, then it attracts...
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/ENDTHREAD


I've been looking at high-end laptops for the office, as the current ones are almost 3 years old.
But the new laptops are only about 15% fast than the 3 year old ones. Only big diference is that they will now support 16GB which will help with some of the larger VM's, and that I can finally order them with 750GB drives instead of the older 500GB drives.
 
Kongar said:
Tablets, win 8, laptops - all these things killing the PC - right - we've heard it before.

However, I often wonder how much of it is due to PCs not really being on the Moore's Law curve anymore? I mean, when I owned a 486 back in the day, it was a TREMENDOUS leap to a Pentium. That I NEEDED to upgrade because I couldn't run anything anymore. Flash forward to 2012 - my Core 2 duo I built five and half years prior was still running everything just fine. And the only reason I upgraded was because I'm an enthusiast, and God forbid I couldn't run mechwarrior online at a decent framerate. But for regular mom and pops - that Core 2 Duo is fine. In fact, I gave the PC to my sister and she's running it now, and she loves it (it's so FAST!) :)

I think PCs are just at that point - there isn't anything pushing the average user to upgrade what they already have. And for the websurfing, facebooking, stupid "tap this and wait a long time" genre of gamers - a PC isn't needed anymore.

I think this is a good thing actually. Get rid of all the crap PCs in the market, and let the survivors focus on smaller numbers of enthusiast products.
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Moore's Law is at the chip level and it is still going strong (the number of transistors doubling every 18 months or so) ... but you are right that although there are lots of new capabilities in the chips now they don't result in a 2x performance increase anymore ... also, most users aren't exactly pushing the envelopes anymore ... games are capped in performance because of consoles and heavy computer power users now have new options like chained video cards or multi CPU supercomputers that provide the high performance they need ... if we can get high bandwidth entry into most homes through fiber, cable, or wireless then that might open the door for some big performance need from the average user but right now it only takes so much horsepower to run email, Facebook, and Farmvile (yes, I know I misspelled it ;) ) :cool:
 
I have a laptop from 2009. Which I have no need to replace.

I have a feeling computers are suffering from the down economy--just the way people held onto their cars longer people also "make do" with their existing machines. Especially if the "new" models don't have a massively compelling improvement in performance. It isn't that the improvement doesn't exist--it's that it is irrelevant to the average user.
 
i still have a windows 7 laptop, sig rig, ipad 3, hp touchpad with android, just didnt need anything, and totally dont want windows 8.

my old laptop does all the laptop things, and my desktop does all the computer things.
 
Pretty soon its all gone be called gaming it wont matter what its on. Learn to accept that and evolve to the next stage of gaming or get left behind. :)
 
The market's hit the saturation point, you can't keep selling more and more of something every year it's just not tenable. Bye bye companies that banked on constantly increasing PC sales.
 
about windows 8.. I read reviews.. all seem useless to me... all i need to know, I have 8 programs in my taskbar (that is fairly typical for me, I am sure there are people with more than that), I can move my mouse to any of them and up they come... CAN windows 8 do something equal to this?, as clearly as fast?
 
The games aren't coming out like they use to. Use to be AAA hits every Christmas and in between. Just seems like its all dieing down. Nothing is pushing hardware like it use to be. Almost with every new game we'd have to upgrade years ago. Now it seems any computer after 2006-7 can play anything out decently even new games. Seems stagnant. All attention right now seems to be on tablets and phones. Android and windows 8 tablets.
 
Uvaman said:
about windows 8.. I read reviews.. all seem useless to me... all i need to know, I have 8 programs in my taskbar (that is fairly typical for me, I am sure there are people with more than that), I can move my mouse to any of them and up they come... CAN windows 8 do something equal to this?, as clearly as fast?
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Go to a Best Buy or other computer place and decide for yourself. It's a touchy subject here lately.
 
mzs_biteme said:
Hardware-wise, there hasn't been any radical changes over the last 12 months.... Software wise, Win 8 probably scares away more potential "mon'n'pops" buyers, then it attracts...
Click to expand...

There hasn't been a radical change since SSDs. Even that was a pretty minor bump compared to radical changes in the past. Pair an SSD with a core2duo and you won't know you are rocking an otherwise 6 year old computer until you try to play the latest game. Even then, you only need a slightly more recent GPU to match games written for lackluster 2006 GPUs (you will want a hefty chunk more power to run at 1080+ instead of the console's barely 720). Even the GPUs are getting what, 20% more than the previous generation instead of the 100%+ in the early 2000s.

The desktop might not be dead, but innovation on the desktop certainly is. Witness Microsoft's "I'm running a mobile OS" attempt on the desktop.
 
Kongar said:
Tablets, win 8, laptops - all these things killing the PC - right - we've heard it before.

However, I often wonder how much of it is due to PCs not really being on the Moore's Law curve anymore? I mean, when I owned a 486 back in the day, it was a TREMENDOUS leap to a Pentium. That I NEEDED to upgrade because I couldn't run anything anymore. Flash forward to 2012 - my Core 2 duo I built five and half years prior was still running everything just fine. And the only reason I upgraded was because I'm an enthusiast, and God forbid I couldn't run mechwarrior online at a decent framerate. But for regular mom and pops - that Core 2 Duo is fine. In fact, I gave the PC to my sister and she's running it now, and she loves it (it's so FAST!) :)
Click to expand...

1992 - 1996 - 2000 - 2004 - 2008
Each of those gaps had a massive leap in tech and paradigm shifts. To consider OEMs, the 2004 generic Dell P4's or Celerons were lame by 2008, but far ahead of sub-GHz chips like a Duron. Diablo II required an expensive PC at first, but not by 2004.

2008-2012, not so much, but lower prices. And the death of Vista. But 2009 Win7 dual-cores with 3-4 GB of DDR2 are fine.
 
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