PC Shipments Are In Decline...AGAIN!

nutzo said:
And unlike those "thin" laptops, this is a business level build and can withstand a lot more drops/abuse/etc.
Most the Latitudes I buy for the office easily withstand 3 years of heavy traveling and another 3-4 years handed down to someone in the office.
I have a stack of 8 year old dual core D830's that run fine with Windows 10. If I where to slap an SSD in them they would be very usable.
However they just look too old/clunky and are too heavy for anyone to accept using them :(
Click to expand...

I don't own a personal laptop, as I have always been issued them through work. If I needed one though, I'd go for a Dell Latitude model in a heartbeat. Those are solid, well made laptops that can take a beating and keep on going, and easily upgradeable RAM/Drive/WLAN card seals the deal. (Though I am a little disappointed that the E6430s didn have a door for the RAM. I had to unscrew the cover. Still dead simple, but a small step backwards.

My current work HP Folio thingamajig (can't remember, see sig) has nothing on a good old Dell Latitude, despite being much newer and costing much more.

I mean, it is pretty, light and thin, but this means nothing to me.
 
sadsteve said:
And I don't really understand why someone would want to peruse the web with a small screen device when you've got a large screen monitor on your computer. My 4.3 inch screen phone is not a particularly good size for perusing the web. I understand the mobile aspect, but when you're home it's so much nicer to have a real keyboard and a large screen monitor or two to make posts to HardOCP.
Click to expand...
Get what you are saying, a lot, but with children roaming, with kitchen and stuff, tablet is nice.
I would be great to have the power of the desktop in your tablet, it just being telecasted or whatever its called.. plus the hardware on the 'tablet' I would assume would fail less, probably being less powerful/ simpler maybe?
No saying this would be easily executed, but I think it could be a success, if very well executed.. a desktop like I am saying would give you a ton of power.
 
The end of Moore's Law...

40-years-processor-trend.png


...where's that video of the chick from Intel talking about this problem?
 
Last edited:
ShamisOMally said:
A: I blame the PC makers because only just now have they started marking down Haswell/Broadwell units and now Skylake computers are the new norm
B: AMD and Nvidia are insanely late with their new video cards, as such sales of both companies for cards have dropped 10% and climbing in the last quarter and there is still no price cut in sight
C: See A and B
Click to expand...

The above only applies to enthusiasts, which are not the bulk of the market.

The bulk of the market cares about getting on the internet/facebook. Once their computer does that, they are done, pretty much until the computer croaks. And even after that: Smartphones...
 
Youn said:
The end of Moore's Law...

40-years-processor-trend.png


...where's that video of the chick from Intel talking about this problem?
Click to expand...

Technically Moore's law is still fine.

Moore's law was expressed in the number of transistors, and if you look at your chart above, the number of transistors are still growing at the roughly same pace. We just became used to all those transistors resulting in a growth in single thread performance, which hasn't necessarily been the case lately.
due to the shift towards performance per watt rather than absolute performance that the mobile market demands. Many more transistors have been dedicated to power management - for instance - than in the past.

I remember reading somewhere that a recent gen Intel CPU (let's say Sandy through Skylake) has more transistors dedicated to power management than the original Pentium had in total...

Now, Moore's law WILL NOT be fine forever, even Moore himself predicted this back in the 70's. Eventually we will hit the point where you simply can not die shrink anymore as you are reaching the limits of what can be accomplished with atomic and subatomic particles. We aren't quite there yet though. Where we are now is at the point where further die shrinks are simply more complex, and more fraught with design difficulties than in the past. This will not be the case for very long though.
 
TechLarry said:
It's not rocket science.

PC's are not improving like they once did. Improvements come at a trickle now, not in leaps and bounds. I used to build a new machine every 6-8 months to keep up with the fastest hardware.

I haven't built a new machine in 2 years now.

A little more ram here, a new video card there, an SSD for a big boost. That's where it's at.

The whole processor game seems to have come to a close. Improvements in performance are so small that it's not worth upgrading.

Basically, people are running their PC's into the ground now.
Click to expand...

Yep, about to upgrade all my family's PCs. They are all running Athlon II X3s or X4s, and I'm just going to bump them all to 8Gb of memory, a nice SSD, and a used mid grade graphics card to replace the onboard. No more is needed for 80% of people, and those builds are 5 years old and weren't blazing fast when I put them together.
 
Everyone's kind of touched on these points, but... As already stated the market is moving towards a more power optimized, performance per watt state. This is two fold; a marketing point to enterprises (majority of the market) and to keep desktop sales competitive / relevant to those who would rather just use their phone or tablet. With optimizing hardware for power consumption software companies are making the move towards less resource intensive programs. This is why we're seeing an explosion of, "Mobile" websites and even Windows 10 is marketed as extending the lifeline of aging hardware.

There's also a major cultural shift happening. My girlfriend has a really nice i7, 8GB ram laptop, but uses her iphone for almost everything she does. I told her I was going to bring a computer over to her house and her response was, "Why?" Now that it is there she enjoys using it as well as playing Tropico 5. Personally, I am at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Using my phone for web browsing or other work is the bane of my existance. I'm still using a 4.5 year old HTC Amaze that I purchased the same week it came out. How people are feeling about desktops is how I feel about buying a new phone for $600. That phone that is going to be outdated in a year is an utter waste to me, considering I never use it. For the vast majority of the population though, why do they need more than a phone. As someone mentioned in the Facebook article some people see Facebook as the internet. That's all they use it for and anything more than a phone to browse Facebook and read email is a waste.

I upgrade my systems about every 4 years to maximize resale value with some incremental improvements mixed in there. Moving to my X99 system from Z77 only cost me $400.00 net for everything (listed below) with some smart shopping. The point in this article doesn't affect me as the only box systems I've ever purchased were budget tower servers on sale. I believe eventually there will be, but until I can get the power, desktop experience, and price to performance ratio from a mobile device I'm sticking to the desktop. I've got a pretty beefy laptop and I still feel restricted compared to my desktops.

Laptop: ZBook 15, i7 4700mq, 32GB DDR3, 250GB 850 Evo, + K610M GPU
Main Desktop: 5820K (4.2 stock voltage, 32GB DDR4, 4x250GB SSD Raid 0, 2x 1TB Raid 1, + R9 290x (Accelero)
Desktop at GF's house: 870k (4.1 stock voltage), 8GB DDR3, 2x 250GB SSD Raid 0, 2x 2TB Raid 1, + R9 290 (with an H80)
 
Just replaced my 75 year old Mother's Pentium Something 1.6 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, Integrated GPU with an HP AIO Athlon X2 250 1.6 Ghz, 4 GB Ram, integrated vid. Running Win 10, Legit. She's happy. I had her on Linux for many months, after XP was no longer supported, and we could not afford any options.
 
I still use a dell D620 for my daily web browsing, and up until recently I was able to run Homeworld 2, NFS off of it, and it ran perfectly fine. The I finally saved enough quarters to upgrade my desktop to something from this decade, and bought a new SSD, and now I'm fine. Can run all I need.
 
Final Fantasy 7 Remake will thrust me into VR, and its comming will require teh graphics to ohh and ahh and ogle. So I will have to update when it comes out. Pascal or viola maybe affordable by then.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

We aren't seeing the new killer programs/games that could take advantage of more powerful CPU's, because there is nothing newer and faster to run them on, and we aren't seeing new killer high end CPU's because there is no software that requires them, allowing Intel to focus on performance/watt improvements instead.

I'm pretty certain there are developers out there who could create some new and interesting stuff that would really take advantage of faster CPU technology, but they are not about to sink development costs into something that only very few people who overclock or have high end systems can run. Development needs to pay if in returns, and you get more returns when there are more potential customers.

Likewise, Intel isn't about to sink billions into having separate mobile and desktop lines if there isn't a large customer base out there clamoring for high end stationary performance they can sell it to, which is why our current generation of high end chips are really chips originally designed for and optimized for mobile applications, but just "factory overclocked" with higher voltages and clocks. This is why my 5 year old Sandy Bridge-E i7-3930k clocks much higher than most brand new Haswell-E chips when overclocked. Their designs are tweaked and optimized for mobile applications where long battery life and low heat output are MUCH MUCH MUCH more important than all out performance.


This "chicken and egg" scenario has always existed, but in the past advances were driven more by competition. Maybe the consumer or shopper didn't necessarily have any needs for the latest high end chips, but hey, why would I buy the slower of the two if they cost the same anyway? Besides, there was also a market conditioning that there would be continuous improvements, and their hardware would be come obsolete quickly, so future proofing was important.

Now, CPU performance has stagnated, and there are no fancy new applications to challenge higher speed, so there is nothing that drives the cycle forwards.

It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's great to - in 2016 - be able to keep a high end system from 2011 and still have it perform like a high end system, but on the other hand it makes our hobby less interesting.

I miss the late 90's through ~2005 when to be cutting edge you had to be on an annual Motherboard/CPU upgrade cycle and a 6 month video card upgrade cycle. It wasn't wallet friendly, but damn was it fun!
Click to expand...

dunno I personally think hardware has just outpaced its need. Yes there was chicken and egg before but still at that time the hardware was fairly lacking. This is the same with pretty much every type of market, first generations are pretty poor, next are much better but then you hit a plateau. PC/laptops are hitting a plateau in hardware.... and just like the engine, focus is now on size and efficiency.
 
I doubt this really has anything to do with hardware being late... or software not pushing things, or the numbers would be worse.

It comes down to simple usage patterns. The industry is likely to contract by 10-12% a year for the next 4-5 years at least. People are turning to mobile devices for the majority of their computing needs, reducing the need to upgrade their desktop setups. We are also starting to have people that don't in fact have a desktop anymore at all. I am not saying the desktop will die off, of course not, but the market is going to contract for the foreseeable future.

I also say 4-5 years because imo that will be around the time, augmented reality for mobile devices really hits the market at which time you can expect desktop sales to start dropping faster then they are now.

The desktop will always exist in some form, I just don't see it being the main stream must have product it still is at the moment.
 
Where's computerpro3 or whatever to tell us how they're going to ship 178 million ultrabooks this year? Except that the global market would be lucky to see 160M notebooks of any kind shipped in 2016...
 
I am nostalgic for the days when Ultima games were released every year or two. Every new Ultima required a computer upgrade just to run the thing. LOL: I had to buy a new computer every year or so just to play Ultima.
 
Snoflo said:
I am nostalgic for the days when Ultima games were released every year or two. Every new Ultima required a computer upgrade just to run the thing. LOL: I had to buy a new computer every year or so just to play Ultima.
Click to expand...
You must have had some serious dough for a new computer every year O-o...Good for you.
 
Lol, no not really: used to sell off the old one for a good amount. Computers kept their value better back then.
 
lostinseganet said:
You must have had some serious dough for a new computer every year O-o...Good for you.
Click to expand...

Some guy here put the math to how he does it. After his initial build, he kept selling/upgrading all of the time and it really only ran him $50-100/mo to keep the latest stuff in his rig.
 
lostinseganet said:
You must have had some serious dough for a new computer every year O-o...Good for you.
Click to expand...

I was cash strapped when I was younger. Computing in the 90's for me was based off of hand-me-downs and scraping together money from my paper route to buy new parts. I started with a 286 built from someones old parts bin in 1991 (mind you, the 486 had been on the market since the late 80's). I didn't care. Having my own computer was great, and Sid Meier's Civilization was 10 times the game anything available on the NES was. Eventually (probably 1993/1994?) I got my hands on a 486sx25 and motherboard and upgraded it. That thing overclocked to 50Mhz!! What a difference that made in Xwing and Tie Fighter!

In 1996 I inherited a 2.5 year old socket 5 Pentium 120Mhz. I was thrilled, even though it wouldn't overclock AT ALL. in 1997 I had scraped together enough paper route money to buy a a Matrox Mystique, my first 3D card. The computer store I bought it at had a unique 1 year in store warranty, so when it burned up 3 days before the warranty expired in 1998, I took it in to the store and traded it for a Miro HiScore 3D, a 6MB Voodoo 1, the Eurpean name for the canopus pure 3d. At the same time I inherited a Socket 7 Pentium 150 (not MMX) and motherboard. It easily overclocked to 200Mhz. The Voodoo2 may already have been out at this point, but I was still very excited. Quake, and Half Life were amazing!

The funny thing is, I used to chat with people around the world on IRC from Sweden where I lived at the time, and I was always amazed at how much money people in the U.S. must have, as people were telling me they had Pentium II's, the latest gen CPU. I didn't know anyone who wasn't at least a generation if not more behind. Part of it was just childish naivete, but also part of it was that the big box retailers in the U.S. sold branded computer systems much cheaper than they did in Sweden at the time.

When my family moved back to the US after 16 years in Sweden (parents jobs) in the summer of 1999 and I went off to college in the fall, my dorm mates all had new computers their parents had bought them for college. I was still using my - now ancient - Pentium 150@200 with a PCI Matrox Millenium for 2D and a 6mb Voodoo1 for 3d. This was the first year the dorms were wired for Ethernet (previously it had all been digital Tau modems) and we took advantage of this for Quake2 tournaments. None of my friends could understand how their brand new store bought Pentium II and Pentium III systems couldn't keep up with my old as dirt ghetto-built system.

College was the turning point for me from a computing budget standpoint though. Computer parts were cheaper here in the U.S. than they were in Sweden at the time, and I worked my ass off both during the semester and during breaks at menial $5/hr minimum wage jobs in order to finance my computer habit and was able use the income to keep up with the annual Motherboard/CPU upgrades and twice a year GPU upgrades.

That Pentium 150 and Voodoo1 were still my only rig until the fall of 2000 though, when I bought myself a shiny new AMD Duron 650Mhz (which would overclock to 950Mhz!) and a GeForce 2 GTS. The rest is history.

Here is my full upgrade history since the late 90's, if anyone cares :p
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top