PC Sales Drop to Historic Lows | Hacker News Reader

PC Sales Drop to Historic Lows

wsj.com

35 pointsjseliger58 comments

This is not unexpected, so many people who own a PC don't need a personal "computer" they just need a system to deploy pre-built network applications to. And while it is "weird" to see that be true, it also reflects the shift in media consumption and communications.

Of course some of us (like me) still want development systems, what were once distinguished by being called "workstations" which separated them from "PCs" by their use in professional code development. I expect that as the market shrinks the percentage of Linux installs as a fraction of the overall market will rise. I'm curious to see how it effects pricing. Once it drops below 100M/year in shipments the ability for the smaller makers to draft on the big orders made by the larger makers will go away and their prices will have to come up, I can't see that they have any margin left to give up.

My workstations have been laptops since 2000, only replaced when they died or got stolen (in one case).

The interesting question for me is how long you will be able to do that. I can imagine a future where the "application only" laptops have hard crypto that prevents anyone from tampering with the OS. And the OS only allows installs from the "App Store" (generic). Think IOS meets Macbook meets UEFI++.

That will be the "sweet spot" for people who just use laptops as tools and are tired of being afraid of being hacked all the time. That will be the only kind of laptop many business people can get.

Because of that the marginal cost to make a laptop that can have some other OS loaded on to it will go up, and probably go up dramatically. I think it is fortunate that for now a laptop can last 5 years easily as its easier to shell out 3 - 5K for a laptop if you'll have it for 5 years than it is for something that won't.

In a way that is kind of the full stack computers we had up until the PC won the war of the home computers, right?

Upgrading an 8 or 16 bit computer usually meant buying a new one. And although they had hardware and memory specs, little was known about the OSes themselves.

Advances in desktop CPU speed have been minimal over the past few years. If I could get a reasonably priced PC that's 50% faster than my two-year-old system, I'd buy it today. Instead, the best performance gain for me is a PCIe SSD.

Exactly. My 4 year old desktop PC with an Intel sandy bridge CPU, which i added an SSD to a year ago, is perfectly fine for day to day work.

energy efficiency since i purchased my computer has improved greatly, but i have no reason for a more efficient CPU, its still performing fast enough for all desktop applications and has no battery.

Don't feel bad about your system not being as efficient as newer models. The carbon footprint of manufacturing it dwarfs that of its lifetime electricity usage, so scrapping it for a more efficient machine would be a false environmental economy. Better to make maximum usage of that sunk environmental cost.

My 6-year-old PC finally carked it over the past few weeks. About to go pick up my new whitebox in 30 minutes...

Interestingly, before this 6-year-old PC, I'd been upgrading every 2 years, but I haven't felt the performance pinch since (okay, some games were a bit pinchy with what used to be a good card, but otherwise no)

Same here. I have a Nehalem 2.8GHz, overclocked (press-button overclocking on the motherboard, I don't have time to mess around with that anymore), and it is perfectly fine for everyday work. The only reasons I'm considering upgrading are video games and to be able to go to 64GB of RAM (and that's only because I want to throw a lot of virtual machines at my problems).

I'm even finding this with laptops now. I bought a high-end laptop a couple of years ago and it seems that a new one today at the same price wouldn't make a lot of difference to my day-to-day usage.

I jumped into laptops around 2000.

The trick is to buy models that you can replace battery, memory and HD.

Already that brings the laptop a very long life, before the motherboard or screen eventually die. Or even the memory limit doesn't help anylonger.

But even in 2016, 4GB - 8GB are still good enough if one isn't running VMs or development environments like InteliJ.

So I bought 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. I only come close to the RAM usage when running multiple virtual box instances, I don't use all the disk and it's fast, and my battery still lasts about 10 hours.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro that I keep at work (I didn't like the company-issued computer, so brought in my own), and a 2009 Mac Pro at home.

I've upgraded them both to SSD, added USB3 via PCIe [1], and bumped the memory up to 32 GB in the 2009. I mistimed [2] the memory updates on the 2008 so only got that up to 12 GB or 18 GB (I don't remember which).

Neither of these machines shows any signs of needing replacement.

If I used them for gaming perhaps things would be different. Now that I think about it, all of my purchases of machines to run Windows over the last 15 years were because I wanted better gaming performance.

[1] http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technologies/USB34PM...

[2] Memory prices often follow a U shaped curve, starting out high when a new speed of memory is introduced, then falling as that new speed becomes mainstream. Then something faster and incompatible comes out, and as that becomes mainstream production goes down on the older item, and prices rise.

For example, current prices at macsales.com of 4x8GB in various technologies for Mac Pro:

   $290  1866 MHz DDR3 ECC    Used in 2013 Mac Pro
   $200  1333 MHz DDR3 ECC    Used in 2010-2012 Mac Pro
   $195  1066 MHz DDR3 ECC    Used in 2009 Mac Pro
   $780   800 MHz DDR2 ECC    Used in 2008 Mac Pro

This is success. Desktop PCs work and do their jobs. Like the large appliance industry, sales will continue due to replacements and new startups, but the initial rollout is done.

The fact that many models now have SSDs with longer lifetimes than hard drives helps too. I agree. While I'm sure tablets have had an effect on PC sales, I don't think it necessarily follows that the overall need for PCs has diminished. Emerging market expansion and overall economic growth will tend to expand it. I don't know which of these forces is winning out, but certainly one factor is that they're just lasting longer.

To be honest, OS advances aside, I bet an improved Amiga 500 would be good enough for what I do most of the time.

There is hardly anything new that the regular consumer would require from their computers, when they already own one.

Hence why OS vendors are pushing so hard for OS updates and trying start new markets like IoT or smartwatches.

Google link to see for non-subscribers: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

The 'web' link now standard below the title on the discussions page for each article provides basically this functionality. There is no longer a need for commenters to post such comments.

Probably because my 8 year old core2 based desktop is still fast enough for everything but gaming.

Yup. Same reason tablet sales are slowing... Though at a slower pace.

Only because tablets are a new medium, with time their upgrade cycle will slow more.

I wonder if phones will start to go the same way. My 2.5 year old iPhone 5 is going fine apart from needing a battery replacement and Apple helpfully trying to stop me using an ad blocker because you know, you should really have a 5s or higher for that (bastards).

They're going to slow down just as tablets are. PCs have been around a long time in tech-time compared to tablets and modern smart phones. Just as computers no longer need to be upgraded every couple years, tablets are no longer upgraded every year or two. Phones are getting to that point as well with the faster CPUs and faster storage. A mid-range phone now has the same specs as a top tier phone from a year ago.

As for ad-blocking on your iPhone 5, you could just install an alternate browser that supports extensio... oh, right. :(

I'm currently using my late 2009 27" iMac.

It's virtually indistinguishable from current models and is more than fast enough for everything except gaming.

I added more ram so I could run some VMs, and recently replaced the Hard Drive. Otherwise, I don't see this thing failing in the foreseeable future.

Doesn't make me miss the days of using cheap plastic PCs with a 3 year usable life.

It's virtually indistinguishable from current models and is more than fast enough for everything except gaming.

I had a 2009 or 2010 model, and while I agree with what you're saying overall, the new 5K models have incredible screens: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os-....

I would say even gaming, as there are many types of games to choose from, specially if one goes for the indie ones.

I have the same but replaced it recently with a QNAP TS-251 NAS. It supports containers and virtual machines. Added 8GB memory and it works great.

At work I have a Z820 dual-Xeon (each w/ 16 cores) specialist workstation packed with SSD drives and 64GB of RAM.

At home I have a 6 year old beaten up Thinkpad with an i7, 8GB RAM, and a small SSD.

Apart from when I'm compiling some very heavy workloads, I can't honestly feel the difference much. For the smaller projects I do at home, it's still zippy.

I thought about getting a faster machine at home to run Quartus at higher speeds for some FPGA personal projects. But the free web edition will only ever use 1 core anyways. So almost pointless upgrading.

Tech has become mostly 'good enough' for many years now, even for engineers. It's only gaming tech and display technologies that are really making me want something newer.

This trend is foreseeable. Mobile devices are replacing part of the function of the PCs. Besides, the growth of hardware is much faster than the software. A 7-years old PC is still performing well if we only require basic function. We do not need a new one. The sales figures will keep declining if there is not new value provided by PC.

I wonder if they count chromeos devices as pc's in this study, currently my main dev systems are a chromebook and a digital ocean instance that I remote into.

And looking above the answer is yes, but the numbers seem skewed to ios having the article behind a pay wall its hard to tell how they derived these numbers it would seem that android rather than is would be in the lead. Its bad news fir the web in that apple doesn't support the really awesome HTML5 APIs like webrtc and web midi on ios

What I want to know is: how does this affect me as a PC Gaming enthusiast? I'm guessing these parts will still be made, but maybe not all completely assembled for someone to take home.

Does this PC label also include laptops? And does this list include Apple? It seems like they're mentioned but its a little ambiguous as to whether its included.

Yes, this includes laptops. Yes this includes Macs, which are up 2.5% (thus the rest of the PC industry is down more than the headline number; supposedly vendors beyond the top 5 were hurt most, down like 20% year-over-year as a group).

Beyond Macs, Asus also up 0.5%, all other PC vendors way down. Overall PC sales down ~10.5%.

Does anyone know if those numbers include Chromebooks?

Yes, the IDC source article[0] indicates Chromebooks are included.

"PCs include Desktops, Portables, Ultraslim Notebooks, Chromebooks, and Workstations and do not include handhelds, x86 Servers and Tablets (i.e. iPad, or Tablets with detachable keyboards running either Windows or Android). Data for all vendors are reported for calendar periods."

[0]http://m.idc.com//pressRelease/prUS40909316

Chromebooks don't have any market outside US, so I expect their numbers to be very minimal.

As far as I am aware the PC gaming hardware market has never been stronger than it is now.

PC gaming isn't going anywhere, the slowdown in PC sales is more about the lower powered general-purpose computers people buy from Dell, HP etc. to put in their homes for general browsing/word processing/email etc. Those kinds of PCs have been and are being largely replaced by the use of tablets and smart phones.

Also individual hardware components like CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards generally aren't included in these declining numbers. It's more about full systems from manufacturers like those I mentioned above.

Microsoft has neen responsible for slow sales for years.

Why? Because their insistance in linking thr OS so intimately with applications effectively stifles upgrades.

Upgrading a PC with a non-trivial amount of software is a complete pain in the ass. Gone are the days of the OS and apps being independent to the point of being able to upgrade the OS without losing apps.

In our case we have dozens of workstation we would like to upgrade to new hardware (and some from Vista to Windows 7). The pronlem comes in when you realize it takes several weeks for us to re-install, license and configure all the software on some of these machines.

If I could take "Programs" and "Programs x86" move them to a mew SSD, mount it on a new Windows 10 machine and be up and running in minutes I'd buy 30 brand new machines tomorrow.

There have to be millions of machines out there that are not upgraded due to the same issues. Microsoft, as I said, is at fault here.

"Gone are the days" that never were. Windows has always been painful to upgrade. In fact, it's probably slightly easier to upgrade your average box today, since apps reduced their reliance on system-provided libraries and MS improved support for multi-version libraries on the same system. The Registry is still a mess though, for obvious reasons.

Become MS-DOS and Windows took over the market, upgrading the OS meant buying a new computer.

A model that has now returned with the mobile devices and many laptops.

Yup, the only thing that I've been buying bi-annually is a new video card, everything else works perfectly.

The new PC paradigm is pump it with ram and ssd while new - you are golden for the next 5 years with video card upgrade in the middle.

PCs were made obsolete so fast during the late 90s and early 00s due to a fluke that was because of leaps in production tech and killer apps/games.

Yep, they have finally become appliances.

Windows 10 being free for old machines going back to Windows 7 units certainly didn't help the industry in the short term.

As if that would have made a big enough difference, as I type this from mobile device.

Really? Which mobile device?

Because I simply _cannot_ get much mileage out of my iphone 6s, most certainly I could not do my HN commenting (I can type ~80wpm on my laptop, and maybe ~10wpm on my phone). Plus, the screen is too small (I browse HN 200% zoomed in on my 1080p res screen... zooming on small phone screens is a pain, but easy to do on Google Chrome).

I feel like I'm missing something maybe. Other people are doing work on their smartphones, I just can't.

iPhone 4 here, even while siting next to my computer. Sure, it is a pain for long comments but for short comments like this one it feels more natural (subjective). That plus I can sit in the most comfortable position while typing this ( feet on couch while reclining on office chair, quite comfy)

I'm with you.

The mobile-only app trend (Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.) drives me insane -- I'm on my laptop 14h a day, I don't want to pull out my shitty tiny mobile device when I have a perfectly good $2000 high-res, full-keyboard machine already open.

For WhatsApp, give their web version a go: https://web.whatsapp.com/

Hence the new trend of having mobile phone docking stations.

In a couple of years, all laptops will be Surface like and all major mobile OEMs will offer some kind of Continuum.

Convenience beats perfection every time. I type this from a 2015 ThinkPad Carbon though. :-)

HN is notoriously hard to read on mobile, but have you tried: https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/

10 wpm seems really low, I just tested myself on iPhone 5S and easily got between 50 and and 60 wpm. Have you tested yourself? (www.iphonetypintest.com) I wonder if the larger iPhones actually make this harder.

Have you tried one of these? http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-bluetooth-keyboard...

Have you checked it out on your phone recently? The new mobile markdown makes it much better

Low sales means last years model is still performing pretty well. In fact, the model from two years ago is still doing just fine.

Here is a post from two years ago where we discussed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6606056

If VR picks up, then I would think PC sales would pick up too. To run oculus rift, you need a high-end PC with dedicated graphics, 3 USB 3.0 ports and more:

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/

Personally waiting on AMD Zen ;) And some spare cash for SSD. Then again I never buy a complete PC.

It is understandable. With the risen trend of phone and tablet. Even some server can run on clould.

PC sale are at historic high. The form factor for pc has changed to smartphones and tablets

Sell computers, can confirm.

this is obvious to everyone. PC sales were inflated for 2 decades anyway. Most people never really needed one in their own home in the first place, it was a luxury for so many. That and it's so easy to knock together a used PC that will perform fantastically, that techies can drop their old gear onto their family and they won't need to purchase anything yet again.

As long as people can internet, print, file taxes, write and open documents from their PTO, that's all the vast population ever needed. iPads and other Tablets do nearly all that and give people an easier library of utilities and games to tool around with than they ever had on a PC. Not only that but the phones and tablets hold and take the digital photos for people. People can share faster than they ever could on a PC using their phone. They have access to graphics software they never understood on a PC.

But PCs will continue to innovate. Especially the laptop form factor that can dock with a high powered video card.

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