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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

Could be several things, ranging from mundane to very concerning.

- People are downgrading their computers.

- Windows 11 is more bloated and slower, decreasing the test scores.

- All the security mitigations are making everything slower but they've been masked by hardware improvements in the past. Now there isn't much in terms of that so we start the slow descent to death.

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It could also mean that consumers are buying more budget models and less pro- ones. Given cost of living crisis (at least in Europe) it would not be surprising.

What cost of living crisis is going on in Europe?

The combined effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have led to a more severe inflationary shock than the US, but with much worse economic growth and lower wage increases. The majority of households have cut their spending in recent years.

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Eurotrack_Co...

Interestingly page 2 of the file doesn't seem to indicate a crisis. All the numbers a roughly stable, some are actually improving (for example less people struggling with housing costs in Germany and generally fewer people struggling in France). What sticks out is that more Germans expect a recession around the corner.

It would make sense if the benchmark would be about smartphones, but laptops and desktop computers are already non-essential 'luxury items'.

If the poorer half of people can't afford a new computer I would expect the benchmark to go up, because the rich people will still buy highend computers while the lower half would drop out of the benchmark completely.

FWIW, I stopped upgrading my gaming PC since 2018, not because I can't affort an upgrade, but because the hardware has been "good enough" (still sporting an RTX2070).

Also, the 'living cost crisis' in Europe has been quite dramatically overblown by Russian propaganda, at least we haven't frozen to death or eaten our pet hamsters yet ;)

> If the poorer half of people can't afford a new computer I would expect the benchmark to go up, because the rich people will still buy highend computers while the lower half would drop out of the benchmark completely.

Surely you can twist this 2-3 times more, can't you?

.. people have computers, because otherwise they die. If people have less money, they buy cheaper computers. Simple as that.

What I'm seeing in my wider family and friends-circle (outside dedicated 'computer nerds' of course) is that owning a (private) computer has become very unusual in the last 10 years. My nephew built himself a PC for gaming - but that's definitely a 'luxury item' because a game console would be much cheaper. And that's about it.

Everybody owns at least one smartphone though.

why would consumers downgrade their systems?

Don’t need top of the line. Just need to get things done. Save money, buy lower performance processor. Done and done.

Hardware failure. Desire for less power to extend battery life.

It doesn’t even have to be a budgetary concern, it could mean that more people are choosing power efficiency over computing performance. Thin and light laptops are good enough for a lot these days, and they are still pricey.

It comes down to what the extra flops get you nowadays. Just like a videogame from 5 years ago doesn't look very dated anymore, we need massive processing power gains to notice anything, and even then, for very few uses.

- People buying new high end computers are no longer benchmarking them (at least with PassMark) while people buying lower end or second hand computers still do so

I know I haven’t bothered on my last two computers, partly because CPU performance is so far past what I need for most workloads, and partly because for the rest, I care about actual workload rather than synthetic benchmarks.

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