Five consecutive quarters of sliding PC sales mark a new industry record

For gaming that will change with the new console releases. The Xbox One is >4x more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PS4 is >6x. It might take a few years, but the slump in increasing processing needs will probably die off.

I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers. The optimisation tricks which can be achieved on console mean that spec-for-spec, a much more powerful PC will be required to run current gen console games in the next few years (just like this generation). The money is going to be in the gamers, and I would expect to see Intel make a push there (AMD is already in the market with their ATI purchase).

But I agree, for every other computer user, a PC they bough 5 years ago is most likely still completely fine, unlike those from the 90s and early 2000s, where after 3 years they frequently became near-unusable. A great development as a result of the slowdown of the spec race is the push for smaller/lighter/better battery life which is occurring - new laptops have near hassle-free portability while still being fully functional PCs.

I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but also points to a change in what drives the market.

The old one was a lower end machine of its era (Lenovo model 4446, Intel T4200, 2Gb stock) and clearly becoming too slow for some applications; higher-end video could not play at full speed, and streaming apps like Google Hangout were essentially non-functional. Add to it the fact that the battery was shot, the keyboard was dead, the fans were dying, and the CCFL backlighting occasionally flickered to half-brightness; there was a pretty good case for me to make the move before it stopped booting altogether.

While the new one(Lenovo model 20182, AMD A10, 6Gb stock) is definitely fast enough to do everything, including the majority of games, this aspect feels more like "pain relief" than "improvement" - the positive differences in upgrading are most visible in physical aspects of the package - screen brightness, build and weight, average heat output, keyboard and touchpad feel. Mostly better, although I dislike the touchpad - the multitouch is not as accurate as the older ones, even after disabling all the features.

And this is not a top-end laptop - it's a <$600 machine from late last year, purchased at $100 off as a refurb. The biggest bottleneck in its performance profile is the use of spinning disk storage(which, I should add, is more than I'm ever likely to use as long as I have it). And, I should reiterate - the performance problems of the previous one only came into play with some newer apps, mostly those that relied on GPU acceleration for video or 3D. To a lesser extent it had problems on CPU-hungry stuff(music production) as the fans gave out, but it was a very gradual degradation.

I think the most intriguing part of the new environment is in how it is informing how we write programs - a huge "style gap" has emerged between applications that can never get enough power, and those that can be unfathomably wasteful of power. For a lot of things, we can really say, "Given unlimited computational resources, how do we best solve this problem?" And the benefits of that thought process turn out to uncover new optimizations at the same time that they improve the code quality.

Oh come, you cannot find a game that is not reasonably performant on your "Core2Quad@2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 x64, GeForce 9800 GT".

How about any major game since 2010-2011?

The PCs are actually improving, but they are improving in things that are not immediately visible. Mostly, this is about, how

- IPS monitors are now way cheaper, so people can get nice 27" FHD IPS monitor for the price of 23" TN monitor few years back. And if you're adventurous, you can get QHD one from Korea for good money.

- SSDs are becoming standard. I know that "everyone who used it will tell you it's awesome and will want to have it for all time" sounds like fanboyism, but with SSD, this is really true. They add incredible responsiveness to any computer they are installed in. It won't actually compute any faster, but you will spend less time waiting and doing nothing, and that's worth it.

- While I can't say what users really care about, the CPUs are actually getting faster. Not only quad-cores trickled into midrange and AMD is now putting octa-cores (with slower individual cores, however) into upper midrange, but the CPUs are actually faster. Look at this benchmark [1] comparing Core2Quad 2.4 Ghz with current upper-midrange i5 4770k. The new CPU is about little less than three times faster.

So the PCs are evolving. And IMPO, SSD and IPS monitor is more important than new CPU anyway.

[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=836

Compiling, virtual machines etc. With your setup it's SO slow. Not that it is bad, it's just you have your requirements which don't change.

>>>>If I had to guess, most consumers can get by with their smartphones for 80% of the things they need to do. For the other 20%, they can probably use their aged or shared laptop.

Except for web development. I can't imagine sitting at a laptop writing code compared to dual 24" monitors.

I can agree about your spec on PC's. I'm still running a 1.7 processor with 4GB of RAM. I just upgraded to WIN8 and have been surprised with its performance. With 7, no way I could have PS and Dreamweaver open at the same time. Now, I can run both with no issues, and the only thing I changed was upgrading to WIN8.

I'm also about to build a PC from scratch and have found the prices for fairly high end parts is coming down drastically. You can get a totally loaded system (Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 2GB Video card) for well under $800.

I think so, I know one person who is literally waiting for a new OS and an older person who went to the store and returned empty-handed complaining he doesn't know how to use computers anymore. I believe he ended up getting an iPad.

An analyst at IDC made a similar argument:

>"At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market," said Bob O'Donnell, IDC Program Vice President, Clients and Displays. "While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413

Windows and even MacOS is a factor IMO. When you have a device with them, you have to play system administrator. You need answers to virus scanners, backups, where your photos are, where you get software from, how you find software you installed, the never ending and frequent updates to everything and the list goes on.

With iOS and Android, the average person doesn't have to care about any of that. It is right there or in the cloud. A web browser is sufficient to do a lot of "work": banking, documents, communication, social etc. For advanced uses there is an app. Your photos are right there when you take them with the device. The amount of babysitting and micromanaging is trivial compared to Windows/MacOS.

Note that to get iOS or Android, you need to buy a tablet or phone instead of a PC.

The problem with Windows 8 is that it is still Windows. It doesn't go anywhere near far enough in the lack of babysitting/micromanaging that characterise Android/iOS and if you get the version that allegedly does (RT) you end up with a tablet anyway. And it broke what people who wanted desktop Windows expected by being different enough from Windows 7 and predecessors appearing gratuitous.

Nobody has evolved successfully - both iOS and Android started from scratch. Microsoft and Ubuntu are trying to evolve from desktop, but without much traction so far. (Of course there could be other reasons.)

That's me. I need to replace a desktop PC but won't use the current version of Win8 and don't want to pay extra to downgrade to Win7.

I don't think Windows 8 is causing the decline, but what it is doing is failing to reverse it. Traditionally, a new release of Windows has been a driver of PC sales because it did new and useful things that people wanted. The problem with Windows 8 is that for a laptop it is pretty much on balance worse than Windows 7. (To be clear, it definitely does quite a number of things better, but it does about the same number of things worse, and the ones that are worse are right in your face while the improvements are mostly behind the scenes).

I actually doubt Microsoft is too surprised by this. My feeling is that they pretty much wrote off Windows 8 as collateral damage from their push into the touch screen / tablet market which they consider to be essential to future survival. They may suffer huge losses in sales from Win8 licenses but the upside is that their new UI is getting forced in front of every consumer and business professional. That is something money simply can't buy. Come Windows 9, when the actually do something people want, people will be buying something familiar.

Many people didn't need a PC, but didn't have an alternative (tablet, smartphone). The market is being corrected. PCs are not dying. I can't imagine any my coworkers doing their work on a tablet, except maybe executives who basically do email, spreadsheets and lame powerpoint presentations all day long.

The gaming PC I built in 2008 still handles brand-new games without any problem or slowdown. Almost everyone is in the same situation.

The market isn't dying because people aren't using PCs anymore, it's dying because upgrades have become unnecessary.

Every decent company on the planet had PCs on a 36-48 month refresh cycle.when was the last like you heard of that happening?

As the PC was the original computing device, it was indeed very general, and many remain this way today. I also host VMs on my main PC, as well as gaming client and server, media center, social terminal (fb, hn, email, text & voice & video chat, etc) & main programming environment.

But at this point, I'm about ready to fragment these roles into dedicated hardware -- dedicated server for VMs, RasPi for media center, phone for social terminal, laptop for programming environment & admin/control for all the other devices.

The only thing really holding me back is that there really isn't a good replacement dedicated device for PC gaming. Even though some consoles use PC-grade hardware, and keyboards and mice can be made to work on some, it's just not the same.