Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline 317
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the recent woes of Apple and Dell. One possible reason according to the article: 'imminent price wars'." From the article: "'There's a softness in the market that's building,' says Richard Shim, a senior research analyst at IDC. In the past two weeks, IDC cut its 2006 forecast for U.S. PC growth to 5.7%, from 6.8%. 'In '04 and '05 there was tremendous growth. In a market that's as mature as this industry is, there's no way you can maintain those levels.'"
Wallstreet Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
Gee Dell and Apple will be announcing their projected numbers in a few days. Well, I guess we'd all better listen to the "analysts" whose accuracy rate is about the same as flipping a coin. Speculation and stock fluctuations before these announcements is pretty much par for the course as people make guesses in the hopes of a stock market win. The rest of us, however, are a lot more concerned about Q1 and Q2 numbers that actaully, you know are how much they are selling.
One word... (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine gave me a dual P3 933 machine with a gig of ram, I put a 100gig sata drive in it, and put Vmware server on it. Now I have 12 virtual machines defined... (no for all you picky types, not all run at the same time, 3-4 at most)
Of course, I'd like to buy a nicer 64 bit machine for this server
Re:Stupid Title (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a decrease in the amount of increase. Clearly you need to brush up on your journalistic doublespeak.
(exactly)^2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista is a great name for MS's next OS: Chance I would use it is WAY off in the distance.
-KB
Re:Old PCs Still Good (Score:3, Interesting)
I need a new desktop Mac. I'd buy a Quad Core G5 now if I knew an Intel Core Duo card for it that would let me run future Intel Mac binaries was coming. Especially if it meant I could have 64-bit quad core and 32-bit dual core running simultaneously. Instead I'm torturing myself waiting for the new Intel desktop Mac announcement and wondering if I should pre-purchase Parallels Desktop (there's a $30 rebate w/purchase of Windows that expires August 15, not applicable to the downloadable option), and I don't even know how many internal drive bays the new desktop model will have.
Re:Typical Business Minds (Score:3, Interesting)
Until the CPU died, I was running the latestest games and microsoft programming tools on a 1.8 Ghz box with 768Megs of RAM.
Now I ahve upgraded to a 3Ghz and 1 Gig of RAM my compile times have been cut buy only 25%, and the increase game performances was good, but not spectaular, or nearly twice as good.
I remember (as do many of you, I'm sure) when in order to play the newest games you HAD to buy a new processor. Not any more.
My point Exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
This machine is 6 years old, and runs Quake 4, Doom 3, and Halo like a dream. I don't see any reason to upgrade to a G5 when I am running 86+ scores on Xbench. I probably won't upgrade for another year at least.
Yea, it has a 100mhz bus, and fights between resources, but if im doing one or 2 things at a time, it flies.
http://www.kore-net.com/office/sawtooth.jpg [kore-net.com]
Re:Slowing Growth != Decline (Score:3, Interesting)
A naive interpretation of a stock's worth is that you take the company's assets, sell them, and divide them up among the shareholders. But a company is clearly worth more than that: it makes profits. So you should add to the worth the amount of money you could expect to make from it if you were to divide up the profits.
But what are the profits going to be? That's hard to say, and much magic goes into figuring it out. People get some idea of what they think it's worth, and they price the shares accordingly. Their guesses aren't secrets: the company (sometimes) says what they think the profits will be, and so do analysts, and they share them.
Make less than that, and the share price goes down. It has to: that share is worth less than you thought it was. It doesn't matter if it's still profit; your share of that profit is less than you thought it was going to be, and you'll pay less for it. And if you extrapolate form how much they missed this profit goal to the future ones that you already had figured in when you made your stock price, you'll pay even less.
This is a vast oversimplification, sadly. The price goes down by more than the profit miss indicates because there's an overcorrection: people see others selling the stock and so they figure it's going down and sell theirs, too. Predicting that herd behavior is obnoxious, but if you were to buy-and-hold the stock for a long time the overcorrections will even out over time. Or you can day trade and take advantage of those overcorrections on a daily basis, but if you do your first investment had better be in Tums. In bulk.
In other words: the share price includes a "discount" of what they expect future earnings to be. Miss those earnings, and you have to recompute the discount. An actual decline would be a disaster, but even less-increase affects your calculations.
Learn from History!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Smithsonian's technology exhibit, I saw a graph that marked the rise of television in the 1950s. It was a saturation curve, rising very quickly at the 40 to 50 percent level, and then flattening and gradually moving up at, IIRC, 70 to 80 percent. I'm sure the transition to color and solid state provided some turnover, as will the hi-def transition we are in now.
The lesson though, is that PCs will saturate too. They can surf the web and play DVDs. They can do word processing, spreadsheets, and most of the other "killer apps" people need. There's no more reason for turnover, and those that want 'em got 'em. I was looking out for this, and figured the real saturation started in the late 90s. For years, the state of the art PC was "about $2000", and then suddenly, very capable machines dropped through the $1000 floor. The vendors must have seen the curve flattening, so they had to reach into that lower price market to drive sales. That was the beginning of the end.
Re:Old PCs Still Good and Net same speed (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm saying that something is even slower than your old iMac... it isn't the worst part of the equation... if you didn't notice a difference.
Because, if the network connection can spit the data out fast enough... there is a huge difference between my oldest Mac and even a three year old system.
I'd have to throttle my network connection back quite a bit for my G4 TIBook to be as slow as my wife's G3.
In other words...
If your network connection can't deliver data faster than the slowest computer can render it, you won't see a significant difference with a faster computer. It is already being rendered as fast as it is being delivered.
That sounds like the situation *you* have... no significant difference between machines.
I, on the other hand, see quite a difference between machines. (and my G5 is noticeably faster than my TIBook... but not nearly as much so)
They'll sell lots of "personal computers" . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Old PCs Still Good and Net same speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Also consider that USB is a shared interface - you don't want all your other USB gear interfering with high bandwidth tasks.
This is not hypothetical - I have helped many people with this conundrum, because stupidly, most consumer cameras today come with a Firewire port, but not a firewire cable. As soon as I tell them to buy a $5 firewire cable, or a $20 Firewire card, their frustration disappears, and is replaced with happiness and productivity.
Re:Many waiting for Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure other people are in the same boat. Perhaps this is why there have been so many more laptop sales increases than desktop sales recently... people looking for that second computer they can take with them instead of replacing/upgrading that old one at the desk?
Re:Rise of the games consoles ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since performance no longer doubles every 12-15 months? Definitely.
Most PCs bought in the last 5 years can easily last 6-8 years if they are taken care of, are running Win2k or WinXP, and have plenty of RAM (1GB is a good target for an office machine). Two years ago, we went through the office and maxed out all of the RAM on any machine with 500MHz or faster CPUs. For $100/machine, we added 2-3 years of lifespan.
New machines are being purchased with a minimum of 1GB RAM and one of the slower CPUs (save $$$ on the CPU, spend it on the RAM). Now that dual-core chips are only ~$180 and getting cheaper, we'll probably start outfitting machines with dual-core chips and 2GB of RAM. I fully expect those systems to still be running in 2016. Maybe with a bump up to 3GB of RAM along the way, but mostly untouched.
The next big upgrade cycle for us is going to be upgrading from 17" CRTs to 19" LCDs. Just about everyone has 17" CRTs on their desks already, so new systems are coming in sans monitors because the old CRTs are still working fine.