Traditional PC Sales Continue To Slide (zdnet.com) 223
Sales of traditional PCs continue to decline, although the overall PC market is likely to grow slightly next year. From a report: Traditional PC shipments are forecast to drop by nearly eight percent this year, and another 4.4 percent in 2018, predicts analyst firm Gartner. Which means that, by 2019, 16 million fewer traditional PCs and notebooks will be sold than were shipped this year. However, much of this will be offset by the rise in spending on high-end notebooks like Microsoft's Surface and Apple's MacBook, so that the overall PC market will by 2019 be at pretty much the same level it was last year. Tablets -- defined by Gartner as basic and utility ultramobile devices -- will also decline over the period to 2019.
Builders vs Buyers (Score:3, Interesting)
Based on the traffic at places like Microcenter I'd offer this: more people have the basic skills now to build a computer on their own rather then buy one. I haven't met a single person in over 10 years that bought a computer, everyone built their own. Corporations are buying laptops for telecommuters and staff versus bulky PCs that are easier to transport, deploy, and use less power for the workloads they deal with.
Re:Builders vs Buyers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a dying art.
Re:Builders vs Buyers (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's sad but true.
Even with gaming systems, unless you're the sort who wants a flashy LED-lit clear-side case that looks like a spaceship, you can build a top-performing system just by buying a mass market machine and selecting the video card you want to put into it.
The enthusiast market is still there, but it's mostly for people who want their computer to look like it belongs on the set of Star Trek. I (sadly?) outgrew that once I was out of my 20s.
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I've never been into the flashy stuff either. I build my own mainly because I tend to like to pick and choose my components without paying for components that I don't want, like conventional SSD and/or HDD for example when I have a Samsung 960 Pro NVMe disk that I much prefer. I also like cases with ample room to run big, slow turning fans, and have the drive bays totally gutted for even more slow turning fans, thus the PC is very quiet and well cooled even while running heavy loads.
That, and I still run an
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Just picked up an iCore 5, 12 gigs, 2 terabtes HD...$197
Great for porn, web, and most games older than about 4 years ago. It's runs SQL Server 2012, VS 2012, and some other IDEs environments just fine.
Why would I pay $1k for anything else?
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Forgot to mention...Discount Electronics.
The had iCore 7s for $300.
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What is an iCore, again?
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I recently bought a cheap HP Stream laptop for about $200. 4GB RAM, 64 GB SSD. Not fast, but very lightweight, and it's good enough for light work when you're traveling. And it has Windows, which for all its faults is still a real OS (unlike what you get on Chromebooks, e.g.).
That said, where'd you get it? I use an iMac most of the time at home (great monitor, great looks, fast enough for everything I do), but my old PC could use an upda
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Just picked up an iCore 5, 12 gigs, 2 terabtes HD...$197
Great for porn, web, and most games older than about 4 years ago. It's runs SQL Server 2012, VS 2012, and some other IDEs environments just fine.
Why would I pay $1k for anything else?
For one SSD is monumentous improvement. So much so there is no way you will go back after you experience it. Second since you mentioned SQL Server and Web development it is nice to partition that off in a VM. VirtualBox and Linux KMS is free and for a little more you can upgrade your copy of Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro which comes with Hyper-V for free which is great for running Windows based Vms and of course VMWare Workstation.
Did your OEM turn off virtualization? What if you need more ram? Are they
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I am 41 and got more into it. It's fun and I like the flexibility that I can add another SSD for a raid as an example which I do use for virtual machines.
You can't just upgrade (to the grandparent here) the graphics card either. PCs today have shitty 190 watt power supplies that will blow or lack slots on the board even.
Yes you pay more. But my ram is not soldiered in. My chipset let's me overclock, I can fit a water cooler as lastest i9s and i7ks burn HOT like 90C to piss on AMD and vice versa. If my fans
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Not exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
The major manufacturers all sell 'gaming' pcs and they'll be damned if you're going to buy an i5 equipped PC on sale for $400, stuff a $200 graphics card in it and get 95% of the performan
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Building it myself is cheaper and more customizable.
I may want to use a rackmount case that I already have (or buy a new one), use the power supply, hard drive, sound card etc that I already have. This way I only pay for the components I need right now. When building a new main PC (that I also use for games), I usually keep the old video card for a while, until I buy a new one when it is clear that the old one is too slow. That way I do not have to spend as much money at once.
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Is it the 1200 with the lovely dust-traps on top?
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Who gives a crap about the case or components, new PC purchase, Windows anal probe 10, stops me cold and with it purchase of software to run on that platform. So pretty much keep the existing going until a platform switch. There is a sound reason PC sales are doing badly and it is all down to M$ and their privacy invasive bullshit.
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This was my assumption. At least it certainly seemed that way.
I built one last fall, focusing on expandability, specifically ram. I have 32 gb of ram and I can expand to 128. The only reason I didn't go for it immediately is because I wanted dual 970s and an Oculus Rift (I know...). Soon, I'll need to buy 1080s, (or maybe just one this time). I'll expand the ram to 64gb and call it a day. It has an Intel thing with 12 threads (hyperthreaded), more than enough for what I'll need during the useful life of th
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I look for refurb models with last year's high-end hardware, it's so much cheaper and the performance differences are miniscule.
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The number of people who build their own computers is a tiny, tiny fraction of the market. Your sample data is skewed by the types of people you know.
It also used to be cheaper to build. It's really not anymore. I still do because I've been building my own, barring laptops of course, for over 30 years and it's fun.
Very few people in the market build their own though. You are mistaken.
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Actually it's growing and quite popular as consumer GPUs really started killing the consoles over the past 7 years.
Asus and gigabyte sell tens of millions of GPUs and gaming motherboards each year.
Who isn't buying them is Grandma and housewives to text on Facebook.
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A huge portion of performance parts are sold to smaller shops such as CyberPower PC, etc. They build them and people buy them. I'd welcome any statistics you have that show that end users are increasingly building their own.
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Not quite. Prebuilt systems are significantly cheaper. My parents computer died last week.
They bought a rediculous over specced PC all in one with a 27 inch 2K 1440P screen, i7, SSD, 16 gigs of RAM and even a gaming card Nvidia GTX 950ti for $999. All my Dad needed was the big screen for his 70 year old eyes LOL
That would be well over $1500 if you home brewed it.
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Consider that the GPU may not have enough lanes to get full speed. The RAM is probably not DDR4, and it being an AIO machine means that heat will be a problem, especially with an i7 (which is likely gimped and lacks the full features of the chip).
It seems like your parents got taken advantage of by sales people.
Nope I picked it. DDR 4 ram is required by the CPU chipset. The CPU chipset sets the lanes too so ditto on both. They don't need dedicated gaming graphics.
All they need is a big screen that is quality IPS and fast SSD boot ups. Who cares if i7 is clocked slower as not everyone games or compiles gigabytes of code all day.
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Firefox died years ago when they stopped listening to the requests of their users (memory leaks) and started pushing crap nobody asked for including cloning the look and feel of Chrome and I knew it was all over when Mozilla started doing wasteful crap like changing their logo to Moz://a
Re:This trend will destroy Firefox. (Score:5, Insightful)
The decline of desktops is more to do with average users realising that a complex computer complete with maintenance requirements and malware risks is not the best choice for someone who just wants to read facebook. These people are better off with an ipad, and they are also the sort of people who will just use whatever browser the machine came with not realising anything else exists.
longer lifetime (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people are keeping their machines for longer and longer as time goes on.
Re:longer lifetime (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:longer lifetime (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't "most like" the case. It is the case. Fifteen years ago I was changing out processors or memory every 6 months. Now I design my personal workstations with a 5 year lifespan. I have a friend that did the same thing. Now he has a 5th generation i7 that is almost 3 years old. He said he has no intention of upgrading anything till something fails or some radical advancement in technology comes out.
I'm in the same boat. I have a i7-6700K which is a 6th generation processor. Intel just announced they are about to release the 8th generation i7. From looking at what is being release I see no real performance gain over my 6th generation.
My linux server is a centos 6 running on a AMD 8350. As a server it has different requirements than my workstation. Its my file/plex server. It's been doing that role since 2013. It is entering its 5th year in that role and I see no reason to update it for the next 3 or 4 years.
As for your mundane computer users, the PC used to be a oddity. Now they treat a PC more like an appliance than a oddity. Its more like a refrigerator than a computer. You don't upgrade your refrigerator every year or so. This is even if they have a PC. Most now have laptops and treat them the same way.
Plus 1 (Score:2)
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Clock speed has also been relatively static. 3.6-3.9 GHz in 2011 [wikipedia.org] to 4.4-4.5 GHz in 2017 [wikipedia.org]. A 19% inc
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GHz for GHz, Kaby Lake (Jan 2017 desktop release) is only about 20% faster than Sandy Bridge (Jan 2011 desktop release). 20% improvement in 6 years. I'm still telling people with Sandy Bridge systems not to bother upgrading. Unless you want more cores (i3 to i5 or i7), some of the newer features (like USB-C support), or want lower power consumption, there's no reason to stop using a Sandy Bridge system
This is the reason I upgraded from my old AMD 8150. It wasn't because of processor performance. I upgraded because the features I anted, USB-C and decent m.2 support, where not available on AMD at the time. Large jumps in PC performance are not because of processors but due to better I/O devices like PCI-e M.2 modules.
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You are not the only one that has expressed a interest in this. It started doing that a few months ago after I sent a email to have some issues fixed with my account. I have sent a few more emails to point that out but never got a reply on them.
So, I figure if the powers that be seem to be fine with me posting at a +3 why should I give a fuck?
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I see a starting score of 2, an Interesting, and an Insightful, so I don't know what's going on from your point of view.
A starting score of 2 is something you can get if you both have a high enough karma score and enable it in your settings. It's been a long time since karma was visible, but I think you needed 25 out of the max 50. Back when it was new, it was the shit, but long ago decided I didn't care enough about standing out with that extra point.
There's also a side-effect where that will cause your
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Yep. I used to upgrade my custom built computers about every two years because I was a gamer. Not anymore. I rarely play them too and managed to find free time to resume playing old games from a decade ago from my mostly the same gaming computer and OS! :O Some things are slow like the HDDs and same video card (512 MB of VRAM). Overall, still usable for Internet stuff.
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20 years ago, a 2 year old computer was basically something you toss at your poor friend so he can play some old games while you bought the bleedin' edge computer that allowed you to at least run the new stuff at decent framerates.
Re:longer lifetime (Score:5, Insightful)
Systems are not becoming obsolete as quickly as they used to.
I remember how back in 1995, a computer from 1991 was considered slow as hell and could hardly run any current software.
Now in 2017, a computer from 2013 is still perfectly usable and fast. The rate of performance increase has slowed to an utter crawl. The biggest advancements in recent years have been reduced power consumption and increasing density in solid state storage, and the latter can be an upgrade to your old machine.
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increasing density in solid state storage, and the latter can be an upgrade to your old machine.
Yup, this. I'm using a 2009 laptop with memory and SSD added. It's definitely getting long in the tooth, but performance is still acceptable (even if battery life is not). My father had his 5-year-old mid-range desktop die on him. For roughly $200 he can replace it with a brand new machine with the same specs. And there's no reason for him not to do that.
The problem is they very much do make them like they used to.
Re:longer lifetime (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't so much that performance has not continued to increase. It is that we've hit the point of diminishing returns for 99% of applications. a single-core 1GHz processor will run Microsoft Word about the same as a 10+ core 3+GHz CPU. And with even low end budget GPUs nowadays offering hardware decoding of 4k h.264, the rest of the computational power of the CPU and GPU isn't really meaningful for the majority of consumers.
Gamers, content producers, and scientific researchers are really the only fields left to push the boundaries of computational power.
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That's implied in "gaming".
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My desktop is from 2010, and it still keeps up quite. To be fair, it's a 3.2GHz 6-core Phenom II with 16GB RAM, so reasonably high-end for the time, but I honestly think I could keep using it just fine for at least another 3-4 years, before noticing any shortcomings. The graphics card (GTX460) is its weakest point by far, once I upgraded to an SSD.
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Re:longer lifetime (Score:5, Interesting)
You can blame that on Intel and their sandbagging
No you can't. I doubt that Intel is sandbagging anything. If they where then AMD would be running away with clockspeeds. But if you look at AMD processors you will see they are running at the same clock speeds as Intel.
The reason processors are not going any faster is we have hit the limit of what can be done with the current technology. Over the next few years we might see a increase in a few hundred mhz here and there. But there will never be another leap of 2 or 3 ghz again. Not with what we have.
To go any faster it will take a radical shift in the basic process of comptuer. Quantum processors maybe.
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There is the whole issue of lowest common denominator when it comes to computers, and what developers base their designs around. Intel really has not been improving processor performance, or system design for a long time, due to AMD not being competitive in the low end. The result is that we still see the majority of new chips being two core processors, up until the 8th generation came out, and not long enough to actually impact the market. AMD is finally competitive again, which is pushing Intel int
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I don't believe we will be seeing a shortage of uses for dual core cpu's for a very long time. Of course I think I said the same thing about single cores too, so take that with a gain of salt. I would say that most things that a PC needs to do can be done quite nicely with a dual core CPU..
I think the real performance increases for the next 10 years will come in storage. One of the reasons I upgraded was to get a m.2 module for my workstation. There is still plenty of room for performance increases
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I would go farther and say even most extreme users don't need more than 4 core or 8 threads. I'm considered a power user by most who know me. I'm also a creator in second life. It's not unheard of for me to have 2 firestorm viewers up and running on one desktop, blender open on another, photoshop on the third, and all the while there is a VM running in the background where my shoutcast station is running to provide a stream to the sims I manage. Doing all this and my processor rarely clocks more than
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That has really only been true with the bulldozer core from AMD. Most of the time AMD only lagged behind intel by a few percent, not enough to pay an extra hundred or more bucks for. The bulldozer cores are where AMD fumbled the ball, but even then the processors where still more than enough for most people. Hell, I bought two of them.
I think a lot of it depends on the software too. I've noticed that when running windows on similar class processors, one AMD and one intel, the AMD system always seems
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While you may have a point the discussion is geared toward gaming PC's.
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FYI the new AMD CPU Ryzen are 8 core 16 threads and Intel's response coffeelake CPus are 6 core 12 threaded i7s .
Don't know what your workload works like but I thought I would mention it as AND got competitive again.
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The reason people have kept their machines for longer is because the new machines are not all that much faster. When new machines are a significant improvement over older machines, people are more inclined to upgrade. I will note that the smartphone market has slowed for that very reason, the new phones are not significantly better until you look at the improvements over three generations, not one.
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2013 is considered very new. My Haswel today still is in the same league with Skylake of today. AMD has changed the game with their neat 8 core CPUs. But mine still works in the meantime
Intel (Score:2)
Does anyone out there keep statistics specific to 'enthusiast' platform (LGA2011, TR4) sales? I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that those have spiked a bit.
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The x86 PC and security. (Score:2)
People never liked the x86 PC, but had to have them to use the Internet's content consumption aspects.
But the issue I have is this: I currently have a Lineage OS Running Phone, and a DD-WRT Router that I have to re-flash to fix a terrible security vulnerability. (KRACK) and due to the design of these things, the update could possibly soft brick them. I neevr had this issue with my x86 PCs
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Could be worse, I have a Motorola (now Lenovo) phone from 2014. It was their flagship phone when it was released. It hasn't received a security update since 2016
It's not like I expect it to run the next version of Android, just a security patch level later than 1 August 2016
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Never liked?
x86 is the greatest tune,tinker & upgradefest in computing history.
Current alternative offerings are glued to last warranty at most.
Countless patches, fixes, whoring BIOS glitches and aftermarket parts to keep it running and extended, it's the ugly dutiful locomotive that owes respect, not your shiny new Tesla.
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People never liked the x86 PC
No. Back in the day a few hackers and engineers didn't like the x86 PC. I wasn't a big fan of it back then ether. I liked the 68K line.
Then and now most people didn't give a shit what processor their PC was running as long as it did the job. I'm willing to bet that most of the people out there don't know what processor their phone is running. I bet even less of them realize that their smart phone is a really just a mini computer they can carry.
Now today most hackers and engineers embrace the x86 PC
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People never liked the x86 PC
No. Back in the day a few hackers and engineers didn't like the x86 PC. I wasn't a big fan of it back then ether. I liked the 68K line.
Then and now most people didn't give a shit what processor their PC was running as long as it did the job.
I don't think they mentioned x86 because they thought people didn't like the x86. I think they mentioned it because all those other things were also personal computers, and they wanted to differentiate. It was true, too; until about the Windows 95 era, a PC was considered by many if not most people both inside and outside of the industry to be the lame but affordable option. If you were in the industry, you were comparing it to "real" computers like ones from Sun, or even other machines from IBM; if you wer
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"Then came the Win95 era", and the Pentiums, and id Software, and 3DFX, and Sound Blaster.
And then it was all about what could run Windows the fastest.
I'd suggest that the watershed moment wasn't actually until Windows 2000 in the enterprise, or Windows XP on the consumer desktop. Before that, it still seemed like there was a point to [classic] MacOS, for example, and the Unix workstations were still more powerful than a PC.
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I would agree that it was around windows 2000 where the PC as we know it was born. That was when most Linux people I know abandoned Linux and moved to windows.
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When I first saw windows xp I thought "what is this crap?" The interface reminded me of AmigaOS 1.3. After about a month I had figured out how to disable all that theme crap and had XP looking like Windows 2000. Once you got rid of that XP wasn't really that bad of a OS.
Re: The x86 PC and security. (Score:3)
I was a die-hard m68k fan... but in retrospect, that's because back in the early 90s (right before DOS4GW), writing programs in anything besides realmode assembly was damn-near impossible.
I remember how I discovered (sometime around 1992 when I was in college) that every x86 from the 386dx onwards HAD orthogonal registers & could do flat addressing... then went in literal circles for MONTHS trying to find anything that resembled documentation or development tools.
To this day, I have no idea whether publ
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We romanticize them because when you solved a significant problem you were a goddamned hero. It's much calmer and safer to live in an age which does not require heroism, but compared to nostalgia it seems boring.
Can't argue with you here. Back in the "dark ages" I remember how happy I was to have set up a usenet and email on my Amiga 500 and it actually worked the first time. Hero time.
We tend to forget the times when we almost burn down our apartment trying to resurrect a toaster oven we pulled out of the dumpster. Just saying....
Forrester (Score:2)
Forrester says they doubled in the last month and will increase hundredfold by the end of the year.
Pretty simple since 2005... (Score:3)
Buy 4x the amount of ram people buy, be good for 10 years.
NVMe and M.2 ports will likely boost PC sales (Score:5, Informative)
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You can get a small card to adapt a pcie slot to give you an m.2 port, as they're basically the same thing with a different connector...
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Even my 2014 era Haswell has all of that.
What are you doing that it even matters? (Score:2)
Re:NVMe and M.2 ports will likely boost PC sales (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter [amazon.com] and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards [amazon.com] and you can go nuts [guru3d.com] with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.
Computers aren't "leaping forward" anymore. (Score:2)
Used to we had to get new computers to run the latest software and to keep up. If your computer was five years old in 1995 you were working on a joke.
I have an 11 year old computer in my computer as an HTPC - it supports plentiful RAM, has four cores and plenty of storage room with room for upgrade. I've got a computer that's about eight years old that I'm using for gaming - and I don't have to stick with just ancient stuff, even most modern games that aren't boundary pushing first person shooters run fine
1974 Ford LTD Wagon (Score:2)
In other news, sales of full sized family wagons have declined for the last 20 years.
apple lack of new hardware on the desktop (Score:2)
apple lack of new hardware on the desktop then the imac. Both the mini and pro are very out of date at high prices.
The imac pro is going to have down clocked cpu's due to the it being thin.
What about Windows 10 migrations? (Score:2)
Have they forgotten Windows 7 is near EOL soon. I would surely hope they don't count on IT departments waiting until the last minute to migrate like they did during XP.
I know bank of America has already started their migration early this year and is replacing their fleet of aged hardware as they go on
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I still game on my PC but I won't buy a new version of Windows, so I just won't buy any game which won't run on my dual FX8350/GTX 950 AMP! (one was a warranty replacement for a 750 Ti, so I bought it a twin). These days I mostly just get games from humble bundles, which will all run great on this machine.
Old / refurb PCs are good enough (Score:3)
Why would you buy a new machine? You can get a $60 refurbished C2D that will meet a regular user's needs comfortably. Or you can get a $150 i5, just add a $150 video card, et voila, a solid gaming rig for the same price as a current console. Some people may want something more high-end, but that's a bit of a niche.
Hold on a minute (Score:2)
I'm getting ready to put together a monster water-cooled gaming PC build in the next month or so when I start seeing sales on components. Will that count as a "PC sale" or does that only apply to people who go to the Wal-Mart and buy whatever horseshit is sitting on the shelves?
You know what? Maybe I'll just go to that iBuyPower place and order me up some sick Intel Ultimate Pantyripper Black Box Edition and let them do the hea
Sales of complete systems, or sales of components? (Score:2)
Considering that Ryzen has pushed the PC industry for the first time in close to ten years, and the resulting excitement for people to buy or build their first new system in over six years, I doubt that the PC market is slowing down. The pre-built PC market may be slowing, due to a lack of Ryzen based systems by the large OEMs, and that means people are building their own systems. On the low end, you don't see the new chips showing up in large numbers yet as well, though that will improve in the next f
Bullshit Article (Score:2)
First of all, the table that ZDNet has in TFA is outdated from the newest table available on Gartner's actual website:
https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3560517 [gartner.com]
The PC numbers on Gartner's website look more rosy for the PC than the ones in ZDNet's article. Also, here is an important snippet from Gartner's website that ZDNet conveniently did not include in their screenshot:
Note: The Ultramobile (Premium) category includes devices such as Microsoft Windows 10 Intel x86 products and Apple MacBook Air.
The Ultramobile (Premium) category is growing 11% this year. I would count x86 devices running Win10 or macOS as part of the PC marke
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Except for GPUs, those are still gaining processing capabilities at an exponential rate.
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I have an AMD A8-7600 and it runs a lot of games very respectably. I tried out the Destiny2 Beta and it only got like 20 fps, but that game is pretty amazing. I can run Unreal 4 on it without much problems with lag. For a computer without a dedicated graphics card it actually runs a lot of games.
That word... (Score:2)
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Moore's Law is exponential, and means exactly this.
Single-thread performance has pretty much hit a wall, maintaining coherency between too many cores of a traditional processor is an extremely hard task... on the other hand, giving a GPU more cores is nice and easy.
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While I agree mostly with this, I think I've lucked out. I purchased my Acer Aspire One back in 2012, and still going perfectly strong!
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Oh no... Firefox doesn't run on Pre-Pentium 4 or Pre-Athlon 64 CPU's from 15+ years ago?
You're talking Pentium 3/Celeron of the age and Athlon XP's
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also... "We need Microsoft to invest a crap-ton of money to further enhance their old software, for no extra money, to support it after the time they said they would when you bought it."
Good one.
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Fine, charge me a (sensible!) annual fee to continue using Win7 and we're good.
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Windows 7 is 8 years old near EOL and quite dated. It's not energy efficient and lacks touch, extra security, and mobile apps like Hulu, Netflix and office 365 add ons like planner, Dynamics, etc.
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And Windows 10 is a glitchy mess with a butt-ugly interface. Is it a surprise that people cling to the old alternative that actually works better?
Oh, and Windows is a desktop operating system. No one gives a fuck about those retarded mobile apps.
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Unless you are a serious gamer, you should be able to put together a really fast machine for WAY less than $1500.
On that high of a budget, you should be able to run a Core i7, a GTX 1080, a really nice power supply, an SSD and a mechanical HD, etc. etc. That's not moderate, that's a f'in hotrod right there.
http://www.tomshardware.com/re... [tomshardware.com]
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A lot of modern smartphones and tablets have HDMI output, so you can carry them around in your pocket and plug them in to a big screen plus a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Of course, then you're stuck with a somewhat underpowered device with a UI that's designed for a 5" screen and doesn't scale well to a larger display.
That said, I'd love for someone to resurrect the Samsung research project from about 10 years ago that did partial migration with Xen. They had a demo where they ran a VM on a phone, then