Annual Global PC Shipments Grow For the First Time in 8 Years (marketwatch.com) 46
Annual global PC shipments rose for the first time in eight years, according to data released by industry tracking firms late Monday. New submitter mimil writes: International Data Group said late Monday that global PC shipments rose 2.7% year-over-year to 266.7 million units, the first annual gain since 2011, when PC shipments rose 1.7%. "This past year was a wild one in the PC world, which resulted in impressive market growth that ultimately ended seven consecutive years of market contraction," said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "The market will still have its challenges ahead, but this year was a clear sign that PC demand is still there despite the continued insurgence of emerging form factors and the demand for mobile computing," Reith said. Over at Gartner, data showed that PC shipments grew 0.6% for the year to 261.2 million units. Gartner does not include Chromebooks that run on Google operating system or Apple iPads.
Chromebooks and iPads (Score:3)
Of course they didn't. That's because those toys are not computers.
Raspberry ? (Score:3)
I bought 2, is that count ?
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I bought 2, is that count ?
That probably the only sales that counted, up from just 1 you bought the year before.
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Not really. Otherwise they'd need to count PC motherboards as "PCs" too.
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Win 7 is the cause.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably not a coincidence that today just happens to be the end of life for Win 7. It probably won't continue, the spike is most likely due to businesses updating their hardware as they migrate to Win 10.
Windows 10 and the need for SSD, perhaps (Score:4, Informative)
One of the biggest things when going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is the need for a SSD. Windows 7, it was an option. Windows 10, booting a machine without a SSD is a deal-breaker, because you have so many subsystems, apps, processes, and other stuff trying to fight for the same read/write heads on a HDD. A SSD can easily handle the random I/O.
This in itself, makes it appear that PCs are "slow", likely getting people to upgrade to new machines.
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I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker. Granted an SSD does faster booting, but a modern HDD with a 32G ReadyBoost works well without needing to go all-SSD.
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Re: Win 7 is the cause.... (Score:2)
Dell and other manufacturers are struggling to cope because of a global shortage of Intel CPUs.
Windows 7 EOL is not helping. Plenty of places (government/healthcare/education) are just buying expensive extended support whilst they upgrade, so I guess that will offset a small bit.
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As someone who plays games, most of the new CPU's aren't that interesting. The big innovation the past few years is cramming in more cores. However, most games just aren't very good at taking advantage of all of those cores, with a decent number of games that are still single threaded. It's the GPU's where things are interesting, and that's where you want to spend your upgrade money. As Intel CPU's go, if you have a quad core made in the last 7-8 years you're more than likely just fine so long as you ca
Pick one (Score:2)
It's probably my fault (Score:2, Informative)
My laptop was getting a bit tired with only a dual core cpu and 4GB of memory, and a failing hard drive. (And it was over 7 years old)
Rather than upgrade/repair it I figured it would be cheaper to just buy a new low end laptop.
I did last for 2 whole days before I nuked Windows 10 and installed linux.
Desktop sales to spike every 7 years (Score:3)
Businesses can write off the computer for 5-7 years on taxes, and honestly there hasn't been a significant improvement in desktop CPU, plus SSD pretty much solved 60% of performance needs in the short term. You can slap an SSD in most any computer and get another 3 years of life out of it, add another 4GB ram if you need more performance.
Unless there's a significant change in the status quo, expect another spike in PC sales in 2026-27
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Even if we stipulate your evidence-free claim of a seven-year interval ( which you yourself hedge down to 5) why would every businesses' purchases be correlated in time?
Re: Desktop sales to spike every 7 years (Score:2)
Honestly if you're unaware of asset depreciation tax schedules, there's not much benefit in engaging you on this topic. It is a pretty basic part of business tax law that's only been expected over the last 100 years or so
Re: Desktop sales to spike every 7 years (Score:2)
*expanded
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Well smarty-pants, the recovery period is just 5 years for computers according to the IRS [irs.gov], not "5-7" which is a pretty significant difference in computer time even today.
Still, the main point was probably how would that explain the spike. Did all businesses purchase their computers in 2014 or something? No, they just buy the equipment as needed, so their replacements wouldn't be bought at the same time either.
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I already stipulated the interval. My actual question which you ignores is why would the end points of that interval line up in the same year across all businesses. Computer purchasing has been happening for long enough that even if a given business does all of their refresh in the same year that different business would be refreshing on different years.
Desktop Standards Rant (Score:2, Interesting)
PC's are still the work-horse of the typical office and nothing around will unseat them anytime soon. Google's online office suite is gaining share, but not fast enough so far to pose a serious challenge to MS. Maybe a decade from now it will be a real dog-fight, but let's solve current problems for now.
Our typical in-house CRUD stacks assumed finger-oriented mobile devices would take over the desktop, and thus stopped trying to be desktop and mouse friendly. That was a mistake. Mousie lives.
We need an inte
Intel held gaming back for almost a decade. (Score:4, Informative)
Last time I ordered / built a PC was back in 2013 because there was little point in upgrading the i7 4770K for minuscule gains. Upgrading the GPU is usually the better move -- this Rule-of-Thumb has been true for ~20 years.
In December I ordered 4 systems:
* Threadripper 1920X
* Threadripper 2950X
* Threadripper 3960X
* Ryzen 5 3600X
AMD has LOTS of people upgrading systems. Octacore is the new quad-core.
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You can't outgrow or become too old for most non-physical hobbies.
Previous older generations played cards and board games, because that's what they did while growing up.
Thus the "new old generation" plays videogames, because that's what they did while growing up.
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On the PC side, I've also upgraded GPUs - figure a PC should have 2-3 GPUs in its lifespan, once you're crammed it full of RAM.
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> figure a PC should have 2-3 GPUs in its lifespan, once you're crammed it full of RAM.
A man after my own heart! :-) 3
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Perhaps enough sales to make them closer to price competitive?
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Sales definitely could be a factor.
I'm not up to date on the update cadence of the Steam Hardware Survey but I would also expect it to "lag" by 3 - 6 months. i.e. People upgrading to 3rd gen Ryzen probably won't show up until mid-year.
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I'm not up to date on the update cadence of the Steam Hardware Survey
I'm not either.
I just found it interesting. There has been a small but solid trend of increasing AMD share of total CPUs, but there was a large (3%) spike for Intel in Dec. Never seen that before.
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For me, I still use my over decade custom built PCs. I used to upgrade every other years due to gaming.
Some claim the PC is dead (Score:3)
..and the future is smartphones and tablets
This may be true for some less demanding things, for people with sharp eyesight and the ability to type on a tiny touch screen
For real work, a large screen is necessary
Re: Some claim the PC is dead (Score:2)
You can have multiple large screens connected to a VDI system - or even VDI hosted in the public cloud.
I think there will be some resistance to moving some desktop workloads into the cloud like this for self-hosting users and those with less typical requirements like legacy science or engineering hardware connectivity etc. but it may become defacto for basic "office pc" duties like word processing and spreadsheets etc.
Furthermore, many mobile devices can run multiple windows, connect to USB on-the-go/Blueto
Sorry, had to replace our 10 yo laptops (Score:2)
Eventually you just have to do it.
Not like back in the day when we replaced the hardware every 2 years due to advances, this is just cause things wear out.
I extended most of my PCs lifespan by cramming them full of RAM, which I'd buy cheap a year or two after release.
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Note: this will cause a spike in Windows 10 sales, since they come with it, but we're all making them Dual Boot Linux, and staying on Linux probably 80-90% of the time, so don't expect a revival of MSFT fortunes in the long run. That ship has sailed.
AMD ending the stagnation? (Score:3)
For a looooong time, the 4-core CPUs have been available in the mainstream desktop platforms, and for quite long time in the laptops as well. 2-core CPUs have been commonplace for ~10 years, too. Meanwhile, the prices of the similarly bracketed CPUs have been on the rise. So people have not been getting a significant speed increase for the same amount of money. As (I believe, not 100% sure) improved performance is the main reason why people buy new PCs, no wonder there has been nothing happening.
Until 2017, AMD finally changed the game by bringing 8-core CPUs to mainstream, and now has caught up, and surpassed, Intel in IPC. And now we're seeing more cores in lower price points, too, and finally in laptops as well, while prices/core have been going down significantly. After a long time, people are getting significantly more performance for the same money. I'm not surprised at all that the sales have been going up, and I expect to see that for quite some time if the progress continues.
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Nothing against AMD or anything but you can't squeeze any more power from silicon anymore - Moore's Law is over and multicore systems are onlya workaround that won't do much without proper software support.
There is a little more to be squeezed from silicon. As you have seen, 7nm has brought significant benefits over 12nm. The clock speeds have not been going up, but the performance / watt has gone. Surely the software has a lot to catch up on the multi-core usage. There's a path to 3nm on silicon. Again, not higher clock speeds, but more room for things like adding cache and specialized functionality. 3D stacking is on its way. Data locality can bring big changes. There are things to be done. It won't be easy
maybe people are realizing cloud==vapor? (Score:2)
Clouds are water vapor, and used to be that vaporware had a bad reputation. Maybe more people are realizing that once their information is no longer "in house" it loses privacy protections because in the US, sharing information with your cloud-service means you give up the expectation to privacy. As such, no warrants are needed for law enforcement to access any online data. It seems this would also affect a company's ability to sue a competitor for using what they thought was proprietary information. Ex