PC shipments are down but sales of their contents are up
INDUSTRY NUMBER-CRUNCHERS at IDC today revealed that sales of PC microprocessors are rising, while over at rival Gartner they who count such things say that PC shipments are falling.
PC shipments in the UK have been falling for some time and Gartner's figures show a recent drop of 6.5 per cent in the second quarter of this year. Overall, shipments in the UK totalled 2.6 million, down from 2.8 million in the same period last year. Which more or less makes sense. After all, how many PCs does the country need? Are people supposed to be wearing them like shoes?
It is not just businesses that have decided to forgo new desk-clutter, consumers have other priortities too. Typically vendors blamed the high street-schleppers for much of the drop, prompting us to wonder if there's a recession on or something.
Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner said, "There is much discussion on where the market is headed and at the moment there is only one direction and that is down." Not really much discussion then.
"Even with the onset of 'back to school promotions', new products and Windows 7 to become available in the fourth quarter, the market will not recover until 2010,"Atwal added cheerily.
Over at IDC analysts said that microprocessor sales were bucking this trend and were in fact on the up. The chin-strokers added that netbook firms were stockpiling the devices after cooling off on purchases in previous quarters.
Or maybe someone is stock-piling chips. µ
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They are counting ready made PCs from dell and ETC, while by now everyone and their grandmother knows its best to build, or have someone build your own.
Maybe they ought to count motherboard shipments and not PC shipments.
... it's because many consumers and IT departments have figured out that you don't need a new computer every year anymore. I have a 5 year old Pentium D that does just fine and will continue to do fine for some time. The real issue is that the needs of consumers haven't increased a great deal and the hardware hasn't gotten much better. You can therefore keep the same basic machine for longer than ever before and just upgrade parts here and there (I've upgraded the video card in mine a couple of times over the years). The average user uses MS Office and surfs the net. You don't need a quad-core with 8GB of RAM for that and people have figured it out. It's nice to have the latest and greatest, but that's a luxury not a necessity and in this economy luxuries are the first things to go. Until the industry comes up with something truly innovative, sales won't pick up much.
Damn Jon, well said. Ditto your comments and this one of my own.
In the manufacturing business, this situation often means finished products are simply piling up in warehouses because supply vastly exceeds demand. Apple did this for a time in the early years (1980's I think) and it took a serious agonizing reappraisal of tactics to help fix the problem. That and a fortuitous increase in demand worldwide.
It's the fact that most apps only run on one thread. I'm not saying the present apps need to be multi-threaded, but think about it. We've reached a sort of barrier where since about 2005 or so, the limit for any one core has been the same for a while, and probably won't change much for another few years.
Recently, though, we've(programmers, and a sub-set of the tech-heads, with me being a perma-noob tech-head) discovered some awesome uses for graphics cards that don't involve games, and in many cases don't even involve graphics. It won't be long until some of this stuff trickles down to the rest of you. At the moment they're beginning to find new, faster ways to process video and pictures(mostly pictures right now) which will vastly speed up things like HD video processing.
Give it another few years and I think people will become much enamored with the new abilities of their computers. :)
Oh, and for the other uses, google "distributed computing GPU". Charity begins in the home gets a whole new meaning, lol.