Global PC Shipments Dropped by a Third in Q1 (techcrunch.com) 40
After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter. Analyst firm IDC's latest figure has Q1 down 29% from the same time last year. Canalys paints an even more troubling picture for the industry, with a full 33% drop. From a report: A disappointing 2022 holiday set the stage for the beginning of the year, as vendor inventory has continued to pile up -- a trend that is expected to carry at least into Q3. The plunge has been so consistent that last quarter's figures dipped below those of Q1 2019, putting worldwide shipments below their pre-pandemic level.
[...] The culprits? For starters, a lot of people purchased news systems in 2020 and 2021 as their work settings adapted to a global pandemic. Laptops tend to have a life span of around three to five years. Desktops are even longer, at three to eight. People are likely to be content with their systems for a few years at least. As vendors go, both IDC and Canalys have Apple suffering the largest drop at 40.5 and 45.5%, respectively. That's a staggering figure, likely owing -- at least in part â" to the company coming back down to earth, as the M1 chip managed to buck larger category trends in 2021/2022. That chip marked Apple's biggest PC computing update since the company shifted to Intel decades prior. In spite of what ad copy might suggest, you don't get a generational shift every year.
[...] The culprits? For starters, a lot of people purchased news systems in 2020 and 2021 as their work settings adapted to a global pandemic. Laptops tend to have a life span of around three to five years. Desktops are even longer, at three to eight. People are likely to be content with their systems for a few years at least. As vendors go, both IDC and Canalys have Apple suffering the largest drop at 40.5 and 45.5%, respectively. That's a staggering figure, likely owing -- at least in part â" to the company coming back down to earth, as the M1 chip managed to buck larger category trends in 2021/2022. That chip marked Apple's biggest PC computing update since the company shifted to Intel decades prior. In spite of what ad copy might suggest, you don't get a generational shift every year.
Culprits? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Culprits? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the fact that a system from 5-6 years ago still holds up even for gaming these days unless you have some very very specific needs or want 4k+ output.
A lot of people are just fine with their 1920x1080 at around 60fps for games, and outside games unless you're doing seriously computation heavy work like 3d rendering and such there just isn't much impetus to upgrade with the cost of literally everything climbing like crazy. I suppose some things like hardware video encoding for streams is a draw, but even that is a small subset of the total market.
Re: Culprits? (Score:2)
(Of course I did some basic updates to the old one, ssd, graphics card)
Re:Culprits? (Score:4, Funny)
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"Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away". The latter is why Microsoft, facing a drop of Windows usage, hired Lennart.
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Try running a language model on your PC. Llama, RWKV, GPT4All or Vicuna, all can be enough for 3, 7 or 13 billion parameters with 4 bit quantization on a machine with 16gig or so of memory. But note that ChatGPT needs 10 or 20 times the memory and GPT4 needs 10 or 20 times that.
While some of these models could be split up using some sort of LLM hierarchy, there is no current idea of too much memory. "640 G of memory should be enough memory for everyone". But a terabyte would be better...
The industry is h
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Not suprising (Score:2)
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Lots Of Used Parts From Crypto Crash (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the economy has been lackluster for a while I'm sure a lot of folks started buying cheep used stuff from the crypto crash.
I would also like to see the breakdown of retail PC parts vs. retail whole system sales, as it seems more folks are buying parts and building their PC's or getting friends or relatives to do it for them.
I'm shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't imagine why people who are having trouble paying for food and fuel wouldn't buy new PCs.
Won't someone think of the poor starving corporations? They're expected to keep increasing their profits quarter after quarter and many of them have just had record setting quarters due to raising their prices far more than they needed to, but that just means they need that much more profit next quarter.
Please, lend a hand. We don't want the corporate executives to get frowned at by wealthy shareholders. You might need to tighten your belt and skip a few meals, but isn't it worth it to ensure those CEOs can afford the yearly upkeep on their mega-yachts?
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Cue Sarah McLaughlin's "In The Arms Of An Angel Investor"
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Somehow, the accounting geniuses haven't yet figured out that increasing prices isn't a sustainable way to keep increasing profits when people are being priced out of being able to afford much more than just "getting by."
Maybe they'll understand after the "free market" shows them that "free" in this case didn't mean "all the free money you could ever want forever and ever." Give them a few downturned quarters.... never mind. The dumbasses will just think that means they need to increase prices even more.
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Oh they know. They know it’ll work out long enough to brag about for at least one annual self evaluation and bonus period before they see any negative impact. That’s long enough to find a new job. Even if the whole thing blows up before they’re gone they can just collect their severance package, go back to school for a bit, and when things cool down a bit and they go out looking for a job it’s still not a lie that they brought earnings to an all time high, they won’t talk ab
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Who do you think suffers when a company goes down? Do you think a CEO cares if he loses his job? Decades ago I worked for a company that was bought by a different company. The two companies did the same thing so a lot of the roles were redundant and many people were fearful of losing their jobs. To assuage fears, the CEO sent out a long email describing how times are changing, and that his own role was redundant so he was leaving. He wrote an epic essay on how we should not worry about him, and that he was
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....
You can't possibly have thought I was actually suggesting that anyone should think that any CEO is suffering. I realize my sarcasm was dry at first, but the bit about paying for upkeep on their mega-yachts at the end should have driven that home.
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No, what I was getting at is that if a company goes down .. the people that suffer are its employees and people who have invested their retirement money either directly in shares or indirectly via mutual funds or other instruments. The CEO and C-suite rarely experiences anything other than a slight ego hit and a temporary reputation setback.
Is Windows on ARM gonna be more than a toy soon? (Score:1)
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x86 and Microsoft are pretty much stuck with each other. x86 tried to cuddle up with Android with a bunch of android tablets that no one wanted, and Microsoft tried to make nice with ARM.
Besides, ARM isn't going to bolster PC demand, unless somehow all the application vendors decided to drop support for x86 for some magical reason.
Also, ARM is working against this by changing to onerous licensing rules that pretty much kill ARM on expensive devices except for Apple.
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Don't forget about the disruption that is RISC-V architecture that is coming to bite both Intel x86+Microsoft and ARM.
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Burying Microsoft is something most of us cheer at; burying ARM would also be nice. I see that a good part of work to pull RISC-V from the ARMey hole it is gravitating into (every device needing its own device tree + bootloader that works completely different + no way for future devices to announce themselves to the system) is done by Intel so we may get parts that made x86 good while shedding the old crap.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is back to their old ways, trying to control the software, and put DRM back into
Multiple factors... (Score:5, Interesting)
As stated in the summary, the pandemic did serve to align and magnify demand, and now we are, to some extent experiencing the consequence of reduced demand.
However, the shortages also drove prices into the stratosphere. While the public line from all the companies was "oh, this is disappointing, we need better supply to return to normal", another quieter lesson being learned was "hey, we are making the same revenue, with higher margin and fewer customers to deal with, this isn't so bad..." Famously, GPUs are very content to sit at their elevated high margin, low volume 'new normal'.
So we have a post-rush population of 'sated' PC buyers combined with key players in the industry deciding they like "low volume, high margin" better than what they were doing before the price increase.
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the shortages also drove prices into the stratosphere
Prices are up way more than costs.
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Right, my point was that once prices *could* have come back down, some of those prices stayed up there deliberately. I imagine a large number of companies had some people saying "higher prices, lower volume is acceptable", and the shortages constituted a whole lot of "I told you so" and now they are calling the shots pricing and volume wise.
Somewhat related (Score:4, Interesting)
My current PC is an i7 6800K (X99 platform) and it's showing signs of illness. Hard lock-ups while playing certain games, sometimes not even the reset button works. I, so far, have been hesitant to upgrade, for three reasons:
1. Machine specs have been enough for all my tasks
2. It's a fully watercooled system
3. It's a somewhat unorthodox build (dual PSU, the case is actually a modified coffee table) and it's a pain to switch to a new machine.
I can afford "the latest and greatest"... which brings me to the point of my post.
Lately I've been looking at two types of hardware: one set for upgrading my main build, and another one for upgrading my server. To my surprise, prices kind of converge.
An AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2GHz is around 900 bucks in my country (EU taxes and shit); but an AMD EPYC 7402P is only about $600 more, while the motherboard for the EPYC CPU (Supermicro H12SSL-i) is much better than the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO, while being much cheaper (about $300 less). Same for RAM, yes, I know, DDR4 vs DDR5, but speed is not really of the essence in most cases, however capacity is. I could get 256 GB ECC DDR4 3200 at the same price as 128 GB of DDR5.
Again, these are local prices, YMMV.
My point is, with a little bit of extra financial effort, I could have a very nice server-grade machine which beats the crap out of a gaming PC.
Gone are the days where new server hardware was untouchable.
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That's true, however I've been looking at my current main machine which I use for gaming, hobbies, learning, you-name-it. It has 32 GB RAM, 6 cores, 12 threads, CPU performance is 30% less than a Ryzen 3600 which sits in my wife's gaming mITX watercooled PC, and still works fairly well.
Passmark scores for single-thread performance (EPYC sample count is really low, take that with a grain of salt):
- Ryzen 3600: 2569
- i7 6800K: 2274
- EPYC 7402: 2092
So, yes, the 7402 has lower single-core performance, however t
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Your post makes sense. And yes, high core count and pci lanes have value for the server setup you describe.
I hope nobody is puzzled why (Score:2)
Between inflation, wages not keeping pace and GPUs still costing a fortune, why buy a new PC?
Quite frankly, CPUs are as fast as you need them to be for pretty much any application, from office work to gaming. What matters is GPU power, and even there only if you care about higher resolutions and larger screen sizes. And that's exactly where the bottleneck is currently closing. GPU prices are insane. Before the bitcoin craze, a mid-range GPU cost somewhere between 400 and 600. Independent of generation, what
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The mining GPUs are starting to trickle out at reasonable prices, too. That's got to be eating into sales, both for the actual sales and for the people waiting for the flood.
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Is it me or would a lack of demand and an ever increasing amount of supply usually cause prices to lower instead of rise? What's going wrong here?
3 more culprits: No optic or hard drives, bad kbds (Score:2)
My wife and I have been trying to buy a couple new laptops for over two years now. But ALL the commodity PCs at retailers (in Silicon Valley no less) have:
- No optic drive.
- No hard drive (only SSDD)
- Rotten ultrathin keyboards with lettering that scratches off after about a year.
We could do it custom. But the cheapest config with all we want (at least for my linux developer box) was about 1.5k last time I checked.
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How often do you actually use the optical drive in your machine? I have a couple of USB DVD+-RWs and that covers my needs more than adequately, I don't even have an optical drive in my desktop any more because of the effects on POST time. My lady has an optical drive in her T900 but never uses it.
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How often do you actually use the optical drive in your machine?
Regularly. Not just for file storage, backup, and the like. We have quite a collection of (non-pirated) commercial movie DVDs and watch them on the laptops. The screen sizes were chosen for adequate viewing.
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I rip those to H.265 mkvs with all the subs and audio tracks, if you keep the resolution the resulting file size is easy to stream even over low-rent wifi. I've had enough problems with DVDs, even when treated well and drives are cleaned regularly, that I don't like to play them any more.