PC Sales Are Flat-Lining 485
DavidGilbert99 writes "Gartner has released figures showing that PC shipments globally declined 0.1 percent in the last three months, making it the seventh consecutive month of little-to-no growth in the PC market. This was despite the launch a number of new Ultrabooks, the much-vaunted slim-and-light platform promoted by Intel. The decline has been put down to the poor economic situation around the globe, increased spending on tablets and smartphones instead of PCs as well as the imminent launch of Windows 8, making people hold out on updating their PCs."
Flattening, not flat-lining (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, on a graph it will be a flat-line. But "flat-lining" is when someone's heart is no longer beating.
Re:Flat-Line (Score:2, Informative)
Nah... "flat sales growth" would be the corporate term.
Flat-Line means dead.
PC growth opportunities are going to require a major hardware improvement or architectural change (i.e. HP/Hynix is working on something called "Memsistor" where RAM is replaced with storage that retains state when power is removed-- and costs less to make than Flash).
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Gimme a Laptop Air that runs Windows or hell, Linux, and I'll buy it in a heartbeat...
OK, it's called the Macbook Air, and it runs Windows and Linux. Now off to the Apple Store with you. Bring your credit card.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
Why should PC sales be different?
Ask Apple, they went through the 2008 financial clusterfuck with flying colours. Same for some Android makers.
Re:Flattening, not flat-lining (Score:2, Informative)
Flatline in an EKG means zero electrical activity.
Flatline in a sales graph would mean zero sales, not just sales being steady.
Re:So, consumers are getting smarter then? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the latter.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. But then he can't imply that he's "suffering" on OSX because he's forced to buy Apple if he wants a pretty machine.
Just more proof that Apple has become a vanity brand. Shame, Snow Leopard is a decent OS (I would know, I use it 40+hr/wk but it hasn't been a mandatory platform for me for over a year now), but Lion and Mountain Lion are playing into the vanity theme. When the updates stop flowing in for Snow Leopard, Apple finds themselves off my buy list; for now, they're just near the bottom.
4 PCs in 14 years (Score:5, Informative)
And if you just want to read your email, a smartphone will do in a pinch, but a tablet will do fine. Practically anything on the market will do it - doesn't need to be a top-of-the-range iPad. So only gamers are buying PCs. Businesses aren't - we have 5 year old machines in the office that still run XP and Office just fine. We don't need multi-core setups and uber-gfx cards to do Powerpoint and Excel. We have no upgrade plans for at least 3 years and we'll probably completely leapfrog Win7 when we do. PCs got 'good enough' a while back - no wonder the market's flattened out.
Re:Flat-Line (Score:5, Informative)
Nah... "flat sales growth" would be the corporate term.
Never listen to an AC. The term you were looking for is "plateaued", but you would see "flat-lined" in such situations as well. People may think "dead" but they will not actually take the meaning to be such, they would, in the context of this article, take it to mean a plateau, which is what was intended, so it would be correct.
Re:Flat-Line (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget, a $500 monitor from today is larger, but with worse resolution, than your 2007 benchmark. The explosion of HDTV has regressed monitor resolution, even as the screens grow. I want to go back in time to when 19" LCDs at 1600x1200 was "standard" and at 21" and larger, you got more.
A 1920x1080 monitor (HDTV) has more pixels than a 1600x1200.
Beyond that, we ARE seeing 2560x1440 in the widescreen form factor and larger, even - you just have to be willing to spend more than the $100~200 "sweet spot" price for monitors to get that additional resolution.
As for form-factor, it seems some people just can't stop hating on any computer monitor that matches up to HDTV's 16:9 display ratio. Why is this? I have no problem with convergence... it greatly reduces manufacturing costs, resulting in lower consumer prices for quality monitors. Don't knock the ability to buy additional monitors for your setup, and spend less than what a single good 1600x1200 21" monitor cost.
CRTs vs LCDs also have changed the space available on our work surfaces, too.... as well as greatly reduced eyestrain.
So... could you buy a 2560x1440 30" monitor for $500 in 2007? I can get it for less than $400 today. I don't recall being able to buy anything with 2 megapixels for less than $500 in 2007. /Just don't understand all the misinformation people are willing to spread in their hate on 1080p consumer monitors.