Microsoft's Product Chief Sees PC Revival as Durable (axios.com) 64
After years of stagnation, the PC industry has seen its best growth in a decade as people buy new laptops and desktops. But while some pandemic-fueled changes may prove temporary, Microsoft product chief Panos Panay sees the industry's return to growth as durable. From a report: "This pandemic has been a forcing function," Panay said in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, following the release of Microsoft's quarterly earnings report. The PC market got a boost as life moved online, but the question for the industry now is whether and how it can keep the momentum going. Before the pandemic, many households focused their tech spending on buying bigger TVs and upgrading their cell phones every couple of years, while trying to keep their PCs as long as possible. During COVID-19, the PC has taken on new life as a tool for remote work, distance learning and staying in touch with friends and family in a world where travel has been greatly curtailed. That drove the global shipments of laptops and desktops for the last quarter to surpass 90 million for the second year in a row, and sales for the year reached a level not seen since 2012. Microsoft reported 25% growth in the revenue it gets from having Windows installed on new PCs.
No kidding (Score:2)
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It's the classic good news/bad news scenario for Microsoft. The good news is that people are buying desktops again! The bad news is that they're using them as cloud service terminals.
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Not to worry, MS makes most of their money from the cloud. People buying Windows terminals just means they get to charge them twice.
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Well, yes. But they don't *control* the Cloud yet.
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I suppose. On the other hand, they are the first company to figure out how to make people pay $300 for a web browser.
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Instead they ran off the cliff like Wyle E Coyote at full speed and hung in the air for about 1 quarter and then suddenly came crashing down with layoffs and suspending production.
Microsoft's demand is more sustainable than that, but they should face it. The whole economy has been wrench
I'm not buying it, literally (Score:5, Informative)
The problem Microsoft is facing is that old PCs are still good enough to do stuff, basically anything that came out since about win7 has enough CPU for 99% of everybody out there to do their day to day stuff, work-related or not. So they had to put absurd CPU requirements into their latest Windows in order to spur PC sales, which is an absolute requirement for their pet vendors to be happy with them. But that only means that more and more people will put off upgrades, and continue to stick with older versions of the OS.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not building a new PC because of the ludicrous prices of GPUs driven up by crypto miners. And I have no interest in Windows later than version 7, except for a small amount of interest in windows 8 now that the interface woes have been mostly solved. (I would like the desktop duplication API so as to speed up my ambilight clone.) But not enough to put effort and/or money into it.
So on one hand you have people and businesses whose PCs are fast enough, and on the other hand you have those who would like to upgrade but won't because the value proposition of a new PC is crap as long as GPU prices are painfully high. Where in this is a healthy desktop market?
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Microsoft may like people buying new PCs and may encourage it, but there's a reason why they are cramming subscription model down everyone's throats: then they don't care that you have a 6 year old computer, they are still getting theirs.
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Microsoft may like people buying new PCs and may encourage it, but there's a reason why they are cramming subscription model down everyone's throats: then they don't care that you have a 6 year old computer, they are still getting theirs.
Windows 11's TPM requirements mean it won't run on a 6 year old computer. There are only two reasons why they would want to do this. One is to keep the OEMs that buy OEM licenses happy, and the other is to improve their value as a part of the panopticon (See: PRISM)
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They of course are probably pretty content selling subscriptions to Windows 10 users, so that's an orthogonal point.
My take on the TPM requirement is so they can have a single supported way of doing BitLocker and Windows Hello and have those always available if the brand says '11'. Without the TPM Microsoft has a hard time competing against the default behaviors of Android, which now pretty much always has something TPM-like.
Not all of us are gamers (Score:5, Insightful)
And we don't give a shit about GPUs. I'm buying a new PC soon to do linux dev and office work on and whether it can play CoD at 100fps is an utter irrelevance.
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I'm buying a new PC soon to do linux dev and office work on
That's nice. For the vast majority of people their old PC suits their needs just fine, just like my comment said. You don't need a new PC for office work unless you've been needing a new PC for that for years; And the vast majority of developers can use an older PC as well, on the same basis. Unless you're building truly massive projects, pretty much anything with a SSD will do the job.
The people who actually need a new PC to get stuff done are mostly doing some kind of graphics work, whether video, 3D, Pho
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"For the vast majority of people their old PC suits their needs just fine"
Define old. Mine dates from 2009. Its time for a total upgrade.
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Define old. Mine dates from 2009. Its time for a total upgrade.
That's pretty well antique. Mine is from 2016, but my prior machine was from about 2010 and frankly it still meets all my application needs. I only upgraded for gaming. Even then I built budget, I have maybe $1000 into my PC all in, and have 32GB RAM and a 512GB SSD (about to upgrade from SATA to four lane NVMe x4 plus my SATA drive for data since a new pull got so cheap, and I need more space.)
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I've been eyeballing this PC upgrade cycle for a while during the pandemic, as I'm the "go to" person for a lot of old friends and colleagues when it comes to PC support, and pretty much everyone for last half a decade has been moving from desktop to laptop if they didn't before. Actual desktops seem to have become mostly bought by/for gamers.
And problem with laptops is that they become rather annoying to use as they age. Mostly due to cooling issues and people being unwilling to take it apart to clean out
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And you don't need a new PC for gaming either. Something 5 years old will still run rings around the previous gen of consoles. Even then the thing that most helps improve performance in many games having more memory. Which is also the thing that helps office and development work the most. So get the 16G, and an SSD, then a mid-range graphics card.
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I'm so glad I don't play computer games anymore like I used to. I just don't have budgets, energy, time, etc. anymore. I have tons of old games that I still haven't started. :(
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The problem Microsoft is facing is that old PCs are still good enough to do stuff, basically anything that came out since about win7 has enough CPU for 99% of everybody out there to do their day to day stuff, work-related or not
Why do you think Windows 11's TPM requirements exist? And in a few years new PCs will need TPM 3.0 and newer
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So they had to put absurd CPU requirements into their latest Windows in order to spur PC sales
Why do you think Windows 11's TPM requirements exist?
I believe I addressed that point in my comment. It's obvious why I think Windows 11's TPM requirements exist.
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Unless you're gaming or doing seriously graphics intensive work -- CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, etc. -- what does the GPU have to do with anything?
The increased storage bandwidth, faster CPU and RAM can be a huge benefit. I just bought a new laptop (Frame.work) and the change for me from 6th Gen Intel to 11th, along with SATA SSD to PCIe x4 SSD was like a night-and-day change.
Native Intel graphics and they're fine for casual gaming, 4K video playback, etc. Hell, I can even play WarThunder on Linux and it's co
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Unless you're gaming or doing seriously graphics intensive work -- CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, etc. -- what does the GPU have to do with anything?
Unless you're gaming or doing seriously graphics intensive work, why would you need a new PC? Any old POS that's at least new enough to have SSD will do literally everything else that nearly everyone wants to do. There are no common tasks which require a whole lot of number crunching which are not also GPU accelerated. There are only a few niche applications in that category. Meanwhile, the majority of computer users play video games [extremetech.com] of some description regularly.
I just bought a new laptop (Frame.work) and the change for me from 6th Gen Intel to 11th, along with SATA SSD to PCIe x4 SSD was like a night-and-day change.
It's not going to be night and day for most
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For me it was system responsiveness. I *despise* the fact that a modern system with oddles of RAM and CPUs clocking at absurd frequencies are less responsive to user input than a Commodore 64.
I tune my system for low latency and responsiveness. When I click something, that is the most important thing the computer should be doing. This is MY desktop, the CPU isn't saving lives or controlling air traffic somewhere.
I agree that moving to an SSD from the old spinning HDs is by far and away the biggest noticable
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Well, I do have a NVMe SSD coming to go into my potato, so I am hip to the argument. I'm only saying the gulf between HDD and SSD is way (way, way) bigger than SATA and NVMe. In the real world a Windows PC with a HDD is just abusive to maintain. I'd rather stab myself with a screwdriver.
The integrated GPUs may do okay for accelerating things, but not as well as a real GPU as you might expect. That the Intel ones are good for anything at all finally is some surprise, but I suppose if they tried enough times
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Congrates on the new SSD, you're right that HDDs are now just abusive.
I was looking for a Ryzen 3 laptop but was having problems finding on that could give me 48-64 Gb of RAM. I work a lot with VMs and since I was getting a new system, I didn't want to regret a RAM limit later.
And I should have been clear, I'm talking about the Intel i7-1185G7 [intel.com] and not the Walmart-special Celerons. And while the embedded Intel Iris Xe [laptoping.com] is good for embedded laptop GPUs, when you compare it to dedicated ones it reminds me of th
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Not really disagreeing with your main point but training deep neural nets (CUDA) is another important application for GPUs now. Not to say many people are buying them for that, but if you reverse the question, quite a few high end GPUs are sold for that purpose.
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My new work laptop has a GPU. I dont' do any 3d graphics whatsoever on it (though I used it to play my mmo over Christmas). But when I go to the task manager, I can see that some apps seem to be assigned a GPU core and are using it. It seems to use this for drawing 2D graphics also. So yesterday I noticed that Teams would hav ethe GPU% go up when it showed the three blinking dots that indicated someone was in the middle of typing a message.
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Yes, but the integrated GPUs in the Intel and AMD processors handle this quite fine. You don't need a discrete GPU to blink some dots. (Dear God, I hope not!)
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Unless you're gaming or doing seriously graphics intensive work -- CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, etc. -- what does the GPU have to do with anything?
Or image processing, video production, streaming, even highend audio processing applications like Ableton are now using the GPU to accelerate tasks. Basically anything you would need a PC for, the sort of things you couldn't just do on a smartphone, iPad, Chromebook or whatever else.
Re: I'm not buying it, literally (Score:2)
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Most new games do not need anything above a 1060 unless you want to run on a high resolution, high refresh rate monitor.
I'm still using a 970, you insensitive clod! Actually it's 2x950s which are supposed to be roughly equivalent. One was a warranty replacement for a 750Ti. Obviously a single card would have been better. I can run most games at 1080p, but not at full quality and still get 60 FPS. Consequently I'm not only not buying a new PC, I'm not buying a new monitor either.
Re: I'm not buying it, literally (Score:2)
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Well, more is more right? I want more pixels more than more fps, but each of those things are immensely valuable in their own way.
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970 and 1060 are roughly equivalent in performance, minus the extra memory (we don't talk about 1050 super that was called 1060 3gb). And to be fair, there are some games that can't be run well any more lately, like CP2077 or latest God of War.
Yes, I know that GoW doesn't officially support 7, but vulkan patch has been out since about 2 days after release.
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Even for games. Maybe it doesn't run the latest and greatest, but those tend to be shooters for twitchy kids. I got mine when Windows 8 was new, so 8 or 9 years old. But with an updated graphics card (1050ti) it runs most of the 3d games I like just fine. I thnk 30fps on an HD monitor is just fine too. No reason to waste money and time on a new sytem, I'll wait until something breaks that I can't fix as easily.
But a new computer doesn't really give Microsoft that much money if you keep all your old apps
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The problem Microsoft is facing is that old PCs are still good enough to do stuff, basically anything that came out since about win7 has enough CPU for 99% of everybody out there to do their day to day stuff, work-related or not.
If that's true then a Chromebook is just fine for 99% of the market and there's no reason anybody needs to buy anything different. Except maybe the tasks that are common to 99% of users - web browsing, email, youtube, video conferencing - would be fine on a Chromebook but then those users have to do other things that won't work on a Chromebook.
If I have misunderstood you then could you explain what this "day to day stuff" is that 99% of computer users do?
Where in this is a healthy desktop market?
Well it'd be nice if Linux desktop/laptop vendors wou
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If that's true then a Chromebook is just fine for 99% of the market and there's no reason anybody needs to buy anything different.
For most non-gamer (or at least people who only game on websites) users then a Chromebook is just fine for them.
If I have misunderstood you then could you explain what this "day to day stuff" is that 99% of computer users do?
Run an office suite or portions thereof without having to worry about whether the internet connection is reliable.
Well it'd be nice if Linux desktop/laptop vendors would collaborate on a unified distribution rather than fragmenting and each creating their own.
Nah, I'd rather have 2340847230 compatible variants so that new ideas can be tried out without harming most users if the ideas are bad.
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If that's true then a Chromebook is just fine for 99% of the market and there's no reason anybody needs to buy anything different.
For most non-gamer (or at least people who only game on websites) users then a Chromebook is just fine for them.
Right but people buy PCs for a whole host of things from 3D animation to visualization to architectural design to audio production to video production to streaming to image editing/production. Aside from maybe corporations cutting costs nobody is buying a new PC to run an office suite.
If I have misunderstood you then could you explain what this "day to day stuff" is that 99% of computer users do?
Run an office suite or portions thereof without having to worry about whether the internet connection is reliable.
If that were true then 99% of people wouldn't have bought new computers in the last 10 years because there is no reason to.
Nah, I'd rather have 2340847230 compatible variants so that new ideas can be tried out without harming most users if the ideas are bad.
The problem is there's no innovation, it doesn't matter which window manager you use for example becaus
As an editor of Maximum PC once said... (Score:2)
For all the hoopla over mobile devices taking over desktop computing, it's been nearly 15 years since Jobs declared the death of the desktop computer. And here we are, still using desktop computers to get work done, play games, edit videos, develop software, and do other tasks that tablets and phones are completely unsuited for performing. Mobile computing has its place (mainly media consumption), but it will never usurp the king of the mountain: the desktop computer.
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I think it's because most desktop computers don't fall apart or become irreparably obsolete within 2-3 years.
This.
The laptop I bought back in 2017 is just as good for the purpose I bought it for today. The PC never went anywhere, it's just gotten to the point where they don't need to be replaced every 2 years, same as you don't need to buy a new fridge or car every 2 years any more. A 50 year old technology has matured.
Now tablet sales... I dare say we may actually be entering the post tablet era, especially if we stop counting things like the MS Surface as a tablet (they're essentially a laptop with a deta
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This (Score:2)
Touch input devices are 99% consumption/output devices. For large amounts of input and content creation they're utterly hopeless. Yes you can get a tablet to sort-a kind-a pretend to be a laptop but the experience is horrible and if you want to do any programming, just forget it.
No one wants to touch the screen. (Score:2)
The problem with the post PC BS has always been that workers want to sit to do work, and nobody wants to touch a screen from their chair for hours or do swipe gestures with a mouse.
Microsoft has been one of the worst UI designers when it comes to this. I can sum up almost all of their recent UI innovations to "I CAN DRAW ON THE SCREEN AND SEND IT TO PEOPLE!". It's almost like they locked their UI designers in a room, gave them only a surface pro and a pen with no keyboard attached and ordered them under pen
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"PC" Revival . . . year of the "linux PC" (Score:2)
The same general rules have always been the same concerning computers - a lot of people want to spend $500 and think that's the same as a properly built computer with adequate resources
Here are some items that are considered to be part of the new PC market . .
1) go cheap on the memory
2) inefficient battery or power usage
3) chipsets/architectu
Hoping Pluton and secure boot will ensure that. (Score:1)
The PC industry has woken up again (Score:1)
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You: Alex, I'd like to choose Paragraphs for $500.
Alex: Make your prose readable for others.
You: Uh? I don't get it.
Alex: Wrong You, you didn't phrase it in a question, i.e., "What are paragraphs?"
Recently bought a new PC, but... (Score:2)
My previous PC was from 2014 and it was (and is) just fine for about 95% of what I do. However, I have started making videos and getting into animation a little bit, and my previous PC was annoyingly slow to render those.
I happened to come into a bit of money unexpectedly, so I bought a ridiculously over-powered machine and I fully expect it to last for at least 10-15 years. 64GB of RAM, AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, dual NVMe drives, and a Radeon PRO WX 3200.
MSFT didn't get a cent. It's a custom bui
by Post-PC logic, no one would still buy trucks (Score:2, Insightful)
I have relatives who haven't upgraded their computer in 15 years, but rely on iPads. They're dumbasses. They have dumb jobs and no interests. Their li
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Since the iPad came out, idiot writers (must have been marketing majors in their early 20s) have been predicting the demise of the PC.
You're arguing about the past, but it already happened. This article is talking about a revival because we can say objectively that the PC industry has not been doing great until the COVID bump.
The only thing left to debate now is whether that is temporary or long term, going forward. You can't argue about the last fifteen years of PC sales.
I have relatives who haven't upgraded their computer in 15 years, but rely on iPads. They're dumbasses.
Fuck me, I guess you can. Ok, the past fifteen years were dumbass, nobody scroll left on global PC sales or revenue charts, IT DIDNT HAPPEN. The future is great, ev
PCs never were dying, though. It was all hype (Score:2)
You're arguing about the past, but it already happened. This article is talking about a revival because we can say objectively that the PC industry has not been doing great until the COVID bump.
The only thing left to debate now is whether that is temporary or long term, going forward. You can't argue about the last fifteen years of PC sales.
By what metric? Stores have been selling them perpetually at good rates. Consumers don't replace them as often as when Moore's law was relevant, but nearly every non-hipster household has one. Sales may have declined, but if you're going from 100% of the a multi-billion dollar market to 50%, I am not sure that's enough of a trend to say you will go 0. The computing market has expanded globally and new device categories expand faster than existing ones. The death of PC stories have always been bogus
If we applied this logic to cars, all sales would be
Dude, whole classes of auto sales DO dry up and the industry moves on. Maybe station wagons will make a huge come back some day, but arguing in the face of reality that people still need to cart groceries and drag kids to baseball games, therefore the death of the station wagon is highly overrated, LOL.
Def
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Good point (Score:2)
Calling people dumb for what job/interests they have is making you seem like an pc master race a-hole. Specially when you're a software engineer.
Good point. Ranting like an asshole like I did is not a productive way to make a point nor a particularly productive way of taking out today's frustrations. Feedback taken. Thank you.
Curious about the software engineer clause. Why does that make someone more of an asshole?
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Win 10 Slowdowns (Score:2)
Win 10 works great on an old machine, ...except when you turn it on.
At startup, the drive is often at 100% disk usage as Win10 is busy doing something (scaping data, evaluating your PC before an upgrade, defragging the drive, scanning for viruses, indexing files, ...). The PC is so bogged down that it's useless for 20 minutes until the job is done.
These scraping and maintenance apps are so poorly written that they consume all resources. They should run quietly in the background, but instead they hog the
Not everyone is financially constrained... (Score:2)
Minimalists resent that anything newer than their T60 running TempleOS exists, and gamers who insist on building their own machines rage that GPU upgrades for their toys (there is nothing wrong with toys but they should be acknowledged as such!) are overpriced.
Many other users can effortlessly afford new PCs as they do new flagship phones. We do the math (a grand or two in 2022 money is bupkis spread out over even five years use) and see no reason to mind.
Why NOT enjoy performance and features if you can af