PC sales down in US and Europe
The largest numbers of PC shipments in the last quarter came from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus.
The report, which combines data from research companies IDC and Gartner, states that year-on-year sales are around 5 per cent lower in comparison to last year. However, the figure of 17.8 million for the number of PCs shipped in the second quarter of this year was apparently significantly higher than the figure for the first quarter of 2011.
According to Gartner, year-on-year sales of PCs have declined by around 4.2 per cent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, while sales in the US have declined by 5.6 per cent.
However, sales of PCs in Asia boomed during the same period, with the market seeing growth of around 10 per cent. Tablet sales are excluded from the figures, but netbook sales also fell as companies and individuals held off upgrading both portable devices and PCs following the squeeze on budgets.
Gartner's principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa stated that 'after strong growth in shipments of consumer PCs for four years, driven by strong demand for mini-notebooks and low-priced consumer notebooks, the market is shifting to modest, but steady growth. The slow overall growth indicates that the PC market is still in a period of adjustment, which began in the second half of 2010.'
According to Kitagawa, some retailers have also been reluctant to purchase large numbers of PCs due to the hype surrounding tablets, especially Apple's iPad and iPad 2.
However, some companies are seeing growth in the apparently declining market. According to IDC, the top five PC manufacturers (ranked by volume of PC shipments) are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus. While most of the companies' volumes grew or shrunk by modest amounts, Lenovo notably had an increase in growth of 22.3 per cent.
What do you make of the slump? Have you been holding off from upgrading your PC or buying a new one? Let us know in the forums.
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Hardware hasn't aged as badly these past few years, there's no pressing need to upgrade yet. Couple that with reduced spending and you've got an answer right there.
Everybody is buying Mac's.
Fixed that for you.
Reduced spending. +1
people are making do with old tech like you say, because its a luxury item. You don't need huge power to get on facebook.
I also think more people are buying pad-type devices as a second "pc" instead.
I.e. if I was getting a second PC 2 years ago, it would be a laptop. Now it would be a tablet.
+1
This is the type of cyber-luddite opinions that hold back progress.
I challenge you to play Crysis 2 on a 3 year old relic. And low settings do not count.
Any gamer knows that his system has a 18 month lifespan, much less for graphic cards.
-.
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The second I used the word 'magic' should have alerted you to my sarcasm :P
Note that he said '3 year old technology is still more than adequate for MOST users'. Most users want to use a PC to go on Facebook and play farmville and other flash based browser games, not triple A titles, that's why they have a console.
3 year old tech is perfectly adequate for me thanks, I've no desire to join in the willy-wangling contest that is Crysis 2. My current system plays everything I need it to at decent settings 2048*1536. I could do with an upgraded graphics card, but that's a couple of hundred quid I don't have spare just at the mo.
Let's face it, the majority simply doesn't need most recent hardware to enjoy some browser-games, write letters or whatever. All these things can be done on 5 year old hardware just as good and in times where the economy is struggling, people simply don't think about doing unnecessary upgrades.
Energy-efficiency is the key to sell new hardware in the allready saturted EU and US. Develop PCs with current performance but with 30-50% less power-consumption and people will buy a new rig in times where your electric bill increases every year.
far as I know microsoft makes the only keyboards that work underwater.. it snowballs.. I don't think hardware manufacturers have much to worry about- or maybe consoles have taken over
You'll find that graphics cards have barely progressed over the last 18 months. My 2GB 5870 is more than adequate for everything that I play, across 3 monitors.
I built a PC in 2008 and it runs everything and Crysis 2 on all full at native res while supporting another monitor. I also have a laptop with a 9600M GT which also runs Crysis 2 at moderate (again not low) settings on native res.
Crysis isn't a be all and end all of gaming (especially not Crysis 2), as to be frank it isn't a good game. Just another benchmarking suite.
Mac's what? What is he selling?
you know he might be onto something, studies show people are getting dumber and losing their common sense, so it would makes sense that they would fall for buying a mac, given the lack of intellect and all.
I'm waiting for an Ivy Bridge hexacore. The lack of real competition from AMD in the mid-high segment has allowed Intel to tease us with uncompetitive Tock-hexacores closely followed by Tick-quadcores which come so damn close in overall performance, lol.
I'm wondering if Sandy Bridge E will he interesting if they're going to use the "3D" transistors, but it'll probably be unaffordable anyway, hopefully by the time Ivy Bridge comes hexacores might just enter into the medium-high (non-exteme/EE) segment and you'll get a good all-rounder which isn't immediately outpaced by a die shrink quadcore.
I note the lack of response. Sadly this is quite typical. Declining education levels on the Internet has resulted in the effectiveness of a self-appointed, friendly and naturally helpful Punctuation Nazi being much reduced.
It is an international disgrace that is not being addressed at all to my knowledge. That the important work of, in the main, unfunded Language Nazi volunteers of all kinds is being entirely overlooked in favour of the commercial funding of the trained-monkey under-classes that resolve DNS queries or the billions Google throws at sub-Saharan witchdoctors to massage their AdSense service and the hundreds of millions Microsoft spends in return on specialist counter-sorcery shamans invoking the kind of spirits required to disrupt such massively powerful advertising voodoo.
And in the meantime, many tireless Punctuation, Grammar and (the most maligned of all) Seplling [sic] Nazis go unrecognised, unappreciated and unrewarded. Then the unwashed masses, those who need the most help and tutoring with their language skills, ignore the freely given helpful advice and often will accuse the giver of being a "troll"! There is just no helping some people.
You keep fighting the good fight, Smiffy, and know that there are people who appreciate and greatly support the work you do for us and the sacrifices you make on our behalf. If it wasn't for net-heroes like you I could have lost my way and become the lowest of all life forms, a native text-speaker. It is but a short step from there to complete intellectual death...<sob>...a Console Queen.
If you'll excuse me now, I have to make sure my panda eats, shoots and leaves.
That & people who like to go put their own systems together breaking free from crappy pc's :D.
My Q6600 is still fine for running everything I throw at it. I thought about upgrading to sandy bridge, but by the time I got around to specc'ing myself a new pc, ivy bridge reared it 3d head and got me thinking, do i really need to upgrade now or can i wait. Well..I think I can wait.
Probably not to a great degree but may have been an influencing factor.
I L'dOL at this. Nice one ;)
+1
It's not just that however, it's also that laptops/pc's aren't cool gadgets like they once were - you need one, you buy one, but you don't update it every year to the latest model for the hell of it.
The portable devices (phones/tablets) are what people are willing to spend money on - how many iPhone 3g users barely used any of it's power, yet still felt the need to buy an iPhone 4?
welcome to the new world.. where everything is expensive and mac/iphone users are the new techie :D
I read that first thinking "he wants to replace his 6 year old, that's a bit off"
Bad thing about this is if you like expensive hardware this is no good for impact on price
As the PC is currently my main hub for...well, everything, I am happy pumping money into it and paying a bit more for high-end graphics cards and 3 displays. However the tipping point will come when it's mostly just for PC gaming and when it does I just can't see me spending that much.
I will keep my machine around for all the games I have on PC up to that point but probably move onto consoles exclusively (I have always had at least one console from the current generation with my PC since the PS1).
This day will be a very sad one for me but I feel it's inevitable. When people have a little tablet they plug's into a HUB (keyboard, mouse and monitor) at a desk that turns it into a full windows 8 PC that does everything they want why would they buy a desktop? The current model is dying and there is nothing we can do about it.
I truly hope I am very wrong.
Don't worry...you are :)
Take me for instance. My business PC recently started blue screening (Pentium D 2.8Ghz). I've had it for so long I can't even remember how old it is. Anyway I was going to build a new ultra-efficient PC for myself using the i3-2100t at the end of this month. I'd costed it at £350 - £400.
Then, last week, I came across this spec: Core i3 550, 4Gb Ram, 1Tb Samsung F3, Windows 7 Home in a SFF case for...£185 delivered. On top of that it came with a wireless kb/mouse and a WiFi N usb adapter.
Buying the components in the PC would cost me nearly twice that. And while they are 1 generation old they are more than enough for the sort of work I do on that computer. (Heck, my old computer is up to the task and if it wasn't dying...)
I *really* wanted to build my own work PC this time - it was going to be a project to see how low I could get the power usage. But in reality (and after much soul searching) I couldn't justify spending more than twice as much on building something very similar.
I suspect the whole tech industry is in for some pretty lean times as more and more of this "old tech" starts to come on to the market a very low prices. Especially as much of it is more than capable of doing everything the average user wants.
Factola #2: Game development has slowed down - graphics aren't increasing at previous rates
Factola #3: A 3-5 year old PC *does* still play most current games at med-high settings
Factola #4: Most people don't use their PC for games. Most people use them in businesses.
Thus...PC sales are slowing down. Nothing to do with anything except money, and it's temporary.
Challenge accepted. I completed Crysis 2 on my 3 year old relic (some parts are considerably older). This is the same "relic" I use for work every day. Usual workload consists of: 3+ browsers, one or more of Netbeans, Photoshop, Fireworks, Apache, MySQL, SVN. It does its job perfectly, although I'm tempted to add a SSD for added responsiveness. Would I notice the difference between a Vertex 3 on my motherboard and a Vertex 3 on SATA 6Gbps in daily use? Probably not, and neither would you.
"Relic" hardware:
Asus P5K-E
Xeon X3350 @ 3.4GHz (400FSB - Really need to get this higher when I have the time, ran my last CPU at 450)
4Gb Corsair Dominator 1066
1Gb Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X (technically only 2 years old, but it's a die shrink of a 3 year old GPU).
Seasonic M12-600
Tuniq Tower 120
Antec P180 with Silent Eagle 1000s throughout.
As well as my trusted pc I own both a 360 and ps3 and play black ops on both pc and 360, just depends whose online, even though it looks far better on pc :). Both the 360 and ps3 are a few years old now, but software sales direct the developers so they make games for those in mind and the pc ports come later. Why buy a new pc for £400+ when a second hand £90 360 will suffice.
I am now upgrading my pc, finally! :) But only because of battlefield 3, this is a game made for the PC in mind. Developers need to start thinking more about the pc gamers e.g. Hard Reset, with their far superior hardware, build a good game and people will pay to play it. I have several friends and now me and my girlfriend, all console gamers, who are upgrading solely because of the new titles being released. I hope more developers jump on board this, assuming these games do well, and we see a greater incline in pc gaming and hardware purchases. Nvidia, ati, intel etc need to push some marketing campaigns once again aimed towards the average joe console gamer "buy this to play this and it will look this amazing!" :)
Talk about making someone look like a massive cock, that was awesome! :D
Oh really?!
I played it fine on my Intel Q6600
8GB DDR2
and GTX 280
Which is a 3 years old relic. These were also not at LOW settings.
The only thing I'm upgrading/replacing is my 5 year old monitor.
I don't think tablets are a fad by any means. I think they are here to stay but we need more competition to drive down prices. And just because XYZ makes a tablet doesn't mean they are competition to Apple.
Challenge kind of accepted. My rig is 2 years old. Crysis 2 at med-high settings. HD4850 and Phenom II still running strong. Defining 3 years as a "relic" is just plain dull. Were you born yesterday? You could call my old Pentium IV 7600GT rig that, maybe, but let's be honest, in the last 3 years, not a whole lot has changed in terms of what people need in their daily lives, and surprisingly, games haven't become much more taxing. Sir, some of the original Core 2 Quads are that old, and they're just as powerful as brand new high-end i3s and Phenom II X3s!
THIS.
I haven't tried crysis 2 but my phenom 555 and 4870 seems to handle recent games at 1920x1080.
Sure I'm probably not considered a pc gamer though as I'm not running a triple screen, sli rig with an ssd. I know I will have to upgrade at some point and the spec isn't the best, but if it handles games then I kind of think "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
By the way sorry for the tone, I just re-read it and it came across a bit... I dunno. it wasn't meant to but it's late and I can't be bothered to re write it.
Same here, I'll run this computer until it stops play the games I want to play or I find a really good deal and am compelled to upgrade