With a total of 76.6 million PCs shipped worldwide in the first quarter of 2014 the desktop market only shrunk by 1.7% compared to the first quarter of 2013. Gartner attributes this to two main factors, new desktops being purchased to replace aging machines running WinXP and a decline in the sales of tablets, at least in the US. Lenovo retains its top spot globally but HP has been doing quite well with their marketing and now hold top spot in both the US and EMEA. Check out all their findings at DigiTimes.
"The end of XP support by Microsoft on April 8 has played a role in the easing decline of PC shipments," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "All regions indicated a positive effect since the end of XP support stimulated the PC refresh of XP systems. Professional desktops, in particular, showed strength in the quarter."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
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- Microsoft cans free custom domain support in Outlook @ The Inquirer
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It’s helping sales of windows
It’s helping sales of windows 7, Linux/Chrome OSs and a few others. PC sales of windows 8 PCs downupgraded to 7, have helped more than XP’s EOL. Tablets sales are taking a toll on PC sales, but if tablets continue to only offer Android as an only OS choice, or RT, then expect PC sales to begin to increase, beacuse there will always be a need for a full function OS in the home or office. There is an underserved market for Tablets that can run full OSX, or Full Linux, to give full windows OS based graphics tablets some much needed competition, and hopefully OEMs will be building full Linux based tablets, and not just Android based tablets. ARM based tablets, as well as x86 based tablets are powerfull enough to host a full linux distro on tablets, but full windows 8 tablets, at an unaffordable price, and with the windows 8 closed ecosystem, and software bloat will not sale. Full PC sales, outside of the big gaming rigs, and the Steam OS ecosystem, will probably remain almost flat, until the hardware needs replacing, and many households already have a desktop, and a few laptops with plenty of power to last the next 5 years. The upcoming Steam OS and matched hardware will probably do more to help the sales of PCs, Steam Boxes being PCs in their own right, and help take some wind out of the dedicated gaming console market. The Tablet market is becoming saturated, and the only real growth will be in tablets that can run a full function OS, at an affordable price, and if Nvidia can play its cards right, it can do very well with the tegra K1 running a full linux distro, and AMD should not tie itself to windows only for its low power x86 tablet SKUs, Intel is increasing its support of Linux, and the Linux OS’s lightweight and bloat free nature will come in great on a tablet form factor.
I certainly contributed to
I certainly contributed to this trend recently, when I put expense I couldn’t afford on a credit card, and bought an el-cheapo Dell Inspiron 3847. The thought of running an unpatchable system was unbearable. So I took the plunge, and went straight to Windows 8.1 (update), and spending the last few days learning humility, as Win 8 security did strange things to installation of programs like 7-zip, and older XP era programs.
I used to be up on all the technical stuff, and I would have preferred to build my own system, but I got outvoted by the boss! The version numbers on all these processors are very confusing. Why should a 1.5 ghz quad-core notebook processor be called an A4-5000 while the 3 ghz dual-core desktop processor is called the A4-4000, or why a Pentium G3220 is slower than a Pentium G2130. And why does HP build a notebook system disguised as a desktop? (That was embarrassing)
At least I can upgrade this system. It will need a bigger PSU, a 4 gig dual channel memory kit (in place of the single 4 gig stick), and a new video card (nvidia, because I want physx to play Sacred II)
Bah, humbug! I don’t give a
Bah, humbug! I don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about EOL for XP. Over Xmas, I gutted my old dual-core W2K primary PC down to the case, power supply and hard drives, & upgraded w/ a new mobo, 3.8GHz quad-core processor, new graphics card, and 8GB of RAM, installing XP Pro x64 (all using credit card points, so at no “cost” to my wallet).
I want no part of Microsoft’s more recent bloatware, especially W8. We’ve been forced to “upgrade” at work to new engineering workstations w/ Windows 7 x64 Enterprise and Office 2010 (from XP x64 & Office 2003)… and I hate the W7 OS (and the crappy “ribbon interface” in Office 2010) w/ a passion. To combat the idiotic changes to the interfaces, I’ve installed multiple 3rd party apps to force the Microsoft BS to work as I prefer, in WINDOWS CLASSIC MODE (i.e. emulation of the Windows 2000 and Office 97-2003 interfaces).
Microsoft’s poo-flinging code monkeys can starve for all I care. I will not purchase ANY new software from the a-holes in Redmond, and in fact, my copy of XP x64 was snatched off a USENET server, so as to avoid letting Microsoft gain one penny from my home PC upgrade.