Once again the death knell is ringing in the peanut gallery as they claim that the demise of the PC is nigh … still. What the data The Inquirer references is actually something we already know, sales of PCs were down 6.2% over 2016 thanks to the fact that there was little reason to upgrade your whole system. Intel's waltz steps do not currently provide a compelling reason to upgrade, in part because of AMD's lack of new product; the lack of which has also hurt enthusiasts hoping to upgrade their AMD systems. As for Windows 10, we have already seen the lack of influence on the market and those picking up VR headsets only tended to upgrade their GPU, which was not captured in this particular study.
With the upcoming launches scheduled in 2017, this year should be somewhat more interesting for system builders and hardware enthusiasts both.
"SKYLAKE microprocessors from Intel, the sudden appearance of virtual reality (VR), and the launch of Nvidia 10-series graphics cards were insufficient to prize open wallets in the run-up to Christmas or, indeed, during much of 2016."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Sony PlayStation VR – A First-class Reality Show @ Hardware Secrets
- GoDaddy revokes 9,000 SSL certificates wrongly validated by code bug @ The Register
- Latest Adobe Acrobat Reader Update Silently Installs Chrome Extension @ Slashdot
- After almost five months, Android 7.0 Nougat arrives on the Galaxy S7 @ Ars Technica
- Seagate laying off 2,217 employees @ The Register
- Why websites will probably know your card details without you telling them @ The Inquirer
- DiRT Showdown from the Humble Store Free for a limited time
No death of the PC at least
No death of the PC at least for the system builder market with those folks building their own! Maybe for the OEM PC market the Peak PC market is over for good with this years decline the same as last years decline and the year before. A lot of the PC decline has to do with OEM PCs and lack of build quality along with windows 10 and that UI trainwreck in addition to 10’s spying and forced updates that breaks things for games and other uses. UWP is not going to be popular no matter what M$ decides to force on its user base!
I only see AMD’s Ryzen helping with the systems builder market at first with the Ryzen/Vega APU SKUs maybe helping the OEM Laptop market some with the OEM desktop PC market limited to business purchases where businesses will have their own enterprise OS Images to install. So any OEM PC market systems purchases for business will have to wait for the Ryzen Desktop APU offerings to arrive if they want to avoid Intel’s pricy kit.
Any new Ryzen/Vega laptop SKUs better start appearing as Linux OS laptop OEM offerings as windows 10 is a no sale option on any laptop Ryzen/Vega OEM SKUs. Maybe some outsider Linux laptop OEM will appear that specilizes in Linux/Mint OS laptops that come out of the box with a Ryzen/Vega APU and a Full Linux OS build factory installed!
I think they mean the end of
I think they mean the end of the PC growth market. Everyone who needs a PC has one that is good enough for what they want, whatever they want, so they only buy to replace a broken one. It’s just another appliance, like a refrigerator or washing machine.
Oh, and will we be looking
Oh, and will we be looking for the man with 11 fingers, bearing the phone designed for his use?
“My name is PC Montoya! You killed my market! Prepare to DIE!”
I was worried there for a
I was worried there for a second someone wouldn't come up with an appropriate comment.
As you wished.
As you wished.
You were hoping someone would
You were hoping someone would call you Princess Buttercup?
How about PC gaming on an Intel iGPU as “Please consider me as an alternative to suicide?”
I spent $4k on hardware in
I spent $4k on hardware in 2015, so I appropriately spent $0 in 2016.
Ironically, PCPer website is
Ironically, PCPer website is not mobile friendly…
yeah… reading pcper on a
yeah… reading pcper on a phone is not a pleasant experience.
Not sure what’s worse: a
Not sure what’s worse: a badly done mobile version or trying to zoom and click tiny icons on the desktop version.
wish they would make this
wish they would make this site responsive, it has been a web standard for quite a while
If they are dead don’t tell
If they are dead don’t tell the 10 people I’ve sold computers in the last month.
INCONCEIVABLE!!!!
actually
INCONCEIVABLE!!!!
actually they are mainly looking at the big business market- but again – the virtual stagnation with CPU’s and feature sets has set most business to extend contracts out to another year- (so 3 year moves to 4 year replacement and so on)
as for my personal build– yup still using AMD – same machine i built 5 years ago, added an SSD, got a better video card- but other than that – no reason to change it for my needs – yet….
see what Zen brings…
You keep using that word. I
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
RYZEN for gaming will
RYZEN for gaming will basically remove the CPU bottleneck and give you performance comparable to what the benchmarks show as they’re done with modern Intel CPU’s.
So there won’t be much point going beyond a 4C/8T RYZEN that’s similar to an i7-7700K.
If you do any demanding CPU tasks a 6C/12T or 8C/16T RYZEN might be priced nicely, or even if it added $100 a 6C/12T might be worth it in the long-run for future proofing gaming.
DX12 and Vulkan can reduce CPU cycles, AND use the threads more fully thus in THEORY making more than a 4C/8T largely pointless BUT nothing is stopping a game developer from utilizing the extra threads to make a game better.
(My i7-3770K is over four years old but the hyperthreading is starting to benefit in a few titles, and help the CPU last several more years!)