PC sales fall at a record rate
Q4 2015 was not kind for PC sales.
Market research firm IDC is reporting PC shipments suffered a record decline in Q4 2015 as its data shows a record-breaking 10.6% drop when compared to the same period the year prior.
According to IDC’s data, PC shipments reached 71.9 million units in Q4 2015, which was a record year-on-year drop of 10.6%. Prior to this, the biggest quarterly drop was 9.8% in 2013.
IDC contributes the drop on a number of factors, including longer PC lifecycles, stiff competition from mobile devices, and broad economic trends. The firm also notes the drop can be seen as something of an outlier as the market is taking time to respond to Windows 10 and new hardware configurations. Consumers may also be contemplating a future between more traditional PCs and slim, convertible, detachable, and touch variants.
We’re sure the upcoming release of VR devices may have something to do with the decline in sales considering you’ll need a heavy-hitting rig in order to get the most out of the experience.
[Via GamesIndustry]
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replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, PC sales fall at a record rate
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Also if a big recession is coming, the first thing businesses tend to do is stop ordering new office equipment.
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Except most pc enthusiasts don't buy shitty computers. Cheap hardware doesn't drive this industry
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What games other than Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight (due to being poorly optimized more than anything) really taxed PCs in 2015? I don't really think people had much reason to upgrade for anything. This year may be different since VR needs a killer rig and people will probably upgrade for that.
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Do they have docking stations for tablets other than Surface?
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My CPU is from 2007 and runs every game that I've tried. Its getting close to time for an upgrade, but it still runs fine.
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tablets do not count, laptops do
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Good question
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they're completely different for the platform owners, developers, and future trends, even if they do roughly account for the same category of 'computer'
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Three things happening here.
One: Enthusiasts have by and large abandoned manufacturers for self builds, and builds via "their tech friend". It's cost saving, and often times, you get better gear for your money.
Two: non-enthusiasts have no need to upgrade, due to relatively few changes in hardware capabilities.
Grandma's 4 year old pc works just as well for checking her email and reading foxnews.com as it ever has. No upgrade needed.
Three: No major windows upgrade forcing new sales. I know, I know "but windows10!"
Well, windows 10 being offered as a free update nixed a lot of new hardware sales. The aforementioned grandma just had her grandson reserve and update her existing pc to windows 10, rather than taking him to best buy (shudder) in order to pick out a new all-in-one from HP for her. -
It's the end of this, that, and everything else. That other thing is the new thing and the old thing is the old thing now. It's the year of the Linux desktop and the death of pc gaming and the consoles are now universal pleasure machines. It's a paradigm shift, with vectors both synergistic and orgasmatronic. A very Murray Christmas indeed.
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Why does no one seem to notice that sales of seperate PC parts are up? This list also doesn't include vendors which don't offer ready-made builds, but only customizable rigs.
I would bet you anything that 'mid to high end enthusiast' hardware has seen significant growth. -
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You are absolutely correct. Also most PC sales are for administration roles not destined for gaming.
PCs for admin need no more processing power or ram than the average PC from 5 or so years ago which takes the average business/home PCs upgrade cycle out to over 5 years when it has been under 5 years until the advent of quad core processors. I will expect PC sales to drop again for the next few years as the current next generations of processors only have minor updates.
The PC I am using is a few years old and the hardware I was using in 2009 is still compatible with the latest video card with only a small loss in performance PCIE2-3.
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Steam has > 125m users. But this report is about 72m PCs sold just in that quarter. The top vendors do 5-15m units per quarter. That dwarfs self built PCs
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5m self built PCs per quarter would mean 20m per year. Since all gaming PCs aren't self built that means we'd be saying like 1/5th of Steam users buy a new PC every year and Steam would have very little hardware > 5 years old represented. So no I don't think that's true. Anecdotally you can see plenty of people in this thread mentioning how there's little reason to upgrade in the past 5+ years besides maybe a GPU upgrade. I suspect you could do an analysis of the specific trends in the Steam hardware survey per model CPU/GPU/etc over time and derive a more accurate upgrade rate.
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I bought a Lenovo back in July. I don't have the time to build computers piece by piece, so when I'm in the market for a new rig, I look for an affordable one that has a solid processor, hard drive, and RAM, and just buy a high-end GPU separately. I usually end up saving a few hundred bucks.
My current setup is a 3.2GHz quad core, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB of storage (plus a secondary drive at 500GB from my old PC), and a GTX 970. Total cost: around $1000. Not too shabby.
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The life cycle of a good PC is longer than it used to be. I can keep a laptop or desktop going for four years without noticeable slow down. I am also holding off on upgrading until the new GFX cards come out this year and also new Macbook Pros with Skylake CPU's.
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Truth. I had my old PC for 6 years. It ran most games at high settings. I only bought a new one because the old one finally croaked.
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i have an early-2012 i5 and a 2013 770 and i still find it suitable. not going to do 4k or anything but for 1200p gaming it's still plugging along.
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