Wanted! 4m-plus PC purchases to halt industry decline
Stop taking the tablets, punters told
The PC industry needs YOUR help!
Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Sony, Apple, Lenovo, Toshiba and co. require stout - and well-heeled - lads and lasses to pop out and buy just over four million machines before the end of December 2012 and prevent world PC sales slipping year-on-year for the first time in more than a decade.
That is what’s going to happen otherwise, if a forecast from IHS iSuppli, a market watcher, is to be believed.
In 2011, some 352.83 million PCs shipped worldwide. This year, iSuppli reckons only 348.70 million will have left manufacturers’ factories. That’s a decline of 1.2 per cent. The market hasn’t experience a year-on-year fall since 2001.
Q3’s traditional back-to-school sales period proved to be something of a damp squib, sales wise, as has Intel’s new laptop sales drive, the Ultrabook. Windows 8 may yet drive demand, but since it’s not going on sale until near the end of this month, it really has only two months to get businesses and ordinary folk buying computers again.
And that assumed World+Dog isn’t left utterly baffled by an operating system with two separate UIs, of course.
The industry doesn’t appear confident of a turnaround. “Optimism has vanished and turned to doubt,” bemoaned iSuppli analyst Craig Stice, “and the industry is now training its sights on 2013 to deliver the hoped-for rebound.”
That’s predicated on punters wanting new PCs, and not tablets, of course. Slates may not suit Reg reading techies, of course, but for a lot of folk with fairly basic web browsing and messaging needs, they’re proving more that sufficient and more attractive than yet another big notebook, no matter how slim it is. ®
COMMENTS
To all the computer OEMs
If you want me to be your customer, here's my wish list :
- No more bloody glossy screens, it's impossible to work with and it's plain stupid
- Vertical screen resolution higher than 700 or 800 or, if you really want me to love you, please go back to 4:3 screens like in good old days. I've had enough of browsing the Internet on a narrow vertical band in the middle of my wide screens with huge unused areas on both sides.
- A minimum of at least 8MB of RAM or better.
- Decent hardware and software support for Linux. Don't need you to pre-install it, I know by now that Microsoft will not allow you do to that.
- Most important, don't charge me three times the price just for offering these basic features.
Why would I want to buy something from HP, Dell or Acer etc?
When:-
1) It will come with Windows 8 (Ugh) of the usually Home Version of Windows 7 which is naff all use to me.
2) The Laptop screens are generally pretty crappy 1366*768 unless I want to pay through the nose at which point.
3) I can build my own Workstation from parts that will :-
- be faster
- have more memory (32Gb Min for multipl VM's)
- Be quieter (nice large quiet fans, lots of sound proofing etc)
- Not run Windows but CentOS (no brainer)
But the article is not aimed at those of us who post in this forum now is it?
Being totally serious, they want 'Joe Public' to buy more stuff when their current 'stuff' does the job pretty well AND when 'Joe Public's' funds are being queezed right left and Centre.
They must be taking the same sort of stuff that Lancy boy was for all those years if you ask me.
The myth of PC displacement
The simple fact of the matter is that a PC from before the "post-PC era" is still quite adequate. It's also still maintainable. So you can upgrade RAM and storage and possibly even your video card. Even a cheap piece of crap PC from 5 years ago will still run circles around a tablet.
Everyone already has a PC.
You don't have to buy one this year because last year's model seems obsolete already.
I have displaced 2 PC purchases this year by buying really cheap video cards instead.
All in one machines of any sort quickly become doorstops.
WANTED!
Reasonable build quality;
Reasonable prices;
And an end to enforced OS choice.
