Blighty's PC market fell to its knees in Q4

The UK PC market shrank by nearly one fifth in the Christmas quarter, suffering the worst decline in half a decade. PC shipments in Q4 slumped by 19.6 per cent to 2.95 million units, with every major vendor apart from Apple posting negative growth. "PC vendors vendors face a long, uphill struggle to regain the interest of …

[Anonymous Coward]

Slump or grow

Hmmmm, I'm confused.

Hard drives shortages caused part of the slump, yet apple machines that use hard drives saw a growth... I know there's a difference between percentages and actual numbers shipped. It strikes me as an easy explanation for PC manufacturers.

Don't vote me down, please explain what Im missing, I fighting off a terrible cold. If I were a horse I'd be shot!

[foxyshadis]

Every quarter

Every quarter has a pat answer for why they failed or succeeded; at the end of the quarter they just look at the numbers and pick the answer that matches. There's never any kind of attempt at deeper analysis with these kind of conference calls and reports - investors don't even want to hear them, they just want a quick simple answer that makes them feel better that the money will keep rolling in next quarter or that the challenges will be overcome right away.

Real insight is the job of the Register and Anandtech.

[EddieD]

Down, down, deeper and down..

I don't think domestic sales are ever going to return - almost no-one I know is even thinking of upgrading their current machine, citing their smartphone as being more than sufficient - it has a browser, they can watch youtube, they can do facebook, angry birds, and if necessary, connect it to the big screen to watch media on a large screen (a bit of a return to the 80s when we all commandeered the telly to "learn about computers" aka play games...)

Most businesses are going from 3 to 5 year replacement cycles - I have an eight year old machine I use at work that is still productive, so why change?

I think, and I'm notoriously incaccurate with futurology, that smartphones and consoles will converge further, and they're probably at the same stage of take off as PCs in the mid 90s - expect shipments of the these to grow almost inversely with the death of the desktop/laptop/netbook/ultrabook.

[DrStrangeLug]

Have we reached saturation?

Perhaps people have realized that they dont need a more powerful or a better user experience when all they do is turn it on and double click the browser.

When all your computing needs are prefixed with "http:" why would you need to upgrade before it breaks ?

[foxyshadis]

Certainly the case here

My Acer lappy486 is nearing 6 years old, with only one hard drive and memory upgrade in all that time (though I did put an engineering sample Merom in it when I bought it); still works great with the latest OSes, plays most games, and of course browses the web. The desktop is only half that age, but same general situation, it just plays movies and occasional games, no need for a 6-core behemoth or 16GB of memory. (Just all the terabytes I can afford.)

At work, I need actual computing power, but I can't justify the outlay at home anymore, not when tablets are much less expensive and fill the niche beautifully.

[EddieD]

ps...

If you get a chance, read "The Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner in '75 - not his best work, but he did predict network worms, the 'net and its social side - Facebook (or it's equivalent), and ubiquitous use of mobile phones to keep your online persona updated - and the paranoia theoretically unlimited access to data can engender.

A friend of mine in the 80s used chunks of the Shockwave Rider to annotate his PhD thesis "A pathology of Computer viruses", so it can't have been that bad :)

[Melanie Winiger]

My kids used to want their own PC. Now they have one it's:

"I want an iPad Daddy"

"I want an iPad Daddy"

"I want an iPad Daddy"

Well, that's one way to judge the PC Market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs a 44 tonne truck to drive down a country lane ?

Most tasks can be accomplished using a phone or tablet and just don't need a monster. Tablets are the way forward, if you need grunt then just VNC into a server.

[philbo]

"posting negative growth"??

<shudder>

[Sirius Lee]

Cost probably has something to do with it

Back in 2008 (Aug) I bought a Dell Vostro 1510 (dual core, 17" 1900x1440, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD) for £360. You can't even get the spec now and the closest is over £500. We've had a massive currency devaluation making imports more expensive but not double the price. So it seems there's some gouging going on and I don't want to play. Maybe others feel the same way. So that's domestic.

Also, my business has reduced it's purchase of kit because we now use so many more Amazon EC2 instances. Much better having Amazon look after hardware/OSs installs and maintenance than us. Maybe this type of behavior is fairly common and so reducing the need for hardware by businesses.

BTW I don't get foxyshadis's point about tablets. I bought an Iconia tablet last year (10.1", 1024x768, 1.2Ghz, Android 3.0). Everyone else was buy a tablet so the must be *something* useful to them right? No so far as our family can see. It's now used by my youngest to play games like Angry birds.

I hoped one use case would be the one suggested by the AC of connecting to a remote desktop. But that really only works if you have a keyboard and mouse (I've really tried to use a stylus). I bought a keyboard with integrated mouse but then I have to carry a heavy device or have it propped up so I can see the screen and a then plug-in keyboard (the on screen one is useless). How is this better than, say, a laptop given the laptop costs less!?!

[ph0b0s]

DYI market

This just covers buying PC's off the shelf, would have been interesting to see if the build your own PC market had also seen the same decrease or if it is the case people are moving away from the big names (Dell, HP, etc), to either build it themselves, or buy from companies that build it themselves.