Bad news: PC slump worse than feared. Good news: It's Friday

Sales of personal computers – fat workstations, clunky desktops and laptops not running Android or iOS – took a bigger dive as 2012 wound down than the box counters at IDC had expected. People are not necessarily shifting from PCs to smartphones and tablets, but these new devices continue to lengthen the time between PC …

[Anonymous Coward]

352 million PCs

352 million is a lot of PCs. Among my systems, I've a (almost) 7 year old Dell laptop running Windows 7 - still going strong (touch wood) and a good reminder why PC sales are rather unexciting. Perhaps the new detachable touch notebook/tablets will stimulate more replacements once pricing and battery life settle down a bit before the end of the year.

[AmigaMan]

Re: 352 million PCs

Exactly, i've got an 7 year old Dell xps, it was running a bit slow a few years ago so i slapped on Win 7 64bit and a touch more memory and its still adequate for my needs.

Device consumerism has migrated to phone/tablet arena where manufactures can sell you processing power that you just don't always need, but at least you will look cool on the train!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: 352 million PCs

Have you found that the 2.8Ghz CPU you had back then is still capable of viewing today's YouTube cat videos or will you have to upgrade to the new 3.2Ghz version?

[(AMPC) Anonymous and mostly paranoid coward]

Re: 352 million PCs

Recently bought four old dell T300s for about 200 bucks apiece on Ebay. .These boxen have E5 2.8 Ghz x64 procs and can host multiple virtual servers and desktops. They can be built up to use 8 TB of disk space and 24 GB of ram. I now have a cheap server farm which can be used for testing, real work or hosting virtual desktops for many of my aging client systems which have a network connection. Why buy a new PC?

In fact it's almost a waste of time and money to buy any new kit at all, unless I just want to look flash on the train (or get mugged). And the flood of trailing edge hardware on the gray market just keeps getting bigger. I might be tempted to buy a tablet or very cool smartphone, when they become even cheaper, otherwise forget it.

I suspect this trend will accelerate, PCs are just too last millennium

[Fihart]

Re: 352 million PCs

I'm with you on old Dell lappies. My secondhand and chunky 15 inch Latitudes and similar Inspiron have a max of P4 1.8 processors and could not handle Win 7, but are quite solid electrically. So easy to disassemble mechanically that cannibalising several into a couple of working ones was actually fun.

Not so true with newer Dells or any other slimmer models.

[asdf]

Cue the desperate MCSEs poo pooing tablets in 3-2-1. Oh well Windows 8 may be a Vista style flop but it does sound like Server 2012 will hit it out of the park. Sadly I don't think that will generate the revenue to cover what the artist former known as Metro is going to cost Microsoft in the long run. At least now that WPF is finally dying the death it deserves Microsoft might revisit modernizing MFC at least.

[Bob Vistakin]

Poor old Microsoft.

No one wants their phones.

No one wants their tablets.

No one wants their new OS.

Even burglars in their own HQ swerve their kit.

:-)

[Bob Vistakin]

Almost forgot - well, as did everyone else to be honest, Windows RT - that was quick, nice knowing you :-)

[Powerlord]

WinRT wasn't necessarily a bad idea. Or wouldn't have been a few years ago. Or a few hundred pounds cheaper. Now it's just too late and too expensive with no killer app to sway people to buy it instead of an iPad or Android.

[Ceiling Cat]

Not a MCSE, but . . .

I'm not a MCSE, but having owned a tablet (Gateway Tab TP A60 a.k.a. Acer Iconia 500) for just over a year, I can't see what all the fuss is about. Sure, it was a great distraction on my work commute, but since I no longer have to travel that far, it's been used mostly for email. It spends about 90% of its time on the (improvised) stand, plugged into the charger, since I couldn't find a dock for it.

What really annoyed me was the shortage of full-featured free apps. It seems to me that every time there's a feature I *need*, it is only available in the paid version. I know most apps are cheap, but so am I.

Beer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Workhorses

Since 1997 I used to have to do a substantial tech refresh for my many godchildren every couple of years. Nowadays they are content with the power of the ones they have had for several years. The same is true of my home PC and laptops. The important thing for us all is being able to run existing devices, games, or specialised applications.

XP works ok for most of us - although a few users were migrated successfully to W7 64bit (with an XP boot also available).

The more I hear of Windows 8 - the less I like the idea of TIFKAM, hardware restrictions, and no apparent gain for much inconvenience and trouble. There was too much aggravation when MS Office 2002/3 licences were invalidated by new hardware - and the users then hated the "ribbon" on Office 2007/2010.

[Tom from the States]

Tablets are front and center

We got a Nexus 7 for my wife. She likes its portability and it frees up our 3-year Dell laptop to be used for home work by the kids. In general, I like Dell equipment and I support it at work, but that's not what Michael Dell wanted to hear.

[jaycee331]

BYOD?

Am I the only one thinking that it's still way too early for BYOD to start blaming that as a significant factor?

[Al Jones]

Re: BYOD?

SShhhhhh!!!!

You don't want people to think that you're not cool, do you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: BYOD?

I agree. I always thought this just meant that companies let you hook up your own smart phone to their exchange server instead of forcing you to have a Blackberry.

Does anybody even know of any serious companies that let you (officially at least) use your own PC to do proper work?

[P. Lee]

Re: BYOD?

The only case I can think of for BYOD PC's is to take a VM image and keep it at home so you don't need to cart your laptop backwards and forwards to work each day.

That's normally done on the sly anyway.

[A Butler]

All hardware eventually fails and you ask anyone doing productive work what is their choice they will choose a laptop or PC (Windows, MAC, Linux: flavor of OS your choice) any day over a tablet.

The tablet is a secondary device used for messing around with while chilling on the couch, or commuting.

The PC market will pick up again when low priced touch and type laptops are available in abundance cheaply and that will happen this year. Windows 8 will be the route to this upgrade for most people.

I laugh when I read all those Windows doom mongers. Windows 8 is cheap stable and fast, metro takes a small bit of getting used to but nothing like the steep curve suggested by some people.

[Scott Broukell]

DIY Build policy

I've always built my own system choosing components that are at least one, two or even three or more years old. In that time prices have normally fallen to something I find acceptable and the revisions / bugs have also been ironed out. I still get an "Upgrade" feeling, without the "must have the latest" hankering. I couldn't care less if my kit is seen as below par with the very latest, I'm more than content with my choices. So I'll consider tinkering with W8 and tablets when the time comes thank you very much. I understand that the market would look very different if we all did this. I wonder how many other Reggers follow a similar strategy ? Got to go, the cob webs need sand blasting of my wallet again ;)

[Ole Juul]

Re: DIY Build policy

I've always built my own system choosing components . . . I understand that the market would look very different if we all did this.

I suspect we'll see prices go up as those of us who want discreet components become fewer and willing to pay for what will likely become speciality products. We've already seen a change in some markets that reflect this. I'm sure there are many examples, but Linksys discovered they could charge double for consumer routers that facilitated hacking. How long until we see motherboards with only one available slot?

Oh, motherboards? We haven't stocked those for years. I suggest you contact our industrial branch who do still sell those - in minimum lots of 1000.

[Scott Broukell]

Re: DIY Build policy

@Ole Juul - I suspect you may be correct, although, what with growing efforts to encourage younger generations to tinker with stuff like the Raspberry Pi etc and the economic climate where peeps might want to reduce costs with some DIY, the niche for those 'speciality products' may be fairly strong, if still small, compared to the mainstream.

It really all comes down to how much the markets can cram into the wide open beaks of the all consuming masses. It would appear that the lust for the newest 'shiny shiny' maybe waning as folk tire of such force feeding.

Perhaps we should all look harder at our habits of consumption for digital goodies, rare minerals and safe disposal methods, instead of just blindly ripping things out of their packaging, only to throw them away a year or so later in favour of the next must-have.

When I do have to retire a very old box that's still in working condition, it is either handed down to relatives or given to charities who recycle them to help less fortunate peeps experience computing. I am sure that I am not alone in this regard.

[Daniel B.]

Too much analysis, the main reason is obvious.

It's the Windows 8, stupid! Companies will have frozen *all* orders for new PC purchases as soon as the win7 kit ran out of stock. People hate TIFKA Metro probably even more than Ribbon when it came out. MS and manufacturers have actually shot themselves in the foot!

[Steve Knox]

Re: Too much analysis, the main reason is obvious.

Companies will have frozen *all* orders for new PC purchases as soon as the win7 kit ran out of stock.

Since the major PC vendors still happily ship Win7 boxes, I doubt it.

FAIL, indeed.

[pdxbrit]

Re: Too much analysis, the main reason is obvious.

I believe it's a bit more complex than that.

1) If you order a home edition as most end-users are likely to do, you're stuck with Windows 8. I just went to Dell's website (US, since that is where I live) and tried a sample order of an Inspiron 15 (just at random, it's a popular laptop). It comes with Windows 8, and there are no options to choose anything else. I'd consider Dell a pretty major vendor.

2) If you buy a machine with Win 8 Pro, you have downgrade rights to Windows 7 Professional or Windows Vista Business (see http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx). I still doubt the PC vendor will install these for you, but for a business with an IT dept, they're

likely to install their own image anyway.

So, no, most vendors will not ship Windows 7 installed any more, and depending on what you buy, you may or may not have the option to downgrade.

[P. Lee]

Re: Too much analysis, the main reason is obvious.

Worse, companies nearly always ditch the OEM license regardless of what it is and build from a standard image.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

I did and it was awful, so bad that I actually decided to replace the internals of the pc I was going to throw out and put an OEM version of Win 7 on it. To get to anything worth clicking on meant huge mouse movements all the time, like using a WII.

I don't understand why they keep changing everythng so much, you would have thought people would buy more of something that does not completely upset their computer usage. Why don't they just provide skins that make things feel familiar but still with all the improvements under the bonnet.

[Androgynous Cowherd]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

Or the option to boot into either gui by default during install (without editing the reg).

It's not difficult for ms to do

It's about choices. Moi? gimme a keyboard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

I boot my Windows machines once a month, after I apply the patch Tuesday updates. So my Windows 8 machine is in Desktop mode when I wake it up. I'm struggling to see how clicking on the Desktop icon once a month is that big a deal for some people. Why did Microsoft do it? Who cares!

[jason 7]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

I know amazing right? It's like you woke up one morning and everyone around you has had a stroke and can't remember how to use a computer or learn new things.

Most bizarre.

[Steve Knox]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

Why don't they just provide skins that make things feel familiar but still with all the improvements under the bonnet.

Because most of the improvements under the bonnet come from clearing out cruft related to the previous UI decisions.

[JEDIDIAH]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

> Because most of the improvements under the bonnet come from clearing out cruft related to the previous UI decisions.

That's just gibberish. What's underneath has nothing to do with the UI. You can still have the old UI with the allegedly better internals.

Your comment rates right up there with IE4 being inseparable from Windows.

[Tinker Tailor Soldier]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

Not so much gibbrerish actually. USER32 is right at the bottom of everything before Win8 and USER32 is pants. (E.g. window move requires an application to respond to a move event before the move happens, resulting in freezing).

That said, they was probably a hybrid they could have chosen which ran the risk of blowing some apps up (or, gasp, having them render incorrectly in some interesting cases) which kept old apps and new apps in one place and still allowed an evolution touch.

Pure is poor....

[JEDIDIAH]

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

> window move requires an application to respond to a move event before the move happens, resulting in freezing

...which they could refactor by using the BeOS "thread everything" approach or by using the X11 approach of having a separate window manager. Bad apps wet themselves but the rest of the system chugs happily along.

Although that's the PROGRAMMER's interface rather than the USER's interface.

So bringing that up is a big of a red herring.

That's like saying you can't build something like Cinnamon because you went from GNOME2 to GNOME3.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should build what people want

I'm in the market for a 17" laptop upgrade. I quite fancy something with an SSD and quick starting. But unfortunately no-one has a decent screen resolution compared to what I currently have, and I don't want to downgrade to 1080p. If it comes with Win8 it also ought to be a touchscreen. But no-one builds 17" laptops with touchscreens. I'll keep waiting...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Should build what people want

I was tempted by Lenovo's new ultrabook, right upto the point where it said 1376x768 display

2000 called they want their definition of 'ultra' back

[P. Lee]

Re: Should build what people want

+1

I want a fast quad i7, ssd + spinny high-capacity disk, big touchpad and high-res matt screen in a small light package.

and I want a little slider switch which says: "optimise for battery life" which slows down the cpu, turns off a couple of cores, lets the spinning disk sleep quickly and dims the screen a bit.

"But I still haven't found, what I'm looking for..."

[grabme]

Complete rubbish., I have tablets and they are good but no replacement for a Windows 7 or 8 PC. I have a Nexus 7 and its a wonderful product BUT given the choice I go for the laptop most of the time. Android is great, I'm fairly new to it BUT I can't help feeling its all novelty value, I view them as mobile communication tools rather than computers, they make a great remote control for my laptop! The only thing that would replace a Windows laptop or desktop is a Surface Pro device but they are way overpriced thanks to Microsoft's stupidity.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the problem Microsoft is facing.

Most of the people who are not 100% on Apple technologies already have a Windows PC and and Android or Apple tablet and/or smart phone. Now they might replace their desktop/laptop with a Win8 (or a Mac) but the tablet is not yet for renewal. And even if it would be, a lot of people would still choose IOS or Android if only for diversity reasons. All these scenarios show that Microsoft has to compete for consumers wallets and minds and that they can have only a part of the whole consumer market they used to have with PCs. Now a lot of marketing slogans Microsoft used to defeat Linux ascension can no longer be used. Familiar interface, application availability, user experience, learning curve and so on, at no longer convincing arguments. To add insult to injury, shackled hardware manufacturers have discovered the sweet taste of freedom (and higher margins too) selling Android devices. It might not be the best OS in the world but it lines the OEM pockets nicely and everybody is making a profit (Google, hardware manufacturers, service providers even app developers). Working with Microsoft would bring nothing but headache and the risk of becoming enslaved like they were when the PC was king.

[mraak]

Logically

Lots of people never wanted a laptop in the first place but they got one because there was no other device to use Facebook. Now that there is cheaper, lighter and fancier alternative, they got what they wanted. Computers are for working.

[Azzy]

Why is that an Asus laptop depicted falling in the image for this article?

Asus is one of the manufacturers whose sales are increasing (and with good reason - they've been producing products that are a real cut above their competition in terms of build quality and their IPS LCDs are beautiful, and they've been selling said better products at only a small price premium.

That should have been an Acer laptop falling, what with their 28% decline and all... Acer laptops are more fun to drop, too. They just kinda explode. The Asus zenbook depicted would probably just get a dent in the corner of the case.

[Tony W]

Go our way or go away

I knew Win8 isn't for me when I found the mail client won't do POP3. Yes you can install the legacy Essentials with its outdated desktop UI, after all POP3 is completely dead and we all have cloud based email, except a few privacy freaks and proper people who have MS Office with Outlook. Well my sister was suckered into buying a Win8 laptop without touchscreen, she can't afford MS Office and has a POP3 account. I found setting up her new machine a deeply frustrating experience, compared to her last one which ran Win ME (yes she is an early adopter) & was a piece of cake.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Re: Go our way or go away

I was talking to a friend about Win 8 on Christmas Eve. New PC, Christmas present for one of the boys...

He was spitting feathers about how crap Win 8 was, and how much time he'd wasted setting it up.

Then he asked me how to set uo his son's POP3 email. The one he had to use for school. The one that not even MS tech support - whom he'd spent an hour on the phone to - could get working.

'Ah,' I said. 'Well...'

The conversation did not improve after that.

[jason 7]

The thing is that......

.... a lot of folks bought XP machines. it was the only game in town for so long.

They held off and and then bought Windows 7 machines like crazy when it came out.

The fact that MS brought 8 out so soon is not going to alter things much. The big rush for now has passed.

It will hit again in about three years time.

No one that bought a Windows 7 PC or laptop in the past two years (who isnt an enthusiasts or has money to burn) is going to buy another Windows PC right now.

[Barry Rueger]

Don't need 'em

Around here we have one PC running XP - very happily. That will likely need to be replaced in the next year to handle some software that's on the horizon that I'm sure won't cut it on this box. (Sibelius).

My box has been on Linux for a few years, on a five year old Dell box, with Vista running in a VM when I do our bookkeeping. I'll probably replace this box too in the next year, for more storage space, RAM, and speed. But that's a "want to" upgrade, not a "need to."

Probably my first computer upgrade though will be my smartphone, which is where I do a LOT of e-mail, browsing, and other on-line stuff. And I can see adding a tablet for a lot of idle around the house stuff.

My laptop was given a way to one of the kids when I realized that I was only opening it up once or twice a month.

[Nuno trancoso]

Don't need 'em either...

Think main problem is that we already have too much as is. My E7400 is old news, and i have it running at stock 2.8. That's a real change since it's the first time i've run stock on any box since my 1998 Cel300A@450.

If i think "upgrade", the image in my mind is HD's+RAM. And for that i can buy parts, no need to shift boxes.

Besides, where i live you fork out an extra €100-150 for a "name box" built out of lesser parts than you'd get built in a mom'n'pop store...

That 1st tier builders also like to install every lame PoS software they think you "might" want and then having to spend hours cleaning that crap out is just another good reason NOT to buy their wares.

[Mikel]

W7 is W8

If you go to HP's website and choose "advanced PCs" you will see a broad selection of PCs engineered for both Windows 8 and Windows 7, licensed for Windows 8 Pro but with Windows 7 Pro on. It's hard to even find the ones with W8 on now.

http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CatalogCategoryID=2XAQ7EN5tHwAAAEuvqEV2RV3

This is no different from the Vista days when Microsoft bragged they sold millions of copies of Windows Vista for PCs that never ran it, nor ever could. Microsoft needs to declare victory even if they have to pre-sell W8 with downgrade rights to OEMs selling PCs pre-"downgraded" to W7, and deeply discount it to do so. They've sold "60 million licenses" - and now OEMs can put W7 on and Microsoft can sell it as a W8 license, and probably had to discount W8 licenses to get the sale. In the Vista days I pointed in a number of comments to the fact that HP workstations nominally came with Vista, but didn't even support the software - they came pre-downgraded to XP and Vista is not even supported on that hardware still today.

But even this isn't saving PC sales. We like our iPads and Android tablets. Yes, we do.

[gravly]

Re: W7 is W8

Sorry but many commenters here are quite wrong and I had to sign up to tell you so. I was recently shopping for 3 new laptops and on the dell australia website most of the best laptops and configurations were win 8 only. You could pay 179 AUD to upgrade to win8 pro and hope that a downgrade to win7 would be effective but this is work you would have to do yourself, as well as the expense, with no gaurauntees of hardware/driver success if support for win7.

I ended up with 3 lenovo ultra books. Their configurations had similar problems sometimes but there were definitely more windows 7 'home premium' options. It is poetic justice for me to see that dell has dropped the most market share. It serves them right for not using their purchasing leverage to stop the windows 8 fiasco prior to Christmas. I will never buy a windows 8 machine. Dell and Microsoft, lift your game!

[Rambler88]

"these new devices continue to lengthen the time between PC upgrades."

This is a good thing for the desktop PC. It will reduce the time consumers spend beta-testing new OSs. It will hopefully reduce the frequency of disasters like Vista and Win8. It will make PCs more usable for the real work they were designed for.

Perhaps someday the marketing geniuses in Redmond and Cupertino will receive the astonishing revelation that small mobiles on the one hand, and larger screen-and-keyboard kit on the other, are (drumroll) two different product classes, for two different uses, with two incommensurable markets. (Cue gasps from the media at the brilliance of this insight.) Desktop machines are (gasp) for work that can't be done on small mobes. (Cupertino may have a vague inkling of the two different markets bit, but at no time have they ever glimpsed the "work" part. The Mac's virtues have always been as a smooth interface for gaming and entertainment, and any other functionality was purely incidental, and forbidden if possible.)

Perhaps in 20 or 30 years *n*x will support non-IT "work" too. (Just joking. Wanted to see if you were still reading. If it ever does happen, the documentation will be written in Chinglish.)

[Andy Watt]

"has gotten more difficult"

YUK.

[Tim99]

My Favourite Little Spiel

Yay. Time for some unnecessary self-praise here. For the last couple of years I have been boring the crap out of everybody who expresses even a slight interest in computing by saying: -

"Most computers will have no keyboard, or will have no screen".

Most people will have an Android/iOS/similar thing that will talk to some *NIX thing.

[Skymonrie]

Moore's Law and ignorance

I believe we should blame Moore's Law, when the computing power available to us double's, it used to make a vast difference. I,e The upgrade from a 486 rated at 66MHz to a 586 at 133MHz was huge in terms of what we could actually do with the device. Many here have already stated their 6 year old computers work just fine, I support this view.

I run Arch Linux on a ULV Lenovo Thinkpad and it is blindingly quick; two VMs and all development environments open. It is pretty much impossible to notice the difference on my older (but much faster workstation) unless compiling programs. Why upgrade?

There has been a lot of controversy relating to the death of PC/Laptops in favour of tablets recently and I am a strong believer in the survival of the former. With that said though, my next purchase will probably be the upcoming Nexus tablet though. Why? Very simple.

When a tablet (hackable with support for *nix) comes with a resolution twice that of my laptop and twice the battery; it's a no brainer, 2560x1600 for pity sake! People say it all the time here; FOAD 1366x768. I can honestly respect all that device manafacturers do however, if they start complaining about sales they should pull their head out their ass and address this very simple issue. I would certainly change my next purchase option from a tablet back to a laptop if it allowed me to work remotely and comfortably as ranted about in this paragraph.

For the record of opinion on the matter, I already own a Galaxy Tab 7.7 and do use it to emulate *Nix whilst still remaining an android phone/tablet so, I do understand the difference between using a laptop for Linux and a tablet for Linux well.. I'd just love something that can be booted natively like the Mer/KDE combination.

[jason 7]

Re: Moore's Law and ignorance

It really was the advent of dual cores that ended the constant need for more CPU power for most.

With two CPUs under the hood we could then do at least two things without the machine grinding to a halt.

Game over.

[gravly]

smart

Heh - I take back my dig at people's comments. Actually most of the commenters here seem to have better smarts than the article writers who seem to have a weird right wing slant. Someone has suggested this is trolling/linkbait. Or is it keeping advertisers happy? Or is it sincere yet misguided opinions? I'm not referring particularly to this article - just an overall slant I noticed since adding elreg to my RSS.

[jason 7]

Re: smart

I'm getting a bit tired of the constant "It's Windows 8!!!! That's the reason....." articles.

Got nothing to do with that from what I see with my customers. They don't care what OS goes on the machine. They really don't.

The main reason is that the dual core PC or laptop that they bought in 2007/8/9/10 is still going strong.

The need for constant power upgrades is over. The OS only matters to Corporate/Enterprise refresh cycles. We all knew that 8, no matter what it was like, was never going to be the main corporate upgrade choice.

Thats partly why I reckon MS went with a more consumer approach with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary reason

...for a drop in PC sales is the worldwide econimic recession. Other portable devices certainly have had a negative impact on PC sales but those of means are still buying toys including electronics, cars, new homes, etc. Those who are unemployed and their number exceeds 100 Million people over the past five or so years, they ain't buying new PCs, electronic toys, cars, etc.

This economic recession is likely to run another 5+ years if the the folks in the U.S. gov don't figure out how to get their house in order. They spent trillions of dollars they don't have and wonder why it eventually catches up to them.

[danielbUK]

power savings?

Most older pcs do work fine for most stuff but i recently moved from a xp420 quad core q6600 to an ivy bridge xeon workstation with a 7750 gfx card and the main thing i have noticed is my electricity bill has come down quite alot almost to the point that within two years of use it will pay for itself. Maybe the retailers and manufacturers should start promoting this as well considering the ever increasing energy prices.

[Richard Cartledge]

To a great extent, general user needs have stagnated, and they don't wat to do THAT much more that they did 7 years ago, so a 5 year old compter can still watch youtube, type a letter, edit and print a photo, rough-edit a movie or surf the net just fine.

[tempemeaty]

To be or not to be....

I watch the PC sales suffering and everyone I know rejecting Windows 8. It's starting to look like the PC manufactures are committing Suicide By Microsoft. Are they choosing to go out of business rather than build a future with a new OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Things not going so well down Microsoft street...

Samsung have shelved plans for Windows RT tablets due to poor demand:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/01/12/samsung-nixes-plans-for-windows-rt-tablets-in-us-citing-modest-demand

[Anonymous Coward]

The same old story

Microsucks tries to tell people what they should want instead of giving them what they want. It's good to see them fail some more. Eventually they will lose their stranglehold over the PC industry and then better O/S's and software can emerge.

[AlexS]

Bad news

It's now Sunday.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bad news

Still time for a few pints so you can deal with Monday...

[Cyfaill]

lets get real

For those with savvy - a powerful Desktop Workstation with some form of Linux to do real work. build it yourself types. I chose aptosid Linux with 40,855 plus applications and programs to select from to make it all happen. And it *is* a power house system with an eight core AMD CPU and all 64bit end to end, 16 Gigs of low latency RAM, liquid cooled. Its a rolling release so up-times are variable but I chose when to upgrade and it is always up to date. Secure, powerful and fast is the name of the game.

For those on the go, either an oldish laptop with Win XP still running ( poor old thing can't get a rest ) or again some type of conversion to some Linux put on it... try Linux Mint, kind of turnkey, Yes it runs great if you have a worthy laptop. not as many choices as aptosid but then again it just works without a lot of knowledge from the user.

Mobile = Android ( Get over it, Linux Kernel Won. 75% global market currently ) Sorry but Apple is going down.

Reason... Android is distributed technologies over many supplying vendors.

Apple is just one, soon to be politically incorrect system.

Or an old Apple Notebook or Laptop or Workstation... if it works why not.

Notebooks can be resurrected with a Linux install. I have done many experiments just for fun... All with Linux installs and trials with live DVD tests... Open your eyes... Its a big world out there.... Chrome, Android, pure Linux... New super laptop... Figure it out because time waits for nobody.

Win 8 fails to impress - Microsoft is soft in the head and its age shows poorly.

I go into a store to look at the new systems and the sales people plead with me to do this and that to make it palatable and I ask why should it have to do this and that with a new system... does it suck or something... laughing as I walk out...

Company’s are not all that stupid unless they are Nokia running with their master - and real owner, Microsoft.

A new age is coming but it will not look like the current forced sales of systems that don't get the job done. Kind of looks like a modern Linux or even Unix like systems are the ones that survived... Windows will hang around for a time... but can you smell its old age yet. Like a relic of some distant past, I think it really is on life support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Why upgrade a PC these days? If someone could answer that question, maybe the sales would pick up again. Games are designed for 6 year old hardware (consoles) and smart phones / tablets are more convenient for most "general computing" tasks.

Most work machines don't need upgrading as they're still fast enough from whenever the last hardware refresh happened, so what's left to justify spending money on new machines? Writing formal letters??

Anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets be honest.

The reason Win8 is doing so badly is that most people don't want to have to buy a touchscreen monitor and Win8 has been sold as being touchscreen. I can't actually think of any reason why I'd want to move to Win8 apart from it's touchscreen friendliness.

Heck, I stuck with XP and completely avoided Vista ... only went Win7 because it came with a new laptop

So perhaps MS have made a serious marketing mistake, or maybe Win8 really has nothing else to offer the majority of people who don't have and don't want to buy a new TS monitor just yet.