Micron: Those dratted PCs, dragging down our revenues

Declining PC sales took their toll on Micron's DRAM revenues, sending year-on-year growth into reverse for its fiscal 2015. Full-year revenues were $16.2bn, one per cent down on fy2014's $16.4bn. Net income of $2.9bn was five per cent lower than the $3bn recorded in fy2014. Revenues for the final quarter in fy 2015 of $3.6bn …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Intel's Skylake CPU and Windows 10 should help drive up PC memory demand."

Oh no it won't, have you had Gartner in again ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that by now it would be apparent to anyone not at Gartner that Windows 10 isn't going to sell new computers. If anything, less will be sold because past trends were based upon eventual software obsolescence driving new buys in addition to hardware failures. That's what I get for thinking again.

I'm still waiting for real world properties, costs, &c. on XPoint. I'm game to playing the where can I stick the new widget and what might I be able to do with it but without that, it's damn hard to play.

[N13L5]

"SSD market a bit of a blood bath..."

...say the guys looking to cause a massacre in 2016

[Mikel]

Intel's Skylake CPU and Windows 10 should help drive up PC memory demand.

A flock of flying swine might fly so high they come too close to the sun and rain barbecued pork on the streets of London. In fantasy land.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Intel's Skylake CPU and Windows 10 should help drive up PC memory demand.

Or for our US readers

The PC Market is going about as fast as Hurricane Joaquim. viz, nowhere fast (6mph)

If PC/Laptop makers were a bit imaginitive they might sell a few more units. There are far too many basically identical devices at the bottom of the market.

Then using SATA even with an SSD is dog slow compared to PCI-E drives. Why not take a leaf out of Apple's book and use them. A USP if I every saw one.

Oh, and stop selling devices less than 256GB capacity. There really is very little money to be made at the bottom of the market.

Then introduce affordable 2TB drives. You might actually sell a shed load and make lots of folding green ones.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Intel's Skylake CPU and Windows 10 should help drive up PC memory demand.

That is more likely than increased PC sales. I believe PC sales will be mostly driven by the two factors noted by another poster in the future: general obsolescence (hardware and software) and hardware failure. The PC market is a mature market that is heading towards its natural sales of mostly replacement kit. W10 and new processors are not going to increase sales and at best maybe provide a temporary plateau on the sales slide.

[ecofeco]

From bad to worse

The PC market has always been a tough one, but the one thing that made it profitable in the last 40 years was ever significant improvements in power and capability.

From barely running a spreadsheet with only numbered or lettered menus that were very limited, to animated graphical interfaces that let one use a spreadsheet like a database or will directly tie into a real database, PC's have come a very long way.

Now that the average PC can run a small business, play high resolution 3D games, watch or even make/edit high resolution video, access the Internet and everything on it, all at he same time and make 3D models, what more does the average person need?

Then there is the used market. When I can buy a factory refurbished PC that will do all of the above things for half the price of new, why would I buy new?

And last, but not least, operating systems. Windows has seriously made a huge mistake with 8 and 10. Linux is growing every year and is no longer hard to install, maintain and use. Besides some companies who make certain specialized productivity software that still has no Linux equivalent, Microsoft would already be dead.

It would seem to me that PC makers would be better off selling the virtues of Linux to move their product. The average person will never know the difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the stagnant wage growth for the middle class over the last 30(?) years. With the price of almost everything increasing, granted not computers, it's harder and harder to justify buying a shiny new when the old ones keep running especially with Linux being as good as it is now. I recently bought a T420 for $350 Canadian from local computer shoppe with a one year warranty and could have bought one for less on ebay.

[a_yank_lurker]

Also, most computers are not really pushed to their limits by users so new kit would not significantly improve the user experience unless the kit is very old or nearly dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

PC sales are going up!

Everybody I know wants to spend hundreds on a big computer box so it can run Win10 and suck up their money on a continuous basis.

OH wait nobody I know wants to do that.

Most are asking how to get their phone to do everything and they are tired of me pointing out it isn't a phone. It's a computer and like most computers you can call people with it but unlike a PC it is personal and travels with you.

[AJ MacLeod]

I blame the fact they completely botched the Crucial website a while back, making it unreadable and chronically slow (I'm not sure my having abandoned buying from them as a consequence is solely responsible for the downturn though!)

Oh - and the fact that their Quidco cashback tracking pretty much stopped working about the same time - that was a nice little extra in my pocket for a while.