Gartner says back-to-school PC sales failed. IDC says they worked Analyst outfits Gartner and IDC have reached opposing conclusions on the same set of events. Both chose Tuesday to release their quarterly count of PC sales for the year's third quarter. Gartner's principal analyst Mika Kitagawa proclaimed the quarter was a “very weak back-to-school sales season” and the firm reported a 3.6 …
Lack of variety.
I would quite like a small size laptop (that I could dual boot with Win (work rekated) & a Unix (non work)) that I could use commuting on public transport & easily chuck in rucksack afterwards (net book size)
Most of the small laptops are dismall laptops typically have dismal specs, laptops with good specs are all large screen size & too bulky for my needs.
Just seems to be very little choice in laptop market, most slavishly following a few "Niches" and if what you want (netbook size but good specs & not ludicrously overpriced in my case) does not fit a specific niche then tough.
"Just seems to be very little choice in laptop market, most slavishly following a few "Niches" "
No offence, but your desire is extremely niche, and the laptop market is very much mass marketed. Students want A4 sized laptops, and not really much smaller. Elitebooks come in small sizes, but probably come under the too expensive option.
The laptop and consumer desktop market is designed around price points, not features. So you have a ~200 low end machine, 4-500 mid spec, ~750 good spec, ~1000 for full swank. The two most expensive options come in big screen or small screen varieties.
Very few people are going to want the combination of mid spec and small screen. Same way that very few people need a serial port, or various other niche designs. Or as another poster was complaining about a few weeks back, a large screen with low spec.
Laptops are always going to be some amount of compromise. Accept that if you're not willing to compromise on your hardware needs, then you need to compromise on price. Oh, and if you're complaining about something being "ludicrously overpriced" it's best to state what kind of budget you have, and what you'd expect for it.
So let us know your budget, min spec and nice-to-haves and we'll see what we can come up with. :)
"your desire is extremely niche, and the laptop market is very much mass marketed. ... The laptop and consumer desktop market is designed around price points, not features."
Designed by whom? By marketing of course. Tell me again how marketing, with their deep understanding of customers' desires, have created these soar-away sales figures.
"Designed by whom? By marketing of course. "
Well yes. Designed to make sure they make a profit, designed to be able to get into shops. Bear in mind you only get a consumer device* in shops if it's gone past a huge amount of approvals, focus groups, etc etc. Since it's easier to repeat the previous success than try something new, you end up with everything looking like clones.
I should also point out that having a niche desire doesn't mean what you want is wrong. It's just a case that there isn't enough demand for similar machines to justify making a large production run to give economies of scale. Therefore if the product you want exists, it will be more expensive than the other options.
* with perhaps the exception of crowdfunding,
"Since it's easier to repeat the previous success than try something new, you end up with everything looking like clones."
You've just described the process which ensures that if there's no product today that meets a particular demand there won't be one tomorrow because it will be dubbed "niche", not because anyone knows it's niche but because, without an existing product, it's niche by definition.
The polite summary of this is that it's a self reinforcing feedback loop. The alternative is that marketing spends all its time looking up its own arse and finding the obvious.
That's why the "no demand" joke rings true with so many people.
"You're the 10th person to ask for that today. We don't stock it. No demand."
I take it you've never worked retail then :)
It's much more like:
"Certainly, here is our selection of souped up netbooks and dinky chromebooks"
"Hmm, these are not powerful enough, and the hard drives have numbers that make me cry"
"Alrighty, here is our selection of elitebooks"
"These are great, but waaay too expensive. I'd like the same thing only cheaper please"
"OK, here's a flipbook from Asus, it's kinda in the middle of these things"
"Keyboard is spongy, it's too expensive for it's specs, and Asus ran over my dog and stole my lover, so I never buy their kit"
etc etc etc
Almost always what someone wants can be had, just for a higher price than they are willing to pay. Laptops don't have a massive price difference between quality levels, a professional high end jobby (~1k) will be roughly twice the price of a mid level consumer one (450-500). Contrast that with power tools, where a professional model is typically 4-5 times the cost of a consumer model.
I'm also confused when people need to buy a laptop for work, and complain about the cost. If it's an essential tool, then it's a cost you factor into your fees, and assuming your accountant isn't an idiot, it should be a tax write off in some form or another. At the very least you should get the VAT (or local equivalent) back.
Back to the matter at hand, if any laptop manufacturer started using nice keyboards again (glares at Lenova) they'd have my business in a heartbeat. But touch typing is apparently another niche case, some laptop keyboards make me want to smash them after maybe a minute of typing. So I'm as fed up as everyone else is about the lack of real choice, and all I can do is vote with my wallet. Which for me is cheap, cheerful and disposable with about as much CPU/RAM as decent smartphone ;)
"I'm also confused when people need to buy a laptop for work, and complain about the cost. If it's an essential tool, then it's a cost you factor into your fees, and assuming your accountant isn't an idiot, it should be a tax write off in some form or another. At the very least you should get the VAT (or local equivalent) back."
I agree in principle although, in fact, for someone who isn't VAT registered, VAT is the one thing they won't get back.
But what the OP wanted was a netbook. That was a genuine product but it threatened MS because it was sold without Windows*. MS then made a cheap licence for Windows available with the stipulation that it wasn't powerful enough to challenge the regular laptops running full price Windows. This effectively stopped the products from being as effective as they might although, as I said, with Linux they were powerful enough.
There may also be an element of snobbery; "it's a chicklet keyboard". Of course it is at that size and price. So what? You can type on it.
*It's also possible that the market couldn't then, comprehend a computer that didn't have Windows. That's no longer the case.
I would quite like a small size laptop (that I could dual boot with Win (work rekated) & a Unix (non work)) that I could use commuting on public transport & easily chuck in rucksack afterwards (net book size)
14-inch laptops have screens that are too small for more than one working window, and 15.6-inches is way too damn wide for my desk and briefcase.
A 15-inch work laptop - not 15.6", not 15.4" - a 15-inch laptop is the sweet spot.
Personally, I've never been a fan of Gartner as I've found their stats differ too much from experience. IDC is usually closer than most.
"14-inch laptops have screens that are too small for more than one working window"
The netbook size is usually about 11". I have one running Linux. I use it for work in libraries or archives where I want something small for data gathering. I normally run text-based applications in a 80x25 window which leaves room to spare but then I did used to use an Osborne luggable as a terminal back in the day. If I wanted to use multiple full screen applications I'd simply use multiple workspaces. That comes naturally to a long-term Linux user and I understand Windows has caught up with that so it's not really a problem. As the OP said Unix he might not even be intending to use GUI - another trick that Unix/Linux users are used to is having several command line sessions running and flipping between them with Alt/F1, Alt/F2 etc. You're not going to use them for compute-intensive stuff but if you adapt to flipping between several single application workspaces or terminal sessions they're quite functional. Mine is running an Informix RDBMS to power the data gathering applications.
If you want a small laptop with reasonable specs (and, especially, a better than base level “half HD” screen), it sounds like you pretty much want a size 13 MacBook Pro (or the slightly smaller MacBook if you really want something a little more compact, but I find that an MBP is actually just the right size for a rucksack).
Yes, the prices are painful (I’m sure Apple could, if they wanted to, sell a somewhat less powerful MacBook at around the £600 mark and they would sell faster than they could make them, but they sadly seem to only want customers who have quite a lot more disposable income than many people do), but they are nice computers and you can get a near Full HD display mode from a Retina screen, if your eyes can handle it.
And if you do want or need to sully it with Windows, you can even do that too!
I have been very happy with my Asus chromebook Flip (C100PA) which I got new from the ebay Argos outlet for £199 when its RRP list price was £249 - sadly, I think it may have gone up in price since. It only has a 10 inch screen, but in compensation, it weighs in at 889 grams and as the screen is so small, the battery lasts 9 hours. It has a metal chassis (aluminium) and when I tripped carrying it and it went bouncing down the pavement for about 10 yards, it still worked perfectly afterwards. At the time it was the only chromebook to run Android apps. It has 4G RAM and a touchscreen.
Subsequently bought one for my daughter to go to Uni, and she loves it.
Urrrr. Same concepts, different numbers, different interpretations.
One has to look at stuff like this and wonder. These entities are supposed to provide the business types with some guidance on where things are going in the industry. Perhaps at least with "PC/laptop Sales" things are a bit wobbly right now? Maybe someone forgot to copy and paste a spreadsheet tab over?
OMG! they put a PASSWORD on one of the S3 data source pools?????
Like all statistics, lies, and damned lies, I take both these organizations with two shovels full of salt.
[deserves a topic heading]
The article said that. I say "_REALLY_???" Because I don't believe it.
Recently I was invited by Micro-shaft to engage in an on-line survey with respect to business-related computer usage and Win-10-nic features. There were several 'comment' areas in which I vented my spleen. I outlined, in detail, how they basically drove me, a long time customer, who USED to be a fan of Microsoft and Windows back in the 90's, AWAY from them, by things like the 2D FLATSO, adware, spyware, forced updates, "start thing", GWX, etc.. ( 'TLDR' and I don't remember it all, so just the summary.)
In any case, their "new,shiny" "business friendly features" aren't really helping business, from what I can see. But their marketing will SAY SO, and I think that trickled into the article.
I have a few legacy applications that require windows. If Micro-shaft continues circling the drain with Win-10-nic, I may be forced to fix WINE so that they'll all work. [some of them are multimedia applications, particularly Cakewalk, and that might take a bit of work, but if I can get XP to run on an old computer that has enough horsepower to do it, or get my W7 machine to work properly with respect to certain device drivers, I may not have to]
One of them must be wrong
I am not so sure that is necessarily an absolute.
But I'm distracted by trying to figure out, if past predictions have been right, whether there should be any PC market left for which sales numbers could reduce. I think we've heard talk of decline so often that we have reached the stage where most people just think "whatever".
Then come up with reasons why they weren't what they had predicted in the past. Since Gartner's figure showed yet another big drop while they predicted only a small drop, they had to come up with yet another excuse from their random excuse generator.
IDC's figures showed a very small drop (and therefore are probably wrong) so they could hardly claim component shortages were hurting the market, because that would have implied otherwise there would be been strong growth and their prediction of a slight drop in sales would be wrong.
If someone managed to swap Gartner's and IDC's figures without them knowing, their stories would have changed. Why anyone pays these idiots, or pays attention to them for anything except to make fun of them when they are wrong yet again, I have no idea.
Here's my (free of charge) prediction. PC sales will continue to drop at 3-5% YoY, despite what Gartner and IDC think. PC replacement cycles continue to lengthen, because what's the incentive for a typical person with a working circa 2009 PC to replace it? Plus, people use their smartphones for more and more of their day to day stuff like checking email, playing games, chatting etc. so the PC becomes less important or even unnecessary for more people every year.
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