PC not dead, Apple single-handedly propping up mobe market, says Gartner

PC shipments will continue sliding south, reckon Gartner’s mystic mages – but, like Monty Python’s Black Knight, they still refuse to lie down and die. Figures from everyone’s favourite analyst haus suggest that shipments of desktop computers will decline from 220 million worldwide in 2016 to 187 million units by 2019. …

[Anonymous Coward]

By 2019, 9 per cent of devices will be 5G-enabled by default

When the

'what on earth is 5G' and

'what benefits will it give me' and

'How much? You gotta be kidding'

questions remain largely unanswered let alone the reluctance of the networks to spend huge amounts of $$$ etc can I have some of what gartner is smoking please? I really would like to look at the world through rose tinted specs.

Well Doh! Of course Samsung is dominating the android market. They seem to be the only phone maker to some retailers, especially those who brand their mobile store with Samsung colours and logos.

People still pay money for this Gartner shit?

Oh well...

To summarise, everyone but Samsung and Apple are doomed to fail or at least experience downward sales.

[m0rt]

Re: By 2019, 9 per cent of devices will be 5G-enabled by default

Beat me to it.

But either way - Three should bite the bullet and rebrand themselves Nine. You know, for future proofing.

Who needs technical infrastructure when Marketing™?

[Anonymous Coward]

5G requires a lot of fiber* to be laid down...

.... so it's deployment will be limited until boadband catches up. Especially in countries which don't have and aren't planning a large fiber roll-out. Sure, some big cities will have it, but for many it won't be a strong selling point.

* 5G will use a large number of antennas and base stations, and they need to be connected at high speed.

[Christian Berger]

Actually not much of a problem

I mean the main problem about fibre rollout are the last few hundred metres. Getting fibre to some mast is rather trivial compared to negotiating a fibre rollout in some multi-tennant building.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Getting fibre to some mast is rather trivial"

With 5G, you need a lot of those must every few hundred meters - and where telephone cabinets are places may not be the right places for 5G base stations, and MIMO antennas. Still, you'll need at least something like FTTC.

Also, depending on the frequencies used, many buildings are not "transparent" enough. You may also need to ask a lot of permissions to install all those antennas, unless you use some public property or the like.

I you want to still allow 5G access along major roads and railroads connecting major cities, you'll need again a broadband infrastructure for the 5G deployment. Where do you really 5G most? Inside the office when you probably already have Ethernet and Wi-Fi, or when traveling on an high-speed train?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Getting fibre to some mast is rather trivial"

You may also need to ask a lot of permissions to install all those antennas, unless you use some public property or the like.

In most developed markets, street lighting columns provide the ideal mounting point - well correlated with population density, and with roads, already have a power supply. As the lighting networks are controlled by the local government bodies, permissions would be less of a problem that other locations. Even if you needed a custom-designed column, it can still have a luminaire fitted and replace an existing column, and with suitable design the comms gear could go inside a widened column base, avoiding the need for a new cabinet.

You've still got to put in the backhaul, but at least the rest of the job could be made easier. Then again, the chances of councils doing something like that in partnership with phone networks....

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: By 2019, 9 per cent of devices will be 5G-enabled by default

Samsung and Apple

And I think even they are going to suffer from dimishing returns. There is no USP for most new phones (other than maybe face login and I think that fad will end) and, while you'll always have the "oooh shiny!" market for both of them, there is already data that shows that the rate of handset replacement is falling fast.

Why spend £500-£1000 pounds on a new handset when the one you spent £350 on two years ago is good enough? Most people don't care about security updates or manufacturer end-of-support dates and so they'll hang onto the old phone until it expires or dies in a concrete-related incident.

So yes, there are still markets that can grow but most of them will be for mid and low-priced phiones and not the latest £1000 wonder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not rocket science

Who even needs a PC these days outside the office? Gaming is better on consoles, and other stuff is better and more secure on tablets/chromebooks.

Even in the workplace, most functions don't really need a PC, and even then, not necessarily Windows/Office.

[GruntyMcPugh]

Re: Not rocket science

"Gaming is better on consoles"

I'm not even going to downvote you, you console peasant.

[Dave 126]

Re: Not rocket science

He has a point though - thirty years ago a home PC wasn't essential for many people. The common tasks many people now put them to - writing letters, very light spreadsheet, internet browsing, managing photographs - can be done by a phone or a tablet with a keyboard.

[Anonymous Coward]

"can be done by a phone or a tablet with a keyboard."

Still, tablets sales are no healthier than PCs. Only mobes sells, simply because many people replace them within 1-2 years, just because they need a newer model to show off (and because older model looks to be artificially slowed down as well....). Both tablets and PCs have now far longer life spans for simpler tasks. Only true power users may need to replace them before five years.

Some are also forced by the lack of security updates for older models. Probably Meltdown and Spectre will trigger a PC sales boost, as soon fixed chips become available. Hope also the cryptocurrencies madness ends, and some components prices get lower again, especially GPUs....

I wonder if mining-specific hardware is counted as PCs or not.

[Korev]

Re: "can be done by a phone or a tablet with a keyboard."

Probably Meltdown and Spectre will trigger a PC sales boost, as soon fixed chips become available

I was wondering why this wasn't mentioned in the article. I for one will only upgrade when hardware-based solutions are available (assuming my four year old PC doesn't die first).

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFY

Probably Meltdown and Spectre will trigger a PC sales boost, as soon fixed chips become available

Probably Meltdown and Spectre will cause business PC and server sales to plummet over the coming 12 months, while buyers defer as many hardware acquisitions as possible until fixed chips are available.

Meanwhile, home PC sales may boom, as manufacturers sell the faulty chips in their consumer products at discounted prices, in order to shift them.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: "can be done by a phone or a tablet with a keyboard."

Probably Meltdown and Spectre will trigger a PC sales boost, as soon fixed chips become available. Hard to see this being more than a rounding error: if the problem is significant then the manufacturers could be obliged to do a recall; most people won't really notice because for years they've been working on overspecc'd machines.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not rocket science

I'm completely on board with other computing platforms and you'll have to pry my iPad from my cold, dead hands, but there's still nothing that quite compares to a PC for productivity, as far as I'm concerned.

Keyboard, mouse, monitor - still the best way to get things done, at least for me.

[Hans 1]

Re: Not rocket science

Keyboard, mouse, monitor - still the best way to get things done, at least for me.

My ancient Blackberry Z30 can do that, OTG and microHDMI, all you need is a powered USB hub and screen that takes DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort and appropriate cable or an additional adapter for HDMI->VGA conversion (I have one of those, and it sucks, don't need it for the Z30, though).

[Hans 1]

Re: Not rocket science

My ancient Blackberry Z30

At the time of this writing, 8 comment@rds have not used a blackberry 10 device.

[skalamanga]

Re: Not rocket science

I tried but I can't get the solidworks installer to work

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Re: Not rocket science

Keyboard, mouse, monitor - still the best way to get things done, at least for me

The one factor you don't mention is processing power. Yes, phones and tablets are getting more powerful, and there seems to be an app for everything, but some tasks need the sort of horsepower that only a "proper" computer can provide.

For example, editing photos, audio or video. The sort of Apps for these tasks aren't up to full-fat use. I've tried plenty of photo editing apps on my phone/tablet, but nothing comes close to Photoshop (or equivalent) running on a PC/Mac. Pro image editing means working with multiple layers, and there simply isn't enough oompf on a mobile device for that sort of work. Ditto, tasks like audio or video editing where you're working with multiple tracks, etc.

[Mike Moyle]

Re: Not rocket science

"For example, editing photos, audio or video. The sort of Apps for these tasks aren't up to full-fat use. I've tried plenty of photo editing apps on my phone/tablet, but nothing comes close to Photoshop (or equivalent) running on a PC/Mac. Pro image editing means working with multiple layers, and there simply isn't enough oompf on a mobile device for that sort of work."

If you're on an iPad, you might want to look into Affinity Photo by Serif software ( https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ipad/ ). They've done (always IMO) a damned good job of porting their desktop version to iOS. Layers, PSD support, good typography controls, and a lot more -- I'm impressed. (I'm currently evaluating their software at work, to see if we can drop our Adobe subscription. Based on what I've seen so far, I've bought copies for my home desktop and my 'Pad.)

[DrBed]

Re: Not rocket science

> If you're on an iPad, you might want to look into Affinity Photo

...and for vectors Affinity Designer + Inkscape instead Illustrator - still for desktop only (Mac, Windows), but there are other mobile solutions:

If you have powerfull Chromebook or Android tablet, try GIMP & Inkscape (native port). GIMP is not so inferior to PS, but also has specific advantages (beside, it's free).

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gimp.inkscape

Or, for simpler (but pro) tasks, Autodesk's Pixlr (web app) could be sufficient (layers, .psd import/export etc)

Speaking of web apps, vector tools becomes quite useful.

Gravit designer is fresh breeze, and beside browser version, there are "native" ones (could be used offline) for: macOS, Windows, Linux, ChromeOs (iPad, Android "soon").

Vectr & Janvas should be mentioned too (as quality vector web apps).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not rocket science

Dare I say it. What you might want to look at is screen size, if you are thinking of serious image editing.

I think that excuses small laptops, tablets and most other mobile devices.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Not rocket science

he one factor you don't mention is processing power.…For example, editing photos, audio or video.

Phones can encode fullHD (and higher) in realtime. The GPUs on a lot of phones make those on a lot of laptops look positively wimpy and are more than suited for video and photo work, assuming the software is able to take advantage of the hardware.

The I-Pad Pro is definitely beefy enough for a lot of things, which is what Apple is pushing it for. But, what you don't always have on a tablet is enough RAM for everything you want to do, and IO is generally shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

"assuming the software is able to take advantage of the hardware"

The issues with phones and tablets it's exactly the software - which is not designed for heavy complex task. But the hardware itself is limited by being run by small batteries. Try to grade and encode 90/120min of RAW video on a tablet - if the software allows for it, and if you have enough storage.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: "assuming the software is able to take advantage of the hardware"

Try to grade and encode 90/120min of RAW video on a tablet - if the software allows for it, and if you have enough storage.

IO will be the killer there but I can see the day when people do exactly that. USB 3 should be able to provide sufficient throughput. Course, the setup wouldn't really be that much different to an existing laptop-based solution. But that's the point.

But you can probably already shoot and edit 90 min of HD video on a mobile device. For editing you'll probably want a larger screen so a tablet makes sense but a phone would be able to do the encoding and decoding, probably need a power pack or better still electric connection.

[DrBed]

Re: Not rocket science

> Ditto, tasks like audio or video editing where you're working with multiple tracks, etc.

Gorrilaz made whole album at iPad. Just sayin'

btw, last wek I saw a guy with Acer 15,6" Chromebook, working seriously with Autocad Mobile. He must be delusional.

Mobiler devices are not replacement for desktop PC, but add-on. For now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not rocket science

Pro image editing means working with multiple layers, and there simply isn't enough oompf on a mobile device for that sort of work.

You've obviously not seen Affinity Photo on the iPad then. Unlimited layers, layer groups, adjustment layers, live filter layers and masks.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/ipad/

Plus, a whole load more professional grade photo editing tools...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not rocket science

yep speak to my wife! she works for a large pharma and they are going to get rid of her laptop and replace it with an iPAD, great but half the stuff she needs to do can't be done on said iPAD. And she spends a lot of time on her laptop. I can see all the RSI claims flooding in! How about some DSE assessments

Horses for courses! Tablets great for a bit of browsing and email, shite for doing proper work. I was hoping that tablets were going the same way as BYOD, something that was all over the news a few years back until people realised what a bleedy shite idea it is!

[imanidiot]

Re: Not rocket science

Tablets ARE going the way of BYOD, it's just that manglement types in big corporation are a bit "300 baud" on the uptake (on a good day). So by now they are wondering if they shouldn't maybe give this whole tablet malarkey a try

[Dave 126]

Re: Not rocket science

I said things CAN be done on phones and tablets - I did not say that they offered an optimal experience for all tasks. A Swiss Army Knife isn't the easiest way to open a tin of beans but it will do it and you'll still get your dinner.

I was outlining what Joe Public might use a home PC for. Remember that the context of this article is PC sales, so it's moot to only talk about what professionals and enthusiasts use PCs for.

If someone once mainly used their PC to transfer photos from their camera to backup media, what happens when their phone's camera is just fine for family snaps? Exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

" it's moot to only talk about what professionals and enthusiasts use PCs for."

It's also wrong to infer that PC sales declines just because people don't use PCs any longer, but tablets or phones only - and not, for example, that PC sales reached saturation and replacement cycles got longer (especially since SSDs gave a big speed boost to machine that were only I/O bound).

Even tablets reached saturation soon, because there were too little improvements but going the Surface Pro way (actually, small laptops). What Apple had to to with the iPad Pro.

They are different situations, that needs to be addressed in different ways. Which should also be Garter job, not only unit sales - but probably the other data have a price (and nobody knows if they're right as well).

I would like to know, for example, how monitors sales are going, and GPUs. It could tell if users are actually replacing and improving just some pieces (i.e.4K monitors and maybe a heftier GPU to run it) or not.

[Mark 65]

Re: " it's moot to only talk about what professionals and enthusiasts use PCs for."

and not, for example, that PC sales reached saturation and replacement cycles got longer (especially since SSDs gave a big speed boost to machine that were only I/O bound).

^^^ this ^^^

I have a 2010 era iMac (2.93GHz i7) that I fitted an internal SSD to as the internal drives are a PITA and it's pot luck which manufacturer you get - I lucked out and got a Seagate which naturally shat itself. That machine is still good for whatever I need to do computationally over 7 years later.

I built a replacement and the end of 2017 for 2 reasons...

1. Tax deductions - may as well have something for the money as it'll be leaving the bank account one way or another.

2. NVMe drive and USB 3 as well as the ability to stuff it full of drives and RAM and easily replace any parts that fail.

3. Heat dissipation when under heavy load. iMacs aren't great when under stress in a hot climate.

[Dinsdale247]

Re: Not rocket science

Couldn't have said it better.

My mother is on a fancy new Android, my wife is on an iPhone, my kids have iThings. Funny that everyone wants a my Windows laptop because they can't really do much of anything except watch videos and surf (baring any web form, advanced search, or viewing half the sites on the Internet that don't render).

I suppose it's my fault. I ditched GNU/Linux and FreeBSD on bare metal and just run a Windows laptop with VMs for the "toys". Far more productive.

At least the Surface is an actual Windows workstation. iPads. Sheesh.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Not rocket science

"Keyboard, mouse, monitor - still the best way to get things done, at least for me."

Ack. and the 10+ year old desktops/notebooks work JUST FINE, and don't have Win-10-nic on them...

[actually, most of mine have either FreeBSD or Linux on them]

The biggest problem with performance on old boxen i really "the software". I've been working on an X11 toolkit for several YEARS now, but I'm getting close to making something that could be a REAL product that uses it. When I get it working well enough, I think I'll wrap a UI around webkit and make a competing web browser. In any case, I originally added the splash screen because startup is "too fast" and i was originally like "what? oh, it's running!". Opening >50 files (several thousand lines each, for at least half of them) and displaying a scrolling-tabbed window with all 50 documents, took about 1 second. Yes, that's 1 second. I even did a video.

And I have to wonder, WHY do "all of those other applications" have to take FOR-EV-AR to load up?

OK in between gigs I have time to work on it, and maybe I can finish enough to make it 'alpha' instead of 'pre-alpha'. Just did font anti-aliasing, and it looks a lot better, now. Yeah in X11 you have to do it the hard way.

So, my point: If it weren't or CRAPware (instead of SOFTware) taking 10's of seconds JUST to load the bozillian shared components and dynamic libraries and runtime-bullcrap, we wouldn't NEED 3+Ghz machines for most of what we do.

And GTK-applications (particularly those that use cairo and bonobo) are NO exceptions to this. It's NOT just Windows, UWP, and/or C-pound and '.Not' doing this...

And all that being said, IF our existing machines are "good enough", we don't upgrade them, so they don't show up as "new machine sales", and so a bunch of CLUELESS CRYSTAL BALL GAZERS just ASSUME that it means "the end of 'The Desktop'" which we ALL know is completely WRONG. Right?

[Christian Berger]

Again, in the past several markets have converged on the PC

Today people do things they used to have seperate devices for on a PC. Where you previously had some dedicated word processing system, some games console, a VCR and an actual computer, you now have the PC as a more-or-less universal device. That is mostly because a decent PC can be had for less than the price of a good display typewriter, or a PC running Linux or some BSD is just as good as an old unixoid workstation, but at a fraction of the cost. Same goes with games consoles. You can now play computer versions of all the popular video games like Pong.

However now tablets and mobile phones undercut the price of PCs. For consumers who just want to have some "Internet Terminal" those are just as useful. So naturally some of the old markets are going to move away from PCs.

[Wensleydale Cheese]

Re: Again, in the past several markets have converged on the PC

"However now tablets and mobile phones undercut the price of PCs. For consumers who just want to have some "Internet Terminal" those are just as useful. So naturally some of the old markets are going to move away from PCs."

When I was househunting around the turn of the century I saw of lot of PCs stuck in the corners of living rooms or bedrooms, totally at odds with the rest of the usually tasteful furnishings.

Someone who just needs the ability to do internet bill paying and the occasional letter or spreadsheet really doesn't want some great ugly thing in the corner of a room.

[Richard Jones 1]

Re: Not rocket science

Well I am not sure how I would carry a 23 inch screen mobile about and the necessary eye to screen distance might be an issue. I might be only person in the world who finds their home PC and server set up completes almost 99% of their needs with the odd percent given over to phone calls and texts. Sadly the mobile is truly crap for these while I am at home, where a wired phone is the only reliable option. While mobile texts struggle through, voice is useless, baked bean tins and string are better. quality Most of the time when I am out I am driving, so game playing is frowned on, so is trying to do any accounting, letter writing, etc.

[Baldrickk]

Re: "Gaming is better on consoles"

And here I am having just discovered Rags' delightful YouTube channel.

Funny how these things coincide.

A few of his arguments are a bit nebulous but I can't say he's actually wrong about anything I've heard him say so far.

I'm personally of the opinion that people can choose what they want. I prefer PC, having gone from PC, through four different consoles, and then come back, but if you personally prefer something else then that's up to you.

[AlbertH]

Can't do most of my work on a Tablet...

I'd love to be able to get rid of my large computer boxes in my office / study and in the loft. They're large, expensive, fairly noisy and consume quite a lot of power, but they're indispensable. I can't write firmware code on a tablet. I could (just about) get away with a laptop or two, but their reliability and price against performance statistics are woeful - even at the very top of the market.

Trivial stuff - answering emails, a bit of web browsing or listening to music - can be done on a tablet, but pretty much everything else requires bigger hardware.

I suggest that many professional computer users are in the same situation at the moment. The casual domestic user can probably get away with using just a tablet (my wife mostly does), but business users are still stuck with the large, power-hungry machines for a while yet!

[Korev]

Re: Can't do most of my work on a Tablet...

A current iPad Pro has 4GB of RAM and either three or six cores (depending on how you measure it); for a huge number of people that's enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Trivial stuff"

Exactly. As soon as stuff is no longer trivial, a tablet/phone becomes cumbersome. It's not just professional users, but many domestic users who has a hobby or any other activity which can't be easily managed on a tablet or phone.

My main hobby is photography, and I can't really think of managing, processing and printing my photos from a phone or even a tablet. Too small screens, lack of proper applications, very basic printing support Storage requires an external disk or NAS anyway, for several terabytes of data.

I also have many medical, legal and financial records/documents which would be hard to manage on a phone or tablet, even using cloud storage - without clear SLA for important stuff, I don't trust any of those consumer services much. Especially when the cloud storage is strongly tied to the make/OS of the device/application used. Most of them plainly say that if data are lost there's little you can do.

A friend of mine curates his model steam railroad club, and the videos they take, edit and publish. Another is building his drones. He uses the PC for loading firmware, etc to the board, and also a simulator to get proficient with the controls and visor. Another one helps him because he got a 3D printer, he's always been a DIY guy. There's also the one who helps the local volunteers ambulance service. My sister does historical researches in her free time, and needs something that can show several documents at once, something very difficult to do with a single (or at most two) window systems.

All of them aren't use their home PC professionally, just for fun, or volunteer social services.

Whoever believe people at home just become Facebook drones or TV watchers, should ask themselves why....

[Korev]

Re: "Trivial stuff"

My main hobby is photography, and I can't really think of managing, processing and printing my photos from a phone or even a tablet. Too small screens, lack of proper applications

Adobe Lightroom is surprisingly useful and fast on an iPad. You can do 95%+ of what you need on it. They just need to fix the workflow* bit so you don't end up with duplicated photos or having to manually delete photos off the tablet.

*I keep all my photos on a NAS, so haven't played with their newish creative cloud storage yet, this may have improved things dramatically.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lightroom is surprisingly useful [...] on an iPad. You can do 95%+ of what you need on it."

If all you process are your snapshots, sure. Otherwise, it's just bullshit.

You can't color calibrate the iPad display (and it may not show all the colors a wide gamut monitor can) The screen is too small, especially for comparing two photos (see the new "reference view" function). Image zoom is limited.

LR mobile pre-CC for a while even didn't have sharpening tools (!!!!), later added very basic ones (sharpness/noise only). Sharpening is one of the most important steps in digital photography, especially when you process RAW files which weren't processed by the camera at all.

But the iPad Pro, you can't use a proper per for local adjustments. Plugins won't be available, nor you can make round trips to Photoshop or tools like Helicon Focus (focus stacking). No panoramic images, AFAIK (I use Hugin). No virtual copies (very useful for different processing, i.e B/W, and of course, soft proofing for printing), and very limited export formats.

The collection feature in LR mobile has a fraction of the capabilities of a LR catalog (when you have an archive of 30+ years of photos, scanned or digital, it matters). You can't fully tag and add IPTC data, nor you can apply presets on import.

Nor you can print (I do print my photos up to A3+ myself, and even larger one using a print shop). If the photos aren't processed correctly, any defect will be clearly visible at those sizes.

Actually, the new Lightroom CC sends all your photo automatically to the cloud (you may have a partial or full copy locally - but not on NAS, unless you link it as a subdirectory of your main drive).

So, sure, if what you use and need is 25% of the Lightroom features, the mobile version will cover 95% of your needs. Unluckily, if you use 95% of the Lightroom features, the mobile app will cover 25% of your needs only...

[Dinsdale247]

Re: Can't do most of my work on a Tablet...

It's really a thermal thing. While the processors have become cooler due to die shrinks, the laptops themselves have also become thinner/smaller. There is just no way that a laptop can compete with a tower for thermal window and that will forever keep me on a desktop.

Speed kills, but will ultimately save the desktop market for many years to come.

[onefang]

Re: Can't do most of my work on a Tablet...

"I can't write firmware code on a tablet."

I've done coding on a phone, several times. The only reason I can't write firmware on a tablet is coz I don't own a tablet, otherwise it should be entirely possible. For the most recent bit of firmware I have written (a USB keyboard, written in assembler, for a PIC chip), I used all the tools that I have had installed on my old smart phone. I haven't gotten around to installing them on my new phone yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Love Gartner

This from just a few months ago.

Feel free to compare to this months made up predictions, based on bugger all.

https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3816763

[Doctor Syntax]

Still hoping for a journo rehashing a Gartner press release to dig out an old one by way of comparison and see how that turned out.

Still waiting.

[Korev]

You'd expect the consultancies to make a point of saying how good their previous predictions were in their marketing if they were as good as they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

See my one above from 3 months before.

[Orwell]

Usable business PCs

Because the business PC market is holding up, Is it not about time that a laptop with usable screen - not widescreen - was reintroduced? And that applies to desktop monitors as well!

Some of us want to get work done, not watch widescreen video content!

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Usable business PCs

What is this persistent nonsense that a wide screen is a problem. If you only want to use 2/3rds of your screen to work on, just use 2/3rds. If the rest annoys you, stick a piece of paper over it. Personally I need a wide screen to work on.

Watching videos? The TV's better for that with less scratchy sound.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: Usable business PCs

Because you get no more pixels on your 16:9 screen that you had on an old 4:3 - they're just arranged differently. 10 years ago, the default "good" screen was 1600x1200. Today, that's 1920x1080. So, 120 less pixels vertically. Until the very recent crop of "4K" screens, more than 1080 vertical pixels was stupidly expensive.

The issue of vertical resolution has been made more acute by the current fashion for massive toolbars ("ribbon"), eating into vertical document space.

[Baldrickk]

Re: Usable business PCs

They can take my 16:10 (1920x1200) monitors from my cold dead hands.

It's a shame that form factor has pretty much died out, but I managed to grab a few before they were chucked out from a recent office move.

They are big enough for two 'sheets' in a pdf to be displayed side by side at 1:1 resolution, and are nice and wide in portrait too.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Usable business PCs

"Because you get no more pixels on your 16:9 screen that you had on an old 4:3 - they're just arranged differently."

So what you want is more pixels. Why not simply say that? If you look at the post I was replying to it was specifically about laptops. A laptop screen has a particular property - its dimensions can't exceed those of the laptop base - at least it would look odd if it did.

Laptop bases tend to be very much wider than long on account the need to accommodate the keyboard. A 16:9 ratio screen is a close fit to the typical laptop. A bigger 4:3 screen means making it narrower without increasing the height unless the entire laptop is made more massive and hence heavier. Can you imagine that happening? A laptop like that would just result in cries of "Too big, too heavy".

So if you want more pixels (and I'd join you in that) just increase the number on the biggest screen that will fit the laptop but don't shrink the screen because of some aspect ratio fetish.

[Mage]

Re: Usable business PCs

Except in 2003, the 4:3 screens were 1200 lines high. Serious money to get more than 1080 lines now on a laptop or monitor and it's heavier as you need about 17" diagonal for 16:9.

Also desktop monitors that could rotate 90 deg was a thing over 10 years ago. Not "wide" enough if 9:16

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Usable business PCs

"Except in 2003, the 4:3 screens were 1200 lines high. Serious money to get more than 1080 lines now on a laptop or monitor"

Yes, this is the real complaint, shrinking pixel density.

"you need about 17" diagonal for 16:9"

That's what I use on this laptop. Why should I settle for less to please the aspect ratio fetishists?

[CRConrad]

The problem isn't that it's too wide...

...for its height, it's that it's too low for its width.

But you knew that, so go stand in the corner and be ashamed of yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Usable business PCs

The problem is getting the hardware needs past accountants and managers. They "know" that widescreen monitors are waayyy cooler than 4:3 ones. In the same way they "know" that iPads are much more fun than Android

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Usable business PCs

"The problem is getting the hardware needs past accountants"

Accountants should be the easiest to persuade about wide screens. More columns on spreadsheets.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Usable business PCs

Dell Ultrasharp range have some that are not widescreen. Unfortunately they are almost double the price of a bog standard widescreen.

[skalamanga]

Re: Usable business PCs

I was waiting for a 21:9 laptop, with a hexadecimal numpad and a trackpad next to that.

[Al-Noor Ramji]

its always worth having a read of what Gartner was saying in 1999 about the y2k "bug"...

they were so spectacularly off the mark is amazing they have the nerve to show their faces in public again

and thats far from the only time they got it wrong

[Tigra 07]

It's not a crash...Tis but a scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gartner used to employ my brother in law so they must be crap.

[0laf]

Do they only count complete systems as "PC sales"?

i.e I've just spent the best part of a grand on components to rebuild my PC.

Is that a PC sale?

[Andy Nugent]

isn't this flattening sales completely to be expected as the tech matures and the incremental increases become less pronounced. I'm currently working on a 3 year old laptop (Intel i7 4th gen, 16GB RAM, SSD, GeForce 850, blah, blah). The speed increase on a new one is so minor that it's not worth considering (to me). 20 years ago the difference between a 3 year old PC and a new one was huge. Would the same not be happening with mobiles by now had the manufacturers not built in obsolescence with fixed batteries (plus the fact you're more likely to drop/break a mobile than a laptop)?

[Colin Critch]

Hardware lasts

I agree. I am still using a 2009 era PC ( i7 8 logical cores, 24GB of RAM 60GB SSD and 3TB Disk and a GTX 750 TI) and a 28 inch screen. It still gets the job done! No plans to upgrade.

[Baldrickk]

Re: Hardware lasts

That 750 is a lot newer than 2009.

In 2008 my 9600GT was new. I bought a GTX 570 in 2011, so it's newer than that too.

Your point is still valid though.

[Boothy]

Re: Hardware lasts

My last major rebuild of my home PC was back in 2012. Used for work and gaming.

Core i7-3770K running originally at stock 3.5GHz (quad core) with a large air cooler/fan.

I added a liquid cooler to the CPU (one of those sealed unit, actually easier to fit than a large air cooler!) about 4 years ago, mainly for noise reduction, but it lets the i7 run much cooler on idle, or up to 4.25GHz under load, without issue.

It still benchmarks reasonably well, even compared to much newer i7 generations, so currently I see no reason to upgrade.

This is now the longest I've ever had a PC, I'd always replace every 2 or 3 years before this, but there is just no point currently, not for me anyway.

[hellwig]

Re: Hardware lasts

I ran an overclocked AMD Athlon x2 dual-core between 2008 and 2014. None of the games I was buying required more processing (multi-core support wasn't really catching on).

In 2014 I rebuilt with an 8-core CPU AMD-FX CPU. Bought an 8GB GPU in 2016.

I figure I might need to upgrade my whole computer again sometime in 2020.

[imanidiot]

Another reason private PC sales are flatlining

Cost. RAM prices have just about doubled over the last 2 years. Graphics card prices have almost tripled and high end cards are hard to even get because crypto-currency miners are buying them all in bulk before they even reach the consumer distributors.

I specced a high end of mid-range machine 2 years ago for roughly 1200 euros, including all the bells and whistles. Decided I had better things to spend my money on back then. Did the same yesterday. A clean system with comparable spec nowadays blows past 2000 euros before I even start adding in peripherals like a printer and such. And most of that is in the graphics card and RAM.

I'll have to bite the bullet some time in the future. My single core Athlon 64 is starting to wheeze a bit. As are the pATA drives. Not a bad run for a system I bought roughly 12 years ago though.

[Colin Critch]

Re: Another reason private PC sales are flatlining

Crypto-asset miners have got a lot to answer for, including wasting power and putting up hardware prices.

I know in the old days it was cheaper to put together a box with a mother-board bundle that getting a price all in. Today it may be cheaper getting last years kit second hand, if you want bang for your quid.

Now even the AMD CPU are as expensive as Intel even though the heat-sinks are massive. Also people don't understand that more cores does not necessary mean a faster machine, some times its better to get less cores by higher frequency, dependant on your type of workload. Is a quad core at 1.2Ghz faster than a dual core running at 3.2Ghz?

[Boothy]

Re: Another reason private PC sales are flatlining

Even with multithreaded tasks, quite a few of Intel's CPUs now underclock with all cores in use, so you can't simply assume your going to get a full speed CPU at 100% with all cores running. Especially on the more budget Intel CPUs.

This guy on Youtube has a quite well done video on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O98qP-FsIWo

He also covers quite a few related things, such as latest AMD vs Intel, price vs performance of GFX cards, the impact of crypto mining etc. He seems to spend a long time doing the work as well. Worth checking the channel out if you are into that sort of stuff.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

More Gartner "predictions"

In case anyone hasn't figured it out by now, Gartner's only job is for people to pay them to say "current trends will continue" so that PHB's can have someone else to blame if current trends don't continue.

[steviebuk]

Anything by Gartner

Needs to be ignored after their association with Equifax.

[BongoBoy]

Gartner

Gartner - we make saying nothing useful look like science.

[JLV]

watch and learn, grasshopper

>“Users were not committed until they see the iPhone X and what it can do. It’s different from the 7 and 8. I do believe that in mature markets Apple will try for a strong replacement cycle.”

See, with this kind of sycophancy*, El Reg could easily get invited to Apple events once again.

* FFS, how much does that thing cost again? Assuming you're an Apple customer, is it worth it, in most cases?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: watch and learn, grasshopper

Wasn't the sales of the X a little below targets? Not everybody has a Gartner analyst's salary to buy a €1000+ phone without thinking twice. Or some more times.

[JLV]

Re: watch and learn, grasshopper

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/report-apple-making-fewer-iphone-xs-due-to-weak-demand/

[Phukov Andigh]

simple

mobile is for consumption.

desktop is for production.

as the worldwide Idiocracy grows and more people need to watch more slideshows on their social media platform to find out what to be Outraged Next about, naughty selfies from nigerian scammers, and an app to figure out what is the politically correct way to hang the bog roll (roll from the front, natch), of course there will be a higher percentage of sales of "consume" devices.

Those who actually produce, not simply modify someone else's work, still need large screen real estate, the ability to handle lots of processes at once, multiple input and storage options, severe number crunching power, and the ability to modify how their system functions.

Which you're not gonna do while wrapped in a hoodie, gaze down, ears blocked by headphones, thumbing away whilst standing on the tube getting to your Next Big Startup job.