PC shipments back in black: Desktops to the rescue, aided by Win10 Global PC sales are back in the black with almost 63 million computers finding a temporary home in warehouses owned by distributors or retailers, preliminary figures reported by Gartner claim. Following two straight quarters of shrinkage, the market returned to growth in calendar Q2, albeit up by just 1.5 per cent year-on-year …
Whether these shipments turn into sales to consumers or linger unsold in warehouses will, obviously, determine whether PC sales are truly back in the black. One assumes that manufacturers are basing their behaviour on market intel, but is is a bit premature to declare that the market for PCs has rebounded just yet?
There is some demand from companies replacing 5-year old and older machines with something more suitable for Windows 10 in the runup to Windows 7 EOL. I've got one such machine from a customer here, though I think the proprosed replacement is Citrix or my browser. ;-/
How can you say windows 10 is a factor if it is not possible to buy a retail machine with a different version of windows?
You could equally say that the lack of sales were down to windows 10 in the first place and the market has given up waiting for secure hardware and software to replace the existing wintel offerings
People hoping MS would U-turn on "Flat, Monochrome, awkward configuration, dumbing down settings, stupid update mechanism and telemetry"?
A windows version that aids backward compatibility, productivity and privacy rather than reducing it might boost sales.
The most important aspect for existing users is compatibility. Genuine new users, especially domestic, hardly exist.
>How can you say windows 10 is a factor if it is not possible to buy a retail machine with a different version of windows?
IIRC, its because Windows 7 has dropped off support and MS pretend Windows 10 won't run chipset earlier than gen8 intel chips. If you have an earlier system, you aren't supported... driving sales of new PCs as replacements for things which really don't need to be replaced.
Curiously, ancient xeon chips are unaffected by this lack functionality provided by 8000 series and later i3,i5,i7 chips.
Over fears of the China trade war getting worse and moving up to the 25% tariffs. We might see purchases continued to be pushed forward where possible, but when its resolved and that's no longer necessary sales could plummet as they snap back the standard timeline.
I'm definitely seeing an upsurge in new PCs purchases around me. Laptops tend to get replaced every three years anyway as they've usually fallen apart by then but a five year old Core i5 desktop still did the job really well so long as you shove an SSD in there. The big thing that's changed is Spectre/etc and the worry that any fixes including disabling Hyper-threading are going to nerf the older CPUs too much so people are actually now looking to upgrade to counter that.
Also, the shine has gone off Apple and there's a lot old ex Mac only people who have switched.
Client's online app reported it would stop working on anything less than Windows 8.1 . So client went out and bought a number of new PCs. Happily I got the job of setting them up ...
Of course he went to Curry PC World. Hells bells. New PCs - Dells - guaranteed to do the job. Come with 4 GB of RAM. Yes a full 4 GB of RAM in this day & age.
Two of the office people took the law into their own hands and took back the old PCs and replaced them on their desks. I bought in 8 GB RAM upgrades for each of these new machines, and now they're working adequately.
It's the same old story - vendors pushing crap. Anything to make the sale. The 3 year old desktop PCs on Windows 7 performed better than these brand new Windows 10 units.
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