IDC Slashes Wordwide PC Shipment Guidance, Windows 10 Upgrades Hurting Sales

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"Surprisingly, the company also noted that free Windows 10 upgrades are a significant factor to the sluggish sales volume, as users do not have to buy a new PC to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system"

Because with previous versions upgrades weren't possible? You had no choice but to buy a whole new computer?
 
I think the bigger issue is illustrated by fact that after 5 years I have no plans to upgrade my i7 2600. We've past good enough for everything the average user does years ago. Now even enthusiasts are finding the time between compelling upgrades is getting longer. Even phones are starting to reach the point of "good enough".
 
SPIKETHEAARDVARK wrote:
> Now even enthusiasts are finding the time between compelling upgrades is getting longer.

And meanwhile Intel kicks prices through the roof, with no new features or anything to make an upgrade worth bothering with. Meanwhile, MS jumping into bed with Intel to lock newer tech to Win10 minimum is making older hw more attractive; those who don't want to upgrade are more likely to consider a hw purchasing decision that will allow them to stick with Win7/8 for a long time, which might be why I've seen some used items increasing in value recently.
 
Those effin' analysts perpetually ignore the elephant in the room: most people don't need new PCs because their 5-7 years old PCs are still good enough for the bulk of what they do on an everyday basis, unlike 10+ years ago where most people still needed a new PC every three years just to keep up with increasingly content-intensive websites, make basic stuff like office apps work smoother and handle more compute-intensive CODECs.
 
I would think the real reason is that as CPUs have become more powerful, the life span of a typical system has increased, while the processing power needed by the average user has stayed the same or even decreased. Most people read email, surf the web, and some word processing.

Even if they are doing more CPU intensive tasks, the current generations are viable for several years.

I doubt it truly has anything to do with Windows 10.
 
Reiterating what InvalidError is saying... There's no reason to upgrade old hardware. The new stuff just isn't good "enough" for it to be necessary. Take my AMD 1075T. 6 core at 3GHz. Old instructions. No speed difference I could see between it and an i5-6600 I made for an associate for her work. Sure, it's "better", you just can't tell under most circumstances. There needs to be a nice breakthrough in speed/performance/something so we don't yawn ourselves into computer apathy.
 
The rise of GPU acceleration has also made CPU performance in mainstream systems much less relevant, eg. video playback and conversion, streaming, etc. Same effect for rendering in some pro markets.

 
These days I scaled back. I'm up for a complete platform upgrade after 7 years, so it'll be a Skylake i5 6500 and a GTX 1070... I'm expecting another video card upgrade in 5 years and another platform switch in 10. That's the reason. Even for higher end use cases (games), older tech is more than good enough.

Hell, I could easily wait out another 2-3 years on my Phenom II X4 965 but the upgrade opportunity presented itself so why not?

I'd like IDC to start reporting on sales of the Likes of ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI to get a feel for the DIY market. I reckon it's a lot more stable than the Dells and HP's of the world.
 

Nearly all PC and PC component manufacturers got hit with lower sales, some (much) worse than others. Asus is among the better off brands with a PC sales loss of only 3%.

The PC market slowdown is occurring across the whole gamut from entry-level consumer to business, enthusiast and professional workstation. Nearly no manufacturer gets spared from reduced sales volume.
 
Though I hate the spam like nagging of upgrading to Windows 10, that is far from the reason why PC sales are declining. There are many significant reasons but not the free upgrade to Windows 10 as it has little added value over Windows 7 or 8.1 .

The decline is respectable considering the availability and saturation of devices competing for the users attention such as gaming consoles, tablets, and smartphones. Yet, there is a silver lining as growth in PC gaming market shows.

It is not impossible to bring back the importance of the PC at home but would require participation of the everyone in the industry. The killer application (right now) that can bring it back to life is VR. VR can span almost all industries as the PC did. Intel can invest in the entire ecosystem of VR from hardware to software and content.

They have to do it fast though as smartphones are dying to get into VR too.
 
They're leaving out one of the biggest factors:
There's generally no need to upgrade PC's anymore.
A few years ago, you had to upgrade often in order to be able to run the latest software. Now, even a PC that's several years old can cope just fine with the latest software.
Games are now the only real reason people need to upgrade.

The market for other devices is shrinking because it's no longer a gimmick. Everyone has a smart phone or tablet and it's not 'cool' to be the one person in the office or class to own one.
 
Not only is progress slowing to the point where people need to upgrade less frequently, but the reliance on GPU for intensive computing means that you often just need to upgrade 1 thing when you do.
 



Bingo. Hardware seems to have reached parity with software, such that upgrades are no longer necessary, especially if they're only giving 3%-5% better performance. VR could indeed change that, but either it hasn't happened yet (especially a mainstream application), or people don't know it yet. When / if VR takes off, assuming the state of the global economy allows it, people will begin to buy more new PCs. Until then, more care about spending has become the rule.

 

Does VR really increase CPU load by much? With Nvidia's multiple view ports hardware support, the CPU only needs to setup the scene once for up to 16 different views. By delegating more geometry processing to the GPU, the graphics-related CPU processing load should actually go down despite the number of views going up and that's without considering DX12 and Vulkan's lighter-weight APIs.

If VR becomes more mainstream, I'll be curious to read about how many people run into issues with motion sickness, vertigo and other related problems due to discrepancies between in-game and physical movements/feedback. I haven't tried VR but based on how I sometimes get headaches and motion sickness from playing FPS or similar games for more than half an hour at a time, I doubt I'd fare well with VR.
 
Sorry to wrong most main comments about "We've past good enough for everything the average user does years ago".
1//Latency is an essential feature: Programs and Apps instantly starting has only being brought by recent NVMe connected SSDs and only minute % of PCs/Laptops have them.
2//Latency is also crucial at Internet browsing... and here is were W10 (and no even W7 and W8) has severely crippled recent bandwidth advancements, by its forced automated tasks continuously sending info to Microsoft. The rest, Google + Apple and all online tracking invested firms are also culprits.
Computer manufacturers and the general buying public have long been vampirised by the cited companies and suffered low sales and sluggish (latency-wise) performance. Time has come it is relevantly affecting us all.
 
Possible, yes. But expensive. Consider that most people buy fairly cheap computers to start with and they're usually several years old by the time a new OS is released. It's simply not worth it for them to buy the upgrade. Now they don't have to.

I know someone with an old computer running Vista. The hardware's perfectly sufficient for their needs, but it's hard to recommend that they spend $100 on an upgrade to a computer that probably only cost $300 brand new.
 
windows 10 sucks it's spyware to the max always f'up internet gaming auto downloads with out your permission, forces updates even if you have to shut down fast due to lightning storm or what not.

the real reason nobody is upgrading much hardly any more is the games are collapsing for the last decade thanks to consoles, nobody make new or demanding games for pc's any more, and it's the same old b.s. with just some updated graphics, no real new games, just a bunch of poser copycats in the fps market and the simulator market has almost collapsed entirely to nothing if it wasn't for dcs and nv3 games.
there's no new 'CRYSIS's or HAWX.
instead game studios are copying 1950's hollywood with VR, just make a pc headset already and beat the consoles to the punch and wipe them out forever.
 
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