Has the tower PC it's day?
I was watching Click on BBC News the other day and it suggested that due to laptop and tablet sales rising steadily and traditional desktop/tower PC sales have been falling for the last few years they said that tower PC's are on the road out.
I don't think this is totally accurate but what do other wossers think?
I don't think this is totally accurate but what do other wossers think?
Post edited by zx1 on
The trouble with tribbles is.......
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The general user is going towards tablets/mobiles
Out of the last ~1000 machines we have installed in about the last 12 months about 850 - 900 would be desktops with the rest being laptops. A few posing managers have got iPads but they don't do any work so I don't count those. The only PC/Monitor combos we have are a few specials which are touchscreens used for one particular piece of software.
The biggest difference for us is the use of wireless which is mostly because of the hassle of installing hardwire solutions.
I just upgraded my PC and as usual had a hard time cramming all the hardware into my tower. I don't consider it an excessive amount: 1 SSD, 2 rotating rust drives, a moderately powerful graphics card, a tv tuner card, and an optical drive (I'm aware that is "obsolete" but I don't know of any other way to turn a polycarbonate donut into bytes)
Thin clients connected to a private "cloud" are a great idea for office workers* and a glorified tv is perfect for people who just want to watch cats on youtube.
Just because more tablets or thin clients etc are being sold doesn't mean that the people who needed a PC ten years ago can magically manage without one now though.
*They used to be called terminals and connected to the company mainframe...
People who used to buy laptops around a decade ago are now moving to tablet computers; people who still use towers are, I think, the sort of people who are the only ones who had home computers ~20 years ago. What I think is that home computer ownership is changing. Around a decade ago there was a huge upsurge in PC ownership because of the internet; this quickly moved from towers to laptops and is now moving from laptops to tablets. The desktop PC is basically just reverting back to what it was before - the choice of a sizeable minority.
Eggzackly!
People bought a general purpose computing device because that was all there was on the market and they wanted to be able to get on the internet and do word processing etc. Now that there are consumer appliances which do those things without all the baggage of a "real" computer they won't need one any more.
I think it's a good thing in a way that all the "normal people" are buying their locked down devices that do everything online etc as I've had plenty of experience undoing the damage that the alternative causes (giving someone with no interest in maintaining a computer a PC connected to the internet is like giving someone with no driving license the keys to a JCB and putting them in the middle of a busy city).
Giving people a tablet that only runs signed code and lives in its own little walled garden is great cause it means they can't do any damage...
It comes with a big proviso though! Don't take general purpose computing away from the people who actually NEED it!
Someone has to design the hardware that goes in these tablets, and write the operating systems and applications for them. Someone has to write the servers that their "cloud apps" run on, and someone has to mix the music and edit the movies so that people have something to watch on their little toy computers.
I don't even use my i-Phone for the internet anymore, I preferred my droid, it seemed a lot more practical for some reason. I'll use it to read WOS every now and then on my break at work, but I can't even be bothered to sign in anymore, I just wait til' I get home now.
Booo!
i normally wait till i get home on my desktop to post, i have 3 desktops :) aswell as a lappy
I don't really like laptops that much, I think if I had one I'd have it hooked up to my monitor, and an external keyboard, mouse, and hardrive, and use it as a desktop.
My wife swears by her lappy, she hasn't used a desktop in about 8 years now.
I don't use a desktop besides my Mac these days. I mostly use my laptop but I do connect it to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor..
erm int that in effect a desktop then? Oo
I only use external equipment if something I'm doing calls for the need for it, otherwise I'd just use the laptop as is.
Long answer - No, it hasn't.
Still have an old clunker of a keyboard, and if I use a laptop, I use an oldish (USB) keyboard.
I'm going to rebuild it with some nice new high spec innards at some point, but something always distracts me. I'll do it eventually as I miss it. The laptop is good for convenience, but it's not powerful enough for what I need really..
plus
easier to repair / upgrade
Completely agree. :-)
They won't disappear, but they will become more expensive because less components will be made.
Ask a bunch of gamers if they need a PC and they will say yes - but stats show less use for a PC... my own web stats show a massive shift in browsers being used - for example, during the day its more IE (because people are browsing at work) but in the evenings its mobile devices.
It's such a big shift, I am currently re-modelling how my websites are produced and viewed...
I updated my PC a couple of weeks ago to a LAN PC case and I honestly wish I'd done it years ago. So much easier to move between rooms and the case is so robust it would survive a bomb blast. Wasn't cheap though!
Well I don't think they will get more expensive (at least for the people who care about wanting a workstation-class system - either for gaming, or for development, or running a heap of virtual machines). The components made for the people who really want a workstation-class machine are not the consumer level things anyway. The high end stuff doesn't have a substitute so none of the high-end users will be migrating to laptops or tablets or any other "consumer class" computer, so the volume of high-end stuff made will at worst remain static.
oh wait we still talking computers?
Exactly, why would companies stop producing high end nVidia cards for example because people aren't buying towers at PC woe any more? The cheapy consumer PCs have onboard graphics so the rise and fall of that market shirley doesn't affect the gfx card market.
Ok, I suppose someone might buy a cheap PC then discover that the onboard graphics won't play games well enough or whatever and so buy a new gfx card for it but I don't think that's very common.
It's a rapidly declining market and it will eventually all but disappear, surviving in the odd niche here and there at best.