PC sales down 75%, according to some. Is that a fudged number? Is it time for manufacturers to introduce a new form factor?

I’m seeing headlines and articles discussing a steep decline in PC sales recently. On the other hand, in places like reddit and YouTube the PC communities and channels seem to be as vibrant as ever, and even growing.

Console sales are doing quite well, and are more tempting than ever before to newcomers to the gaming world, being that they offer decent performance for the price, and PC components are getting very expensive. Recent bugs with new hardware coupled with less than stellar reception from certain reviewers add some hurdles for new adopters to overcome.

Considering a majority of consumer PC sales are for the purpose of gaming and media consumption, perhaps OEMs should consider a new standard form factor to build upon. Minisforum has been pretty bold in this endeavor and I think it is pretty neat.

Between the price of new hardware and the immense size of an average PC tower build, just to play video games and watch YouTube, I could see where a console would be a no-brainer over building a PC. A console fits in most backpacks, so isn’t tied to a dedicated spot in your house for it’s lifespan. Gaming laptops are a no go for many due to the lack of upgradability and repairability if something were to malfunction or you needed a performance boost.

It would be a shame to see PC sales go the way of the dodo. They give consumers options and from an environment standpoint they are the far greener choice. Heck, I have a machine that is over a decade old still humming right along…

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It means the pandemic is over and people are being forced back into offices.

Laptop sales are still doing well, which is why Nvidia is putting all its chips into Professional GPUs and Laptops.

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Well pcs I don’t think are going anywhere. Word of thumb and my completely uninformed opinion is that the update cycle for pcs were horribly thrashed when companies and individuals realized their home desktop was not good enough for video calls and other creative tasks.

You can still rock 4th gen intel and do a whole lot. People unfortunately are not all tech enthusiasts who do it for understanding the new thing. Almost all of my family buys a piece of tech and hold on to it until it physically brakes in half.

So a lot of the market upgraded during the pandemic. we are just seeing the slowdown in my opinion.

But i am exited for new form factors like the handhelds and mini pc. So many fun things you can do without losing your hearing now a days.

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I have often looked at the Threadripper/Epyc CPU size and wondered if AMD could somehow make a giant ass APU with a monster GPU inside. lol. Sure it may be a chore to cool, but imagine the possibilities if they could offer support for three to four years on a chipset with upgrade paths at different tiers… They seem to fare quite well with the console market, considering several years pass before new ones are offered.

I assume by PC sales they mean pre-built systems? Given that you said the sales decline and PC communities in general are growin, I suppose more people are just going the DIY route.

New form factor could be cool, as long as I don’t have to personally build in it. Mid tower is perfect size for my clumsy hands. Anything smaller than that is already pain.

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My guess is that younger generation isn’t so much used to PC’s since mobiles/tablets/laptops and even consoles for game have quite some big chunk of modern tech industry.

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I suspect a lot to do with it as that computers generally just work. a 10 year old computer still work just fine. Hell, an i7-4770 came out in 2013, still a perfectly fine CPU

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From what I can gather, the 75% figure may be overall. I see varying numbers on specifics, where Apple has seen a ~40% decline in computer sales, and I have seen numbers for Lenovo at ~75% down. Mobile chips are becoming little powerhouses in their own right, and are increasingly finding their way into tiny desktops. No path to upgrade on that route either, though, so not really a great option from an environmental aspect.

M-ATX and Mini ITX have always been my jam for DIY. I mostly game with my main PC so I really don’t need or utilize the extra PCIe slots. I assume that is the case for a large majority of the consumer market.

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I could totally see that being a huge factor. I have a system rocking an i7 3770 and it’s still serving me well, quite literally. I’m getting a new PSU for it and giving it yet another new life as a NAS for my brother’s small media startup company. Admittedly, though, I’m one of those people who will use and maintain something until it is no longer possible to keep it going. Even my vehicle is 35 years old. Lol. I 3D print enclosures for laptop motherboards that still function but everything else is broken. Maybe I have some issues that need to be addressed. Lol

Time to start building desktop PCs with fancy RGB and massive curved monitors for all the family kids you know… get them addicted now before it’s too late!

It shouldn’t be hard to beat the sad experience of “laptop gaming” or the joke that they call “mobile gaming”.

Pre-install Linux with Steam. :sunglasses:

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The recent (hyped) declines in sales only look bad because they are based off of historic (pandemic-driven) highs. Look at the chart below. Look at the green bars. Don’t get distracted by the ‘made for headlines’ annual growth line, or the sensationalist text. Last quarter’s sales were the same as Q1 2020. The apocalyptic headlines are a Nothingburger.

Unexpected disruptive events always impact sales. Temporary events (like pandemics) only temporarily affect sales. If the event causes a bump, that bump is always followed by a dip as markets recover back to normal. If the event causes a dip, that dip is always followed by a bump as markets recover back to normal.

tl;dr: Nothing to see here, move along.

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Or, to put it another way, “Context is good”:

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Ahh, so the numbers are fudged… The charts help paint a better picture, but when you incorporate them into a meme, the clouds make way for the sun and the flowers begin to bloom. Maybe the real takeaway is I should realize no topic is safe from FUD based headlines, which I totally click when it comes to things that I enjoy. I could shame media outlets or my Google News algorithm, but really I should just know better by now.

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Honestly, why would anyone buy a PC in today’s market? Pandemic money is gone, Crypto is no longer profitable on consumer PCs, the used market is flooded with better deals than retail, and even those are a terrible value when you consider you could get similar performance at the same price point more than three years ago.
This is just nVidia and AMD holding onto prices for as long as they can, looking to big business orders rather than the consumer market.

Servers are high margin low volume, consumers are low margin high volume. GPU prices will continue to drop until GPU manufacturers find the highest price the market will bear at expected sales volumes, all while trying to convince the market that prices are as good as they ever can or will be and consumers just need to remortgage their house to pay for their next computer.

Well that, and now apple is mostly no longer shipping intel based computers.
For the same time period apple was down 4%. I think apple used to be around 15%, and now those chips are made in house. Apple does not share the number of products that they ship, so those numbers were probably completely missing from the counting.

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Ah. Interesting. That’s something I would have never considered, and I wasn’t aware they kept their numbers close to their chests.

Apple gives rough revenue numbers, but not units sold. But for an example Take a look at this analysis which shows the graphs the numbers for the last 5 years or so.

The M1 MacBook Air was released in December 2020. Take a look at the top 2 graphs, revenue and profit. The only thing publicly significant that happened in q1 2021 is that apple stopped development of new x86 computers publicly.

How much was it costing the company to continue to develop intel based computers? From the graphs, about 10 billion dollars a quarter. Dropping intel doubled the company’s profit. And the Mac is only 8% of the company’s revenue, but Intel was needed for the development environment for their other products, until it wasn’t.

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Unfortunately inflation isn’t temparary, and it is inflation not price gouging. As for the pandemic disrupting supply chains, if you were in favor of lockdowns, Get boosted.

Massive spike during Covid for work from home. All these users don’t need to upgrade for 3-5 years, so they aren’t buying.

Combine that with push to cloud for (again) easier work from home. Cloud stuff works on an iPad or phone. Again less need for new pcs.

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You can do more things on phones and online using “potato” “trash” computers. Spending $500+ on a “cash register” PC isn’t happening as much as it used to - various solution apps and subscriptions have changed the landscape.

Consumer mix is a lot more tight and twitchy than 10y ago (horrible pun).

weird thoughts

We all know that statistically know gen z consumers are “different” from millennials, less inertia, less tolerance for money related BS.

“Markets” (traders investors banks…), are used to being the ones in control of shaping consumer spending through various ways and current consumers don’t respond to this.

Perfect recent example, US budgets: Imagine congress passing a law that makes budgets fine grained rates that can change at any time rather than requiring yearly bipartisan pow wow and being a golden media opportunity. That would fix a bunch of problems and replace them with new smaller ones that are more easily tackleable (agile fixes some waterfall problems, as imperfect in so many ways). But it would be political suicide to rob future generations of politicians of this haggling opportunity.

Why did “markets go down” when the budget was in the news and why did “markets” rebound when there was a budget when clearly there will be a budget (not having one would just mean a nice vacation for a bunch of people, can’t pay bills on time? congrats you owe money… it’s only a question of give and take as is usual in various elected government cleptocracies ).

Now take large companies, what did we learn from the pandemic? They’re not as much of “a stabilizing influence”, as we thought they were going to be, they can over-react and shrink the markets.

What happened at end of 2022? End of pandemic - non-techies especially genz but millennials as well (gamery consumers) stop spending on techy stuff, because life,… despite supply chain getting better. Techy companies start laying people off, this threatens millennials and genz techies, that spending shrinks.

So … I’d take this -75% as really good news if you have money to invest about a month from now… and really bad news if you’re saving up to buy something next year, … as a consumer I’d be looking forward to cyber Monday this year.