"I absolutely think the slowdown in computing performance gains play a big factor [in slowing PC sales]. Maybe even more so than the whole tablet thing. Why would you replace your PC if it’s not noticeably faster than what you bought two or three years ago?"
see Why Moore's Law, not mobility, is killing the PC
Of course that’s a factor but there are others:
- Moore’s Law also helps make smaller, cheaper computers without fans and storage drives. Without all those moving parts thin clients and tiny desktops will easily do on the tenth year what they did on the first year. You can upgrade servers or add servers much more cheaply than you can roll out a new fleet of client machines. It just is too costly to change all the hardware, something that prompted a lot of migrations to GNU/Linux because it required fewer resources to work.
- The typical CPU in a single user system idles most of the time and the real delays are accessing dozens of files to open the next window or application. One can update storage to something faster without changing the rest of the machine but one can also do the heavy lifting on a server that can have enough RAM that storage doesn’t need to be accessed for applications. They can all be stored in RAM and shared amongst users. Zero storage is obviously faster than any other form of storage. Again, thin clients and small cheap computers work.
- The ARM processors are clearly able to do the job most users need done and consumers see the advantages of a pocket-sized PC over the legacy boxes and even notebooks. Hundreds of millions have traded off the larger screen for the greater portability. This is partly an effect of Moore’s Law making ARMed machines good enough but it’s an entirely different architecture with its own advantages. If there were no ARM, salesmen probably still could sell the next release of Wintel…
- Today’s networks are a huge improvement on even five years ago. Gigabit/s is fairly standard on the LAN and Internet connections for individuals approach the pipe whole buildings used to have to the Internet. This means a thin client and its server are behaving more like one machine and the user appreciates the web application that runs on someone else’s hardware with all those headaches gone rather than having the headache over Wintel at home. No headaches. No need to replace the PC to fix the headaches, temporarily. Wintel was built on making new sales to soothe headaches created by Wintel. That worked when Wintel was the only choice on retail shelves… Welcome to the 21st century.
- It’s also a matter of software. Peoples’ small cheap computers are not slowing down because they have less malware and incompatible and resource-hungry apps on the go. They are consuming less power, making less noise and taking up less space. They are often far more portable than Wintel to boot. The app-stores and package managers of */Linux system just work better for people customizing/managing their personal computers. Clearly, people like installing an app in seconds without having to fiddle with re-re-reboots, malware and Patch Tuesdays. Those negatives are all associated with the legacy PC so why buy more headaches? Wintel might have adopted and extended ARMed systems a few years ago and rationalized their system management and headed the stampede off at the pass but they didn’t and we are seeing a quite different historical change.
All in all, this is a good thing about which I have been writing for years now, first about GNU/Linux instead of that other OS, then APT package manager of Debian GNU/Linux and then small cheap ARMed computers. It’s empowered by more than Moore’s Law, but it is empowered and Wintel is getting taken down a level or two. It’s no longer essential and soon Wintel will have to work for a living competing for price/performance on retail shelves. I expect 2013 will be remembered as the year small cheap computers really went on a tear.
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“I expect 2013 will be remembered as the year small cheap computers really went on a tear”
Somehow that seems to be an echo of years gone by. Just change 2013 to 2012, 2011, 2010, and so on. If all the death knells for Microsoft were put into a single album, I doubt that it would fit on a CD. It would surely take a DVD at least, maybe a Blu-ray.
Still, though, you have a valid thesis regarding what might motivate future purchases of what we have come to call a “PC”. I personally haven’t felt resource or speed limited using a PC for as long as I can remember although I do remember being thrilled again and again as PCs evolved from the original through 286, 386, 486, Pentium, and beyond. I don’t even know what’s what anymore. I have something called i7 on my year and a half old desktop and i3 on this laptop. I have no plans at all to get another although I am sure that one day I will. I might want to get one of those Surface things.
I sent Microsoft $40 twice to get the two converted to the Windows 8 Pro version which lets you do nifty things like connect them via the internet while traveling. I am set for years now.
I don’t see any reason that this environment would be more favorable to adoption of Linux though. Whatever influence the Windows license fees have on sale prices are made even more insignificant when amortized over a longer time period. If the “tax”, as you call it, were, say, $50 per unit, it would sink to just a few dollars a year if the computer were kept for a decade as might be the case now.
At the same time, keeping an original computer for an extended time should just increase the owner’s desire to preserve the data accumulated over that longer time and make it less appealing to change to a newer technology.
Microsoft has been working on ARM processors for a very long time and it is not likely that they would be stymied in any effort to move to these processors. After all, they have a lot of people with time on their hands.
bw get a little bit of a worry when you see what is 100 dollars. http://wandboard.org/
So replacement unit in hardware could be lucky to be 200 dollars cased in a few years.
For general office work wandboard now is getting into the big enough range.
Also that is a generation behind tech that has been developed. So we know what is on the wandboard can double from 32 to 64 bit no problems also from 2 to 4 cores no problems in a fairly short time. Also jump up in clock by upto 3x.
So a Quad core 64 bit a 3 ghz under 100 dollars is most likely not far off.
bw if you don’t need bigger than the i7 so 12 months time arm equal may be possible. Notice the powerconsume of the wandboard 10 watts then remember the new Arm64 bit chips draw less power. Faster smaller and less power.
Now that sections are going to be there own hardware vendors again. Microsoft really does have to release Windows RT to OEMs. Problem is Microsoft has only been doing selected Arm processes.
bw, thoughtfully, wrote, “I don’t see any reason that this environment would be more favorable to adoption of Linux though. Whatever influence the Windows license fees have on sale prices are made even more insignificant when amortized over a longer time period.”
I was looking at Walmart.com’s current offerings. There are discounts of ~$30 or so on ~$300 PCs and $hundreds off of “Ultrabooks”. A lot of that is M$ taking a cut. It’s a different Wintel treadmill. How low will prices have to go on full-size notebooks to get people to buy again? Effectively, this is the end of the Wintel cash-cow where M$ and Intel got to charge what they wanted for their pieces of Wintel. If M$ gives the OS away for $0 the world of Wintel will have to sell a Core ithingy, 4gB RAM, 500gB storage and a 15 inch screen away for the cost of an ARMed tablet with Android/Linux. M$ and Intel might be able to survive that way but they will be much different businesses with Intel cutting product lines and M$ diversifying to services. They will both have to work for a living.
I don’t mind either or both M$ and Intel working for a living but the world does not owe them a luxurious living by coasting on their ability to make copies. The world can make its own hardware and software without either of those businesses participating and at a reasonable price. Finally competition in the marketplace and all corners of the world of IT is able to grow. Look what it took to do that. Several government suing M$ and Wintel for anti-competitive activities. ARM and AMD plugging along in grim times. SUN, Google, and FLOSS plugging along in grim times. But there is light on the horizon. The world of IT is emerging from a very Dark Age. In this new world order, FLOSS can thrive because you can’t beat the price and the performance is great.
“In this new world order”
What has changed? Of course there is a modicum of internet activity attributed now to iPads and phones that used to be the exclusive province of PCs and Macs, but that is not a terrible sign for Microsoft, or Apple either.
You postulate that the “small, cheap computers” are replacing PCs and Macs, but is that really true?
Not in your own case, apparently, and not in the conventional wisdom that sees tablets and phones as additions to the modern consumers electronics cache. You have to view the PC business from its historic perspective, that is “how big is it?” and “what are the characteristics of the major players in that business?”. Equally important for business plans are the questions about how fast the business may be growing (or shrinking) and in which directions.
You have posted frequently about the Microsoft “monopoly” and the control that it has over the actions of OEMs, large and small, who continue to mostly ignore the opportunity to use some version of Linux pre-packaged with their PC offerings. That surely makes the Windows brand worth far more than zero, not to you perhaps, but some vast majority of the 350 million or so buyers of PCs and Macs each year.
Whatever that may be worth, the “savings” to be had from rejecting Windows appear smaller as they are spread out over additional years. I agree with your assessment that the PC business has reached its peak and is on the long slide downhill, but it is starting from a very high position and will be a fantastic cash cow for quite a while still and what ships in the future will still be Windows and, to some increasing degree, Mac.
bw wrote, “You postulate that the “small, cheap computers” are replacing PCs and Macs, but is that really true?
Not in your own case, apparently”
I do a lot of typing and use Beast for that. He runs RAID on AMD64 and Debian GNU/Linux. For my workshop or outdoors, I now have a smartphone. I am its third owner and now that my wife has transferred her contacts to her new blackberry, she may allow me to use it to browse to Beast on the LAN searching and recording data. The other PCs are all old and most of them could be replaced with small cheap computers and USB storage or networked storage, for example, the media players and kid’s playthings. The old ones have to die first and that takes a while. I still have a stock of 10 thin clients I bought years ago for a conference presentation. They can connect to Beast for multiple users like a LAN-party. They can probably survive another five years…
So, no, I am not rushing out to buy small cheap computers but I might buy some for gifts and the like. Under $100, why not? They are gifts that keep on giving. They can always be used as picture-frames or coasters. I do have one notebook that is old and has a broken display. It is a candidate for retirement but it just won’t die… I used it as a portable in the North years ago as its second owner. The grand daughter and the little woman use it in the corner of the living room with external monitor/keyboard/mouse. It could easily be replaced by one of the thin clients or be used as a thin client. Many families however have a bunch of kids who are active/mobile and the new smart thingies are just the ticket.
bw at this stage we don’t know how fast the fall will be. 350 million per year is based on people not having Internet enabled phones and other devices.
The side could be quite quick.
O xp rodava em k6II 500 com 2GB RAM.
O vista/7/8 pede um mínimo de 1GHz e 2 ou 4MB RAM.
E sistema operacional não serve para nada. É só a camada onde se rodam os programas que o usuário realmente usa, como editores, planilhas, etc…
Então é absurdo você ter que usar um computador que há poucos anos seria considerado um super servidor só para rodar o sistema operacional…
E para rodar um word, excell ou libreoffice, tanto faz ser um xp ou um vista/7/8…
My 8 years old PC with Linux seems to works better than many Windows 7 laptops bought in 2009/2010. My son has 9 9 years old ex-enterprise PC now installed with Ubuntu and he too has no problems -it’s fast enough and decent device to use even after 2015, i guess. So why to invest at all for new devices, especially new pc’s?
Hey, I have an OS/2v4 IBM ThinkPad 765D (laptop, Pentium II MMX 166 MHz) that still works! Changed out the power switch and have a few spare drives, but even the original one still runs.
Now pretty much just used as a MIDI filter in one of the studios. Still, they built things to last back then!