Displaying items by tag: PC

Dell has released a quarterly report that could be the last one published by them as a company listed on the stock exchange. Although revenues in the second quarter of this year were still somewhat higher than expected and amounted to 14.5 billion USD, what is worrying is the decline in earnings by as much as 72%.

Gartner's predictions for the 2013 are not in favor of Acer. According to their report they expected a decline of Acer's share in a PC market by 44 percent compared to the 2012, which is the biggest drop among all the leading vendors in the business that still stumbles. In fact, the only exception is Lenovo which is projected to grow by 11 percent on a Windows PC market.

Believe it or not, thanks to Windows 8, PC sales have just gone through the biggest decline in the past 20 years. These sales, combined with the increasing popularity of tablets, beg the question:  is Windows 8 going to destroy the PC Market?
I own a PC that came with Windows 8, and I can tell you, I wasn't pleasantly surprised when I began to use the operating system. Lets take a look at why or why not PCs might be on their way out.

Microsoft’s recent reorganization has been in the news for a couple of days and while everyone seems to be using the same euphoric language we have to wonder if this change is really for the good (and if it might come back to haunt Steve Ballmer). Traditionally Microsoft has existed in multiple (and separate) business units. According to insiders at Microsoft this has led to inefficiency and reproduced efforts when developing software and services. Now Ballmer wants to bring those units back together into a much more cohesive unit. The intention is to build a better, more nimble and efficient Microsoft.

For those who plan to buy a Xbox One, and then use the console's Kinect on the PC and vice versa we are brining some bad news. According to Ars Technica, the new Kinect for Xbox One will not be able to directly connect to a PC, unlike the older versions of the device for the Xbox 360 that came with the adapter that made connectiong to PC's via USB slot quite simple. Instead, the new Kinect that comes with the Xbox One has its own connector and it is physically impossible to connect it with anything on the PC, and Microsoft does not intend to make an adapter that would allow such thing.

IHS iSuppli claims that netbooks are barely kept alive, and that by the 2015 will completely disappear from the market. During this year it is expected that 3,97 million netbooks will be shipped, which is a decrease of 72% compared to 14.13 million devices shipped in 2012. During the 2010 Netbooks have reached their peak and delivered 32.14 million devices.

One of the great arguments in the PC industry is always who (or what) is faster. We all want to know what CPU, GPU, HDD, SDD, etc., is the fastest. We might not be able to buy that particular product, but we want to know, and we will scour the internet in the hopes of finding out which is truly the king. In these cases, the issue is often settled by the smallest margin (1-2 frames per second) which might not even be noticeable to the average person. However, there is a new term that is being swapped out for speed, and that is responsiveness. Unfortunately, responsiveness is not the same as speed or power, but this term is being used very often. During a recent trip to a local box store it was used to push a system that while responsive, was actually quite slow when put it to the test.

The PC is dead, PC sales are declining, and we are entering the post PC era; these are all headlines that are getting pushed around the internet right now. These are the same headlines that we have heard every year around the same time and by the same people for the last 15 or so years. They are just as wrong now as they were then, at least mostly wrong. What has happened is that we have hit an interesting time in the market. This is a time when we have too many new and “cool” technologies that are not cheap to make, but no idea on how to implement them (or an OS that really takes advantage of them). This is not the first time we have seen this and it won’t be the last either and it also comes at a time when the market is flooded with companion devices that are being marketed as standalone products.

Along with the cheaper Raspberry Pi Model A, the foundation is working on the release of some hardware accessories this year. On their official blog they published photos of the final editions of the module with the camera, which should become a part of distribution in the next month or so.

The consumer electronic market is an interesting one. It is probably one of the only markets (with the exception of possibly the auto industry) to have the massive number of incorrect segmenting of products. One of the biggest areas of segmentation (incorrect segmentation) is in the “PC” market. Here the competition for products is insane. Back in the early days (the days when we had IBM Compatibles) things were relatively simple; at least they were on the surface. When you walked into a store and looked for a computer (if you were at all interested in having one back in the mid-90s) you saw IBM’s and their clones. One of the first computers I was exposed to was the Osborne One which actually predates the original IBM PC and the consolidation of the market in the early to mid-80s. In fact it was the introduction of the IBM PC combined with the Kaypro II portable that ended up killing Osborne and their chance in the market.