Admittedly, I have some skin in the game because I like PCs and I can’t work on a phone, but this article’s very first statement is just egregiously wrong.
Personal computers have been on their deathbed, but HP Inc. proved this week that the PC market still has some life, at least when it comes to higher-end computers sold under its brand.
No, personal computers have not been on their deathbed. This is a tale told by journalists, full of drama and demise, signifying nothing in the real world.
This data is so easy to find. Why can’t any journalists seem to do it or to understand it when they do? There were 62.4 million PC shipments in Q2 2016. Adjusting for the fact that there always more PCs sold in Q4 due to Christmas in Western countries, worldwide PC shipments will be around 275 million units in 2016.
Sound like a dead market to you? Strangely, the journalist includes this very statement in her article and yet rolls on like it’s not there.
The “death of HP’s PC business has been greatly exaggerated,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Sherri Scribner in a note to clients Thursday.
At the bottom of this article is a table of worldwide PC shipments from 1996 onward. Yes, the PC market is declining which is what I’d expect. Most people who currently have PCs don’t really need them as they can barely use them.
However, notice that PC sales have only fallen back to roughly 2007 levels, not cratered into some abyss.
It’ll be many, many years (if ever) before any real work can be done on phones or tablets. Until then, it’ll be PCs for those who need to do something more in and with the world other than Snapchat or look at LOLCats photos.
The industry wants to kill PC’s because they’re less monetizable than mobile devices. This is doubly true with Mozilla having pulled the plug on the open-source mobile operating system FirefoxOS. They’ve largely killed RSS and blogging, so they might kill PC’s. Or render them useless via treacherous computing. I’ve certainly reached the point where I won’t buy any computer or peripheral, used or new, without reading at least a few reports of confirmed Linux compatibility, with a minimum of hacking.
Indeed. The big push now is to put the information genie back in the bottle, both for profit-related and power-related reasons. This has been largely successful so far. I don’t see anything that will be able to resist this. Free-flowing information and individual control of powerful computing devices is just too dangerous.