Windows 10 is actually hurting the PC market

[hex4]

Not sure if retoast, i hope not, but according to Alphr Win 10 is causing less sales on PC, i can see this myself being attributed to the fact that Win 10 is essentially free no matter what, and was forced by MS so hard on Windows 7 making people upgrade.

Those on machines bought from a store with little know how think they have a new product simply from upgrading to Win 10 and hurts actual sales of of the shelf computers.

 

http://www.alphr.com/operating-systems/1003665/windows-10-is-actually-hurting-the-pc-market?_mout=1&utm_campaign=alphr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

 

"Microsoft really, really, really wants you to have Windows 10 in your life."

 

Not sure what everyone here thinks about this.

[terrytek]

i absolutely saw this coming. because windows 10 is free, people don't see a need to upgrade their computers to run the operating system. they get a free os that can run on their current machines, unless its too old to run 10.

[Arty]

Could be the fact that performance for "Business oriented computers" are starting to plateau. 

[Guest]

I would rather have this than having to get a new device to be able to run a new OS. Just like how the iPhone 4S is still receiving updates.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

It's already been established that PCs have started to hit a point where there isn't a compelling reason to upgrade for the mainstream consumer. We're not talking about the enthusiasts because clearly that's not the market these OEM manufacturers are relying on. So it might not be just on the fact that Windows 10 is free, it's on a multiple of factors. When an Intel ix-2000 series chip is still plenty fast enough for the average joe to type documents and watch videos, what good does upgraded to the newest ix-6000 platform do?

 

Heck I'm still running a 1100T.

[AresKrieger]

Meh, I don't think most people really need faster computers at this point, since all they are doing is using facebook and youtube anyway, which might more so account for the slump. But any reason to have people blaming windows 10 is good enough for me. /s

 

But seriously I still hate it.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

16 minutes ago, Arty said:

Could be the fact that performance for "Business oriented computers" are starting to plateau. 

Could be running on a Core 2 Duo and still couldn't tell the difference.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Sounds like another "journalist" who doesn't get that correlation does not imply causation.

 

In a semi related tidbit, despite what you may think about Japan being all high tech, they're surprisingly computer illiterate. Mostly a cultural thing, but a lot of people use their phones for Internet access.

[TetraSky]

Computers for the last few years haven't changed enough for people to need an upgrade anyway. Windows 10 is just yet another stat on top of every other reasons why people aren't buying a new machine.

I'd sooner blame Intel and AMD for the PC market "slowdown" over Windows 10.

[SurvivorNVL]

Y'know I still believe, given Apple's resources that they should, in an effort to corner another segment of the market, start selling Mac OS or OS X, or whatever it is now, and begin mass hardware and software validation for the OS. Since Microsoft is just giving Windows 10 away for free, and a lot of people aren't very happy, or at least many that I know. It'd take time, but if they garnered more and more of the OS market, programmers and developers would port over in haste(that's the thought, at least).  Mac product sales would continue on, but maybe some OEM's would be able to build their own Mac based machines - given some supervision or partnerships with Apple.  And for custom builders, just buy the OS and get it running, instead of making a Hackintosh.  

Then again I'm insane.

[zMeul]

they can blame W10 all they want - it's not because W10

 

if there wasn't a free upgrade to W10, people would've stuck with W7 and W8.1 - and guess what? there are quite a significant % of people who could upgrade to W10 but won't

so, where is the blame? the blame lies with the hardware - there's nothing worth upgrading for, the increments in CPU power are small and the prices have gone up; the same with video cards

 

even when AMD pushes ZEN based CPUs to the market, the % of people upgrading will be small

for something to change in the market it needs a strong AMD lineup that would shake the price/perf and that won't happen with the 1st generation of ZEN

[hex4]

2 minutes ago, zMeul said:

they can blame W10 all they want - it's not because W10

 

if there wasn't a free upgrade to W10, people would've stuck with W7 and W8.1 - and guess what? there are quite a significant % of people who could upgrade to W10 but won't

so, where is the blame? the blame lies with the hardware - there's nothing worth upgrading for, the increments in CPU power are small and the prices have gone up

 

even when AMD pushes ZEN based CPUs to the market, the % of people upgrading will be small

for something to change in the market it needs a strong AMD lineup that would shake the price/perf and that won't happen with the 1st generation of ZEN

Why are you bringing AMD here? take your hate else where, seriously you are laughable.

[Lays]

8 minutes ago, hex4 said:

Why are you bringing AMD here? take your hate else where, seriously you are laughable.

He's not even hating or flaming anything lol

[hex4]

2 minutes ago, Lays said:

He's not even hating or flaming anything lol

It makes no sense to me though, sorry i see too much bias from other threads and posts from this guy, may have got a bit rustled.

[ChineseChef]

22 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Could be running on a Core 2 Duo and still couldn't tell the difference.

This is the real problem for OEMs.  The masses don't actually need more powerful systems.  They don't need new features.  Everything in their computer is faster than their internet connections.  And with everything being designed to be able to run on mobile platforms, the average consumer PC is still years ahead of the phones people are using to browse the internet.

 

Software for the masses doesn't need more powerful computers.  Thus, the masses have no reason to buy better computers.  They only buy new computers to replace broken ones.  And even then they usually just buy the cheapest thing out there because again, its still good enough to do everything they want to do.  So the only real sales OEMs are getting these days are for replacements.

[GoodBytes]

My 2009 Core 2 Duo with an SSD (not even a good one) on SATA-2, 4GB of RAM laptop runs Windows 10 so smoothly for my father, that ignoring gaming, I COULD USE it myself, and be fine with it. Why upgrade? I mean yea, the display is complete shit in today's standard, the laptop is big and heavy for today's standards, and it is starting to show its age with problems here and there, and you can always get something faster even for web surfing and office, but it isn't a must. Sure it is nice to have a system that boots in 6sec like my Surface Pro 3, due to full UEFI support, while my laptop is on BIOS, but it is livable.

 

I see many people being the same boat. And PC sales have diminished for the longest time. Fingers where pointed that tablets, then Windows 8, and I guess now, Windows 10 free upgrade, but these are not the real reason. The real reason is that software no longer pushes hardware. The last time we had this, was Vista, which pushed 64-bit dual core CPUs, and much more powerful graphics card, and RAM, and drop of legacy hardware in favor of new ones. And of course, like Windows 95, and Windows XP, it was bashed as being big and bloated (ignoring the bugs of Vista, of course). Mind you, that was also said for Netscape navigator, then Mozilla web browser, Office, Corel Office suit (WordPerfect), and so on as well. But these days we don't see this. Gaming pushes things, but aside from that, and maybe iTunes (although, you can find alternatives that are nicer looking, and has the same amount or more features and performs better... assuming you don't need to use your Apple device with it), but that is about it. Chrome, the memory hog, is getting less and less a problem for those using bookmarks, and not  have 2 million tabs, and RAM becoming so cheap, that it is just getting to be a non issue, even for a med-range PC.

 

Currently, all I can think about, is that software could be now developed in higher level programming languages, which means more stuff needs to load on the back, in exchange of easier time to program, allowing, yes, more bulky software in terms of performance, and system resources it consumes (which we have computer performance to spare for), but allows devs to focus on features, rather then coding say... string manipulation algorithms.

[themodernagenb]

Guess what? MS doesn't care about PC sales. Their minds are set on us using the Windows Store. That's where they hope the majority of their revenue will come from. So to them, selling another PC is second.

[GoodBytes]

3 minutes ago, themodernagenb said:

Guess what? MS doesn't care about PC sales. Their minds are set on us using the Windows Store. That's where they hope the majority of their revenue will come from. So to them, selling another PC is second.

Yes and No. Microsoft does many billions in Windows licenses sales from OEMs.

But what Microsoft is understanding is that desktop and laptops are dying..

 

The day we have an 'Core i5'-like CPU in a smartphone (all by remaining thin and decent battery life), believe me, for the mass majority of people will be using their phone with dock stations (laptops docks, and desktop docks). And this might be sooner then expected, as if Intel doesn't make it (or AMD), then ARM CPUs will be powerful enough to run Win32 programs under translation, and we might see Windows 11 or 12, running on ARM, (and I don't mean Windows RT.. I mean FULL Windows), OR, most likely, the switch to Universal Apps will replace most Win32 programs, feature for feature, and Windows Mobile with Win32 support will take over. Of course, that assuming Microsoft plays its cards right, else, well it will be another OS, like Android.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

24 minutes ago, zMeul said:

they can blame W10 all they want - it's not because W10

 

if there wasn't a free upgrade to W10, people would've stuck with W7 and W8.1 - and guess what? there are quite a significant % of people who could upgrade to W10 but won't

so, where is the blame? the blame lies with the hardware - there's nothing worth upgrading for, the increments in CPU power are small and the prices have gone up; the same with video cards

 

even when AMD pushes ZEN based CPUs to the market, the % of people upgrading will be small

for something to change in the market it needs a strong AMD lineup that would shake the price/perf and that won't happen with the 1st generation of ZEN

It doesn't matter if AMD pushes out a beast price to performance chip because the market isn't there anymore. It doesn't matter how good your chip is because no one has the need to buy a new computer except for enthusiasts. But enthusiasts are still a small percentage on the global scale. 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

2 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Yes and No. Microsoft does many billions in Windows licenses sales from OEMs.

But what Microsoft is understanding is that desktop and laptops are dying..

 

The day we have an 'Core i5'-like CPU in a smartphone (all by remaining thin and decent battery life), believe me, for the mass majority of people will be using their phone with dock stations (laptops docks, and desktop docks). And this might be sooner then expected, as if Intel doesn't make it (or AMD), then ARM CPUs will be powerful enough to run Win32 programs under translation, and we might see Windows 11 or 12, running on ARM, (and I don't mean Windows RT.. I mean FULL Windows), OR, most likely, the switch to Universal Apps will replace most Win32 programs, feature for feature, and Windows Mobile with Win32 support will take over. Of course, that assuming Microsoft plays its cards right, else, well it will be another OS, like Android.

Continuum is already here and it's well on that path.

[patrickjp93]

59 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Computers for the last few years haven't changed enough for people to need an upgrade anyway. Windows 10 is just yet another stat on top of every other reasons why people aren't buying a new machine.

I'd sooner blame Intel and AMD for the PC market "slowdown" over Windows 10.

Blame software devs first. There's very little Intel can do when its instructions already take the fewest cycles possible anyway and have the micro-op cache, a deep pipeline, loop detectors to remove the fetch stage from the pipeline of small to moderate loop sizes, a 99% accurate branch predictor for branches up to 8 options wide, and hit a clockspeed wall that no one has been able to break on FinFET processes. The pipeline can be modified, more cache can be added, but that old software is about as fast as it's going to get. We have new instructions which even contain small algorithms to make better use of the instruction caches that can reduce program sizes and make them proceed much more quickly. Software must evolve, period. Hardware vendors can't do anything about performance beyond these incremental improvements anymore without the support of up-to-date software.

[Wyzzy Moon]

If they just fixed the fact that at completely random moments your strart menu could permanently  disappear until you reformat, than I don't see any reason for anyone to have a problem with win10

[zMeul]

1 hour ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

It doesn't matter if AMD pushes out a beast price to performance chip because the market isn't there anymore. It doesn't matter how good your chip is because no one has the need to buy a new computer except for enthusiasts. But enthusiasts are still a small percentage on the global scale. 

the enthusiasts "need" a better than existing CPUs - this can't happen with whatever AMD releases with 1st gen ZEN - it will already be "obsolete"

and enthusiast don't drive the market, the mid & hi end does

 

people that postponed upgrading might get ZEN, might not .. it depends on what it will be and at what price

[laminutederire]

Microsoft suite licensing type has been shifting, and they don't see it the way they did previously. They want it to be a service. While not many people know how to do things, a lot of them can be interested in stuffs beyond text editing and so on. Deep learning stuffs for instance. That requires computing power to get people to the point where their computer can predict what they want to do, or when they will be able to automate some of our tasks with sharper precision.

People are lazy and could be into upgrading their PC to do more stuffs for them. (That's one idea, there should be a lot more I guess )

[Doobeedoo]

Wouldn't say W10 is the reason at all. There are many other reason that are more justifiable.