9 ms·

The total PC market (including tablets) had 23% year-on-year growth

58 points by elsewhen 6y ago

alisonkisk 6y ago
Covid WFH bump?
- kube-system 6y ago
  Sounds like mostly learn-from-home increases. Tablets and chromebooks are the biggest winners. "gimme the cheapest thing that'll run zoom" I'd bet people with school-age kids are significantly more disproportionately affected by the need to buy a device this year. Few schools already had devices kids could bring home, and families with children skew lower income. By comparison, people who can work from home often already have work-provided computing devices, and for those who don't, they are higher income and likely already had a suitable device.
  - cashewchoo 6y ago
    "families with children skew lower income" Is this because lower income -> more kids, or is it binary, and lower income -> higher probability of has_kids=true?
    - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
      It's a sort of complex but fairly well understood demographic trend globally if you want to look into it. There's not really one clear cause. In general more educated people and professionals have kids later and have fewer of them. Having kids earlier is also a significant barrier to completing education and entering a high income profession so there's an effect there too. This isn't all of it just the two most clear examples.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      I mostly mean that they are lower income in comparison to those who can WFH. But yes, income and fertility also tend to have a negative correlation;
    - curiousllama 6y ago
      Both, and income is often measured as a function of family size (e.g., poverty line for singles is lower than for families). In other words: lower income folks are more likely to have kids, more likely to have more kids, and each subsequent kid lowers relative income (according to most income metrics).
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Also because by the time women reach their peak earning years they are physically unable to have children (even women who choose not to have kids don't reach their peak until after they are done with kids). While men are able to have children they are typically done as well.
    - stkdump 6y ago
      Actually, in Germany the opposite is true. The median net household income ladder is: 1. Single household (lowest income) 2. Single parent with one kid 3. Two adults, no kids 4. Families with one kid 5. Families with two kids (highest income) Now obviously there is a correlation with age. And also income and disposable income are two different things. But I don't think the story is quite as simple as GP seems to make it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
HenryKissinger 6y ago
One year after the pandemic ends: The total PC market (including tablets) had 23% YoY crunch.
dpweb 6y ago
Apple almost the #1 PC maker. Wow.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  With the swap Apple Silicon that should be an easy move into first as there are many wanting to make the jump. However they did include tablets in that one chart
  - darkwater 6y ago
    > With the swap Apple Silicon that should be an easy move into first as there are many wanting to make the jump. Source for this? Normal users don't give a dime or don't even know about different processors (and these are the vast majority). Fan-boys will always upgrade to the latest no matter what. Prosumers might be interested or not in the change depending on the audience, and the same applies to professionals.
    - asutekku 6y ago
      Being able to run their iOS and iPadOS apps on Mac is something that matters to the consumers and that’s thanks to silicon (could’ve been done otherwise too, but that’s how it’s marketed).
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      > Normal users don't give a dime or don't even know about different processors (and these are the vast majority). Intel's marketing in the 90s is a case study in how to make 'normal users' care, not necessarily about different processors, but about one manufacturer's in particular. "Intel Inside" was hugely successful at turning 'normal users' sentiment away from any competitors.
- yunusabd 6y ago
  *PC and tablet maker. If you subtract the # of tablets, Apple is far behind Lenovo, HP and Co. Strange that they lump these two together.
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Lenovo is quite successful. I have to wonder, why did IBM sell its laptop and PC businesses to them, later its server business as well? Lenovo got not only the brand, but also advanced production lines, technology, engineering and sales teams. What did IBM get? A few billion bucks, and 18.5% share of Lenovo, which they've largely sold off. Maybe IBM should have invested that money into fixing what was wrong with their profitability and management model. Hire Lenovo to manage the product lines or do a joint venture like GM-Toyota. It's sad to see a once great company just give up the fight.
- snarf21 6y ago
  A lot of this is investor pressure and price/dividends at any cost. Consulting has a lot higher margins and is easier to fire in a downturn. They gave up the fight a long time ago. Invest in the future or you won't have one.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  This assumes IBM had the institutional competencies and structure to make that division work as well as Lenovo has. It's quite possible, and IMO likely, that IBM's former laptop and small server/workstation business is doing so well because IBM sold these lines to a company that has the correct core competencies. It's a common problem with companies like IBM and GE that try to go or stay too broad. It's hard to stay top-tier in several verticals at once without decentralizing the company to the point that each vertical is defectively an independent company anyway. Google has tried this with the Alphabet reorganization. GE partially did that with its quasi-independent business units, many of which it ended up selling anyway. IBM seems, from the outside, to be too monolithic to effectively divest a subsidiary. I think it will be telling what it does with Red Hat.
  - MichaelZuo 6y ago
    Indeed the phenomena of large highly diverse organizations trying to be experts, i.e. number one or number 2, in every sub domain is really untenable past a certain size. Even the casual observer begins to notice the pretense of competence versus actual competence. Perhaps the underlying forces are structural.
melling 6y ago
I love the iPad. However, I wish someone would hurry up and invent the future where it is a better productivity tool. A better voice UI plus gestures: https://atap.google.com/soli/ https://atap.google.com/soli/
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  What's the likelihood of Windows on ARM Boot Camp for iPads? 1%? 0.1%?
sundvor 6y ago
I wonder how much of that is for gaming. The growth and demand for high end gaming parts has been unprecedented. Ie Nvidia's 3080, just about impossible to buy, chaotic launch, and AMD's 5900x - very hot property now.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  It used to be people were blaming the crypto miners for GPU shortages but that doesn’t seem to be the case now.
- bhauer 6y ago
  Apparently not a whole lot since given the data they show, desktop computing was hit hard. I admit this came as a surprise to me. I had assumed, from a combination of the title and my intuition about 2020, that desktop computing would be enjoying a resurgence. My thinking: many of us are stuck at home and desktop computing is the premium computing experience—especially for enthusiasts, gamers, content creators, engineers, programmers, etc. We're no longer carrying a computer to and from an office each day, so the value of a laptop is diminished. In fact, when my laptop died in April, I didn't replace it for several months because my home workstation is what I'm using every day and I wasn't traveling anywhere. I suppose enthusiasts don't really count for a big enough market to lift the numbers. Still I would have expected 2020 to be flat on desktop computers, not dramatically down.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I'm guessing that a big chunk of the desktop market was in corporates and they have been switching to laptops while people work from home. That was certainly the case in my wife's office.
    - bhauer 6y ago
      That's a good point. And that must have been large enough to easily more than offset any increase in demand from the home desktop computing enthusiast. For my company, since we didn't want to use a bunch of money to buy new equipment during an economic squeeze, we let the programmers (essentially everyone) take their workstations home, and most did.
yalogin 6y ago
Chromebook is the rare HW consumer device that Google created that is a success. Not just that it made a dent into Apple's ecosystem and is now the most popular product in education.
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  I wonder if much of Apple's desktop success came from educating a generation of students with Macs... and I wonder if that bodes well for Chromebooks into the future.
  - tcbawo 6y ago
    Before Macs, the Apple II series we're enormously successful in schools throughout the 80s and early 90s.
- listic 6y ago
  They are mostly popular in the USA, aren't they?
  - izacus 6y ago
    I wonder how much that is caused by the fact that they don't sell them outside USA. It's really really hard to actually get a Chromebook in Europe, the availability is pretty poor.
    - ponker 6y ago
      That’s very weird and unfortunate since poorer countries have a much more desperate need for inexpensive computers. Any idea of the rationale?
    - qz2 6y ago
      It's really not. Schools are crammed full of them in the UK as well.
    - ksec 6y ago
      Google are exceptionally poor ( To say the least ) at distribution for a company of their size. Just Look at Pixel Phone.
alkonaut 6y ago
I wonder what the non-gaming desktop market is like now. I developed for 15 years on a desktop and my latest machine for the first time is a laptop. They used to be twice as expensive and half as fast but now it’s a smaller difference so being able to move it is worth it, even though I almost never do.
- capableweb 6y ago
  It's funny because I'm the opposite. Started doing development on a desktop computer (family computer), as soon as I became a paid developer, started using laptops, first Macbooks and later others. Bought my first desktop computer for work about a year ago and couldn't be happier. Doing any sort of creative work is just unbeatable on desktop computers. And development work is also much nicer. Even if the specifications are the same / below the ones of laptops, the computer runs faster as the cooling is much better.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    There was a bit of a plateau in the last years when intels processors stagnated but they could still improve their laptop parts. Now you can get a decent 8-core laptop that isn’t much slower than a desktop which might have 10-12 cores max. The new Ryzens may have ended this, and made 130W again usable to get more perf and cores and not just heat. Being able to shift locations even if just temporarily is still great. Perhaps the solution is to have a beefy desktop and a tiny but weak laptop with good battery, and just remote in to a desktop when on the move.
    - second--shift 6y ago
      > Being able to shift locations even if just temporarily is still great. Perhaps the solution is to have a beefy desktop and a tiny but weak laptop with good battery, and just remote in to a desktop when on the move. This is what I do - my 'main' general purpose computer is a Linux-Chromebook and most of my 'work' is processed on the server stack at home.
- bhauer 6y ago
karmakaze 6y ago
TL;DR > Client PC products by year-on-year shipment growth, Q3 2020 Desktop -32%, laptop +30%, tablet +42%
- mrkstu 6y ago
  Makes sense- desktops are stranded at work now generally. I'm one of the few lucky ones at mine to be able to grab mine and take it back home- most everyone else w/a desktop is using VDI or moved to a laptop.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    In case anyone else was wondering what's a VDI? "Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is defined as the hosting of desktop environments on a central server." Seems like remote desktop in the cloud (or on-prem) but in aggregate rather than 1:1 hardware.

58 points by elsewhen 6y ago

alisonkisk 6y ago

Covid WFH bump?

kube-system 6y ago
Sounds like mostly learn-from-home increases. Tablets and chromebooks are the biggest winners. "gimme the cheapest thing that'll run zoom" I'd bet people with school-age kids are significantly more disproportionately affected by the need to buy a device this year. Few schools already had devices kids could bring home, and families with children skew lower income. By comparison, people who can work from home often already have work-provided computing devices, and for those who don't, they are higher income and likely already had a suitable device.
- cashewchoo 6y ago
  "families with children skew lower income" Is this because lower income -> more kids, or is it binary, and lower income -> higher probability of has_kids=true?
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
    It's a sort of complex but fairly well understood demographic trend globally if you want to look into it. There's not really one clear cause. In general more educated people and professionals have kids later and have fewer of them. Having kids earlier is also a significant barrier to completing education and entering a high income profession so there's an effect there too. This isn't all of it just the two most clear examples.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I mostly mean that they are lower income in comparison to those who can WFH. But yes, income and fertility also tend to have a negative correlation;
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    Both, and income is often measured as a function of family size (e.g., poverty line for singles is lower than for families). In other words: lower income folks are more likely to have kids, more likely to have more kids, and each subsequent kid lowers relative income (according to most income metrics).
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Also because by the time women reach their peak earning years they are physically unable to have children (even women who choose not to have kids don't reach their peak until after they are done with kids). While men are able to have children they are typically done as well.
  - stkdump 6y ago
    Actually, in Germany the opposite is true. The median net household income ladder is: 1. Single household (lowest income) 2. Single parent with one kid 3. Two adults, no kids 4. Families with one kid 5. Families with two kids (highest income) Now obviously there is a correlation with age. And also income and disposable income are two different things. But I don't think the story is quite as simple as GP seems to make it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

HenryKissinger 6y ago

One year after the pandemic ends: The total PC market (including tablets) had 23% YoY crunch.

dpweb 6y ago

Apple almost the #1 PC maker. Wow.

Shivetya 6y ago
With the swap Apple Silicon that should be an easy move into first as there are many wanting to make the jump. However they did include tablets in that one chart
- darkwater 6y ago
  > With the swap Apple Silicon that should be an easy move into first as there are many wanting to make the jump. Source for this? Normal users don't give a dime or don't even know about different processors (and these are the vast majority). Fan-boys will always upgrade to the latest no matter what. Prosumers might be interested or not in the change depending on the audience, and the same applies to professionals.
  - asutekku 6y ago
    Being able to run their iOS and iPadOS apps on Mac is something that matters to the consumers and that’s thanks to silicon (could’ve been done otherwise too, but that’s how it’s marketed).
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > Normal users don't give a dime or don't even know about different processors (and these are the vast majority). Intel's marketing in the 90s is a case study in how to make 'normal users' care, not necessarily about different processors, but about one manufacturer's in particular. "Intel Inside" was hugely successful at turning 'normal users' sentiment away from any competitors.
yunusabd 6y ago
*PC and tablet maker. If you subtract the # of tablets, Apple is far behind Lenovo, HP and Co. Strange that they lump these two together.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago

Lenovo is quite successful. I have to wonder, why did IBM sell its laptop and PC businesses to them, later its server business as well? Lenovo got not only the brand, but also advanced production lines, technology, engineering and sales teams. What did IBM get? A few billion bucks, and 18.5% share of Lenovo, which they've largely sold off. Maybe IBM should have invested that money into fixing what was wrong with their profitability and management model. Hire Lenovo to manage the product lines or do a joint venture like GM-Toyota. It's sad to see a once great company just give up the fight.

snarf21 6y ago
A lot of this is investor pressure and price/dividends at any cost. Consulting has a lot higher margins and is easier to fire in a downturn. They gave up the fight a long time ago. Invest in the future or you won't have one.
vonmoltke 6y ago
This assumes IBM had the institutional competencies and structure to make that division work as well as Lenovo has. It's quite possible, and IMO likely, that IBM's former laptop and small server/workstation business is doing so well because IBM sold these lines to a company that has the correct core competencies. It's a common problem with companies like IBM and GE that try to go or stay too broad. It's hard to stay top-tier in several verticals at once without decentralizing the company to the point that each vertical is defectively an independent company anyway. Google has tried this with the Alphabet reorganization. GE partially did that with its quasi-independent business units, many of which it ended up selling anyway. IBM seems, from the outside, to be too monolithic to effectively divest a subsidiary. I think it will be telling what it does with Red Hat.
- MichaelZuo 6y ago
  Indeed the phenomena of large highly diverse organizations trying to be experts, i.e. number one or number 2, in every sub domain is really untenable past a certain size. Even the casual observer begins to notice the pretense of competence versus actual competence. Perhaps the underlying forces are structural.

melling 6y ago

I love the iPad. However, I wish someone would hurry up and invent the future where it is a better productivity tool. A better voice UI plus gestures: https://atap.google.com/soli/ https://atap.google.com/soli/

0-_-0 6y ago
What's the likelihood of Windows on ARM Boot Camp for iPads? 1%? 0.1%?

sundvor 6y ago

I wonder how much of that is for gaming. The growth and demand for high end gaming parts has been unprecedented. Ie Nvidia's 3080, just about impossible to buy, chaotic launch, and AMD's 5900x - very hot property now.

dawnerd 6y ago
It used to be people were blaming the crypto miners for GPU shortages but that doesn’t seem to be the case now.
bhauer 6y ago
Apparently not a whole lot since given the data they show, desktop computing was hit hard. I admit this came as a surprise to me. I had assumed, from a combination of the title and my intuition about 2020, that desktop computing would be enjoying a resurgence. My thinking: many of us are stuck at home and desktop computing is the premium computing experience—especially for enthusiasts, gamers, content creators, engineers, programmers, etc. We're no longer carrying a computer to and from an office each day, so the value of a laptop is diminished. In fact, when my laptop died in April, I didn't replace it for several months because my home workstation is what I'm using every day and I wasn't traveling anywhere. I suppose enthusiasts don't really count for a big enough market to lift the numbers. Still I would have expected 2020 to be flat on desktop computers, not dramatically down.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I'm guessing that a big chunk of the desktop market was in corporates and they have been switching to laptops while people work from home. That was certainly the case in my wife's office.
  - bhauer 6y ago
    That's a good point. And that must have been large enough to easily more than offset any increase in demand from the home desktop computing enthusiast. For my company, since we didn't want to use a bunch of money to buy new equipment during an economic squeeze, we let the programmers (essentially everyone) take their workstations home, and most did.

yalogin 6y ago

Chromebook is the rare HW consumer device that Google created that is a success. Not just that it made a dent into Apple's ecosystem and is now the most popular product in education.

EamonnMR 6y ago
I wonder if much of Apple's desktop success came from educating a generation of students with Macs... and I wonder if that bodes well for Chromebooks into the future.
- tcbawo 6y ago
  Before Macs, the Apple II series we're enormously successful in schools throughout the 80s and early 90s.
listic 6y ago
They are mostly popular in the USA, aren't they?
- izacus 6y ago
  I wonder how much that is caused by the fact that they don't sell them outside USA. It's really really hard to actually get a Chromebook in Europe, the availability is pretty poor.
  - ponker 6y ago
    That’s very weird and unfortunate since poorer countries have a much more desperate need for inexpensive computers. Any idea of the rationale?
  - qz2 6y ago
    It's really not. Schools are crammed full of them in the UK as well.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Google are exceptionally poor ( To say the least ) at distribution for a company of their size. Just Look at Pixel Phone.

alkonaut 6y ago

I wonder what the non-gaming desktop market is like now. I developed for 15 years on a desktop and my latest machine for the first time is a laptop. They used to be twice as expensive and half as fast but now it’s a smaller difference so being able to move it is worth it, even though I almost never do.

capableweb 6y ago
It's funny because I'm the opposite. Started doing development on a desktop computer (family computer), as soon as I became a paid developer, started using laptops, first Macbooks and later others. Bought my first desktop computer for work about a year ago and couldn't be happier. Doing any sort of creative work is just unbeatable on desktop computers. And development work is also much nicer. Even if the specifications are the same / below the ones of laptops, the computer runs faster as the cooling is much better.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  There was a bit of a plateau in the last years when intels processors stagnated but they could still improve their laptop parts. Now you can get a decent 8-core laptop that isn’t much slower than a desktop which might have 10-12 cores max. The new Ryzens may have ended this, and made 130W again usable to get more perf and cores and not just heat. Being able to shift locations even if just temporarily is still great. Perhaps the solution is to have a beefy desktop and a tiny but weak laptop with good battery, and just remote in to a desktop when on the move.
  - second--shift 6y ago
    > Being able to shift locations even if just temporarily is still great. Perhaps the solution is to have a beefy desktop and a tiny but weak laptop with good battery, and just remote in to a desktop when on the move. This is what I do - my 'main' general purpose computer is a Linux-Chromebook and most of my 'work' is processed on the server stack at home.
bhauer 6y ago

karmakaze 6y ago

TL;DR > Client PC products by year-on-year shipment growth, Q3 2020 Desktop -32%, laptop +30%, tablet +42%

mrkstu 6y ago
Makes sense- desktops are stranded at work now generally. I'm one of the few lucky ones at mine to be able to grab mine and take it back home- most everyone else w/a desktop is using VDI or moved to a laptop.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  In case anyone else was wondering what's a VDI? "Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is defined as the hosting of desktop environments on a central server." Seems like remote desktop in the cloud (or on-prem) but in aggregate rather than 1:1 hardware.